A Very Muddy Work Day

What happens when you have just one day set aside to rent a sod cutter to get ready for your raised beds, and it rains for days and days before that? Lucky for me, I now have this experience and can answer the question.

1. The sod cutter wheels get caked with mud and fail to grip, so it requires some man-handling.
2. The sod is much, much heavier than it would be if given a few days to try out.
3. Carrying the sod to its resting place for composting turns your husband into Mud Man.

I just pulled these clothes out of the dryer. They're amazingly clean.

We stripped the sod from a roughly 65' x 6' area. I have an in-progress picture, but won't get another one until we dig out the bits that refused to be cut and it dries up a bit. Currently, we've just created a mud pit. It rained all day the day after we did this.

The bed on the right up against the retaining wall is home to about a half dozen raspberry plants, and a lot of weeds. We used some of the cut sod to smother the weeds and mulch the bed. The area in the middle will soon be home to eight 6' x 3' raised beds.

The upper garden is much further along. On April 23 I completed the prep and planting of the bed along the fence. What was once a forest of weeds and unwanted landscaping plants is now home to 50+ garlic plants, 200 onion plants, and 21 asparagus crowns.

Last week we had a landscaping crew on our property for two days, working to clean out the overgrowth and weeds around the property. Part of what they did for me was clear out a roughly 800 square foot area that will become the main part of the upper garden. I got two areas planted on Saturday - the strawberry/rhubarb patch (24 ever-bearing strawberries; rhubarb was existing) and the pea patch. I planted two 7-foot rows of peas along both sides of the temporary fence, and around the two tripod structures I found on the property. There's still room for another row, so I think I'll plant radishes here on the next dry day if I can find some seeds in my stash.

I also spent a lot of time this weekend potting up plants. In fact, my phone just died because I was down in the basement so long listening to podcasts, so I don't have any pictures. I'll have to save those for next time!

Head on over to Our Happy Acres for Harvest Monday to see what other gardeners are harvesting, prepping, planting, or preserving!

Seed Progress and Bed Prep

Since I'm going to submit this to Harvest Monday over at Happy Acres, I should probably start this post with my harvest for the week.

There. That's it. Brassica thinnings, which will find their way onto a roasted beet and feta salad this week. These were harvested while maintaining my seed starting operation in the basement. Photos are from a check-in on Thursday night.

One day after taking this photo, I added four trays of freshly-seeded tomato seeds. Good thing it's time for some of these trays to get hardened off! Here's where things are at presently.

Onions are the first thing I started. They're doing great. Tonight they will spend their first night outside, and I expect to have them planted by the weekend.

Sage - I've been feeling too lazy to pot it up. Should probably do that soon, though.

Thyme also needs to be potted up.

Parsley is doing well, and is getting ready to live on the porch full-time. It got its first dose of fish emulsion yesterday.

Peppers are chugging along. The sweet banana and early jalapenos are at the stage in the picture, while many others are still pushing up through the soil. These were started on March 31.

Eggplants are at varying stages, but this one looks great.

The brassicas (kale and broccoli) are just starting to get their first true leaves.

I spent a few hours outside today, continuing to work on the new garden bed on the fence. I finished part of it last fall and planted garlic. The rest is destined for an asparagus patch and this year, onions. I spent weeks digging out weed trees and holly bushes. Today I pulled the tiller out of storage and tilled the bed 7" deep. I also took a hoe around the edge of the bed where it meets the lawn (it's edged in brick), and removed all the grass and weeds the tiller couldn't get to. All that is left is to rake out the bits of roots (there are a lot!), mix in some compost, and plant the bed. I plan to do all of that by the weekend.

The next 6 weeks will determine if I can realize my 2017 plan for the garden. I have a sod stripper reserved for April 28 to make way for the raised beds by the pond, and a landscape crew is coming over before the end of the month to do a major spring cleanup. As part of it, they're going to clear the rest of the perennial garden that I want to turn into veggies. Yay!

