Garden 2009

I haven't talked much about the garden this year, but it's back in full force. We had some good early season success with spinach and radishes. I was too late on that last year, but I got seeds in the ground early this time. I left a radish in the ground just to see how big it would get. It ended up getting pretty large and it even flowered.

Getting Dirty

We made dirt. We bought a tumbling composter last year and we've been throwing crap in it ever since. Today was the first time I've taken anything out of it. Normally, I wouldn't find dirt all that exciting, but it's cool to know that the nice nutrient rich food I just gave my garden would have otherwise become garbage.

It was interesting to see what stuff did and didn't break down. In addition to the normal organic scraps, we tossed some other things in there. A couple experiments were a wine cork and a wooden french fry fork (from Belgium). Both still looked brand new. I had also tossed some compostable cutlery, and it all decomposed. We tossed some shredded paper in there early on, and it composted pretty well except that it formed into small clay-like balls that I needed to break up by hand. I also found several mango pits. They didn't break down completely on their own, but I could easily crumble them with my hands. Same with corn cobs. Peach pits didn't break down much at all. Neither did some small branches that we put in.

Now our composter is just about empty and I'm ready to get back to tossing our would-be garbage in there.

The first harvest

Last night we made some pad thai and used our first* pieces of produce from the garden: a serrano pepper, and some basil. We also got to use some radishes that we got from our CSA last week and some some pasta from the farmers' market. (And it was tasty.)

* Technically, we did pull a strawberry from the garden a while ago, but that thing was pretty much ripe when I bought the plant from the nursery and planted it. The first thing we get to eat from our garden that we actually grew from seeds will be either spinach or radishes.

Irrigation

I had a simple plan for Saturday afternoon: Install automatic garden irrigation. Conceptually, it's pretty simple. There was already a sprinkler valve near the garden, so I just needed to T off the water line, add a drip valve, and reroute a little tubing. Voila! Instant irrigation. But things never quite work out the easy.

There were several gotchas along the way, the most annoying of which was the sprinkler wiring. Sprinkler wiring is not complicated, but the people who installed my sprinklers did something stupid. To make a long story short, instead of spending $0.10 on a couple wire nuts and about 30 seconds worth of work they created an extra hour of work for me.

I tried my darnedest to get all the supplies before I started, but there were several return trips to The Home Depot for various sprinkler trinkets. For example, I had to get something to repair a water line because I found out that a landscaping staple had pierced it. It's been like that forever (I probably even hammered that staple in), but the metal had rusted and sealed the hole.

Eventually (Sunday afternoon), I prevailed and we now have a nice drip system in the garden. Each plant gets its own adjustable dripper so we can give them as much or as little water as they need when the sprinklers run each day.



We replaced our dead cantaloupe, and added some new stuff: brussle sprouts, rosemary, dill, radishes, sunflowers, and strawberries.

Garden Success

We have some early success in the garden.

Bring on the produce

For the past couple weeks I've been slowly working on building our garden. It's the same type of planter as we built for our raspberries, but I've been spreading the work over several days instead of doing it all at once. It's all ready to be filled with soil and fenced off now. Sometime in May we'll plant some stuff, and hopefully it will grow. :)

Even if our garden fails miserably, we have plan B: We signed up for a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. Every week this summer we'll be getting some fresh, local, organic produce. It's going to be fun finding some recipes for vegetables that we wouldn't normally buy. As part of the CSA, we also signed up for a fruit share (peaches, pears, apples, strawberries). It's going to be a tasty summer.

Raspberries

While Christine was off skiing last Friday, I stayed home and built a planting bed.


Landscaping projects are always deceptively time consuming, and this took me a good portion of the afternoon. This was kind of a fun project though because I got to build something.

After the snow melted this afternoon, Christine and I got to work finishing the soil prep and planting some raspberries. The cool part about building a raised bed is that we didn't have to do much digging into the terrible Colorado soil clay. We mad a mixture of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite (ala The Square Foot Gardener).

The method of mixing the soil on a tarp and then sliding it into the bed worked great. And once we got all the soil put together, it was so nice to be able to move it around easily with your hands instead of struggling with the clay.