Garden Progress March 21-28th

We've made a lot more progress on the garden this week. I had blueberries and asparagus coming in the mail so I really needed it to be ready! I got my blueberries all planted. Asparagus hopefully will get done today or tomorrow.

Here's a good overall look from a few days ago. Cameron got all garden beds made and I put them roughly where they will go. We will dig each bed in so it's level on the slope. I also painted fence posts black. I love black fences.

 Saturday the Elders came over and helped Cam put up the fencing.  They are super hard workers and also worked happily. By the time we finished for the day we had 3 sides of the fence up. I am super grateful and told them as much. Even so, I still think those guys have no idea how much they reduced my stress level.

 Cameron jimmy rigged up a stretcher to pull fence and we borrowed a come-along from a friend. It worked well.

 The fencing is a black coated welded wire fence. It's almost invisible from far enough away.

Garden Progress March 14-21

We are making some progress on the big garden. We had the missionaries over for dinner Friday and they offered to help us put the rest of the posts on Saturday! Cam had already dug all the holes the week prior with an auger so all that was needed was to cement each one in.

This is the view from the road. The first three rows which are outside the fence are blackberries. I need to get some ground cover in between the rows.

Cam already made four of the raised beds with Cruz helping screw each one together. This week I will level them because the area is sloped.

Here is the small garden 2 weeks ago.

 

And here it is now. That hairy vetch grows fast! It's almost time to till it up.

 Under the white cover is kale. The cover has a dual purpose, it helps protect plants in frost and it prevents bugs.

The kale is getting pretty big since the cloth also has a greenhouse effect. I have a few cabbage worm holes but actually my kale got attacked while I had them under grow lights indoors. Isn't that odd? I think they must have come out of the soil since I didn't use a soil-less seed mix this year.

Against the fence is my peas and below that my spinach.

Garden Start 2016

We've had a really warm spring. I started a few things early indoors, like spinach and kale. These pictures are from over a week ago, I'm just slow to get it posted.

This was my first year doing a cover crop on some of my beds. It is a really pretty bit of green, especially because everything else is still dormant. The kind I used is called hairy vetch and I planted it late October I think.  It has really started to take off now. I'm following it with tomatoes which will love the extra nitrogen the vetch fixes in the soil. The real test of how good it works will come this summer!

 Here's my little holes for snap peas- I always do sugar snaps, and a few snow peas.

 And my spinach I started indoors in my soil blocker.

 The soil blocker is great for plants that don't like transplanting because there is no shock. The roots can grow freely. I have some of my indoor seed starts in cell trays too. The trade off is that cell trays don't use nearly as much soil and they also don't take up much space under lights. A mix of both is working pretty well so far.

Here is the spinach all planted (on the right).

I will update on the new garden area soon. We are behind schedule (still working on putting up a fence) but hopefully can get caught up soon!