Planning Gross Farms 3.0

It's been a while since I published a post on this blog. There a few reasons for that. After the 2014 gardening season wound down, I decided to focus on getting my dissertation written. I'd been sitting on an almost-finished proposal for over a year. After nine months of solid focus, I defended my dissertation in September 2015. This gardener now has a Ph.D.! 2015 was a great year for gardening but I didn't have time to write about it.

Also in fall 2015, my husband accepted a job offer with the company I work for. This meant we were both commuting almost an hour each way, which seemed silly. We started to hunt for a home closer to work, in the country, with lots of land for us to pursue our hobbies (including gardening). We found it! In December 2015 we moved into our new house in the tiny hamlet of Kroghville, WI. It's located on a 1.6 acre lot and was previously home to a master gardener, so there are beds everywhere, mostly filled with perennial flowers. We took 2016 as a year to figure out what is really growing here, and how we might want to adapt it to make it our own.

Existing Spaces and Plans

We certainly have an amazing canvas to work with.

The side border and the front of this perennial garden will stay in flowers for the foreseeable future, although we have a lot of work to do to clean them up. They've been spreading and left unweeded for a few years.

At about the point where the pergola is built, I'll start my vegetable garden. There's about a 400 square foot area here for planting. When possible, I"ll transplant some of the special flowers that are currently in that space. Plans for that space include peppers, eggplant, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, beans, cucumbers, and strawberries. There is an existing rhubarb plant.

The further back you go along the fence, the more overgrown it gets. I've started clearing a 28' x 5' bed here.

Plans for this space in 2017 are garlic, corn, and and asparagus patch.

On the west side of the house is an amazing pond. Between the perennial border and the pond is a 60' x 6' strip of grass that is difficult to get to with the mower, and holds a lot of water. I'm going to remove the grass and put in six 3' x 8' raised beds, surrounded with stones.

Plans for this space in 2017 include: onions, carrots, fennel, celery, beets, chard, kale, broccoli, and tomatoes.

This will give me a total of 684 square feet of growing space in year one, if I can get it all in this spring.

Initial Preparation

I've already started on the side border, and have a 8' x 4' block of German Extra Hardy garlic planted that I picked up at the local farmers market. The purchase of a new rear-tine tiller made this job a bit easier—and more fun!

Seed Order

Yesterday I placed my seed order. Here are the varieties I plan to grow in 2017 (will all be started from seed in my basement or in the beds).

• Asparagus: Will decide on variety when I see what the local greenhouse has.
• Beans: Rattlesnake, Purple Pod
• Beets: Lutz Winter Keeper
• Broccoli: Arcadia
• Carrots: Mokum (early), Dragon (main crop), New Kuroda (late/storage)
• Celery: Conquistador
• Corn: Golden Bantam 8 Row
• Cucumber: Diva, National Pickling
• Eggplant: Black Beauty, Slim Jim
• Herbs: Florence fennel, Caribe cilantro, Dukat dill, Greek oregano, Italian parsley, rosemary, sage, thyme
• Kale: Red Russian
• Onion: Yellow Sweet Spanish, Red Wing
• Peppers, Sweet: California Wonder, Sweet Banana, Chocolate Beauty, Purple Marconi, Lilac Bell
• Peppers, Hot: Cayenne - Long, Early Jalapeno, Habanero
• Potato: I have ideas but might see what the local garden center has to offer.
• Strawberry: Will wait on local garden center
• Squash, Summer: Lebanese White Bush, Zephyr, Cash Flow zucchini
• Squash, Winter: Red Kuri, Waltham butternut, Vegetable spaghetti
• Tomato: Plum Regal, Blondkopfchen, German Pink, Moonglow, Incas Hybrid, Little Napoli Hybrid, Health Kick, Riesenstraube

This is actually a short list compared to past years, but I'm starting slow (for me). I've also signed up for another half share of a CSA just in case I don't have the luck I suspect in our first year here. I anticipate I'll be preserving a lot of food in 2017!