We spent our Mother's Day finishing the garden. This has been a project that has lasted for several months, since I first started the seeds in our little indoor greenhouse.
We also had our work cut out for us with the garden itself. Last year we let the land rest and while we did not plant anything ourselves, it was amazing how much grass, dandelion, and other weeds took root. We did, however, start installing a chain link fence around the property line on the three main sides. Here are some pictures featuring the original fence we installed when we first bought the house. We were not sure where the property lines were at the time and our entire goal was to keep out the rabbits. We knew that we would be letting the land rest in a few years and that we could replace the temporary fence with something more permanent.
Installing the fence ran into a few challenges, namely our haphazard compost pile and scrap wood pile. At one time someone added a lean-to onto the shed. We decided that we wanted to make a dog kennel for our beautiful chocolate lab, Hershey. The compost pile grew year over year as we threw the corn stalks and other garden debris into the corner of the garden. We also ran into an electric power pole. After we had the land surveyed, we discovered that the power pole was placed dead center between our property and the neighbors. They had purchased the home with a few sections of wooden fencing installed about a foot off the property line. After speaking with them, they permitted us to install our fence just outside of our property line and onto theirs, as well as to tie into their fence. Eventually we will be fencing in our entire yard. In the meantime, we needed to get the garden fenced for the next growing season.
We opted to use a chain link fence for the garden because we needed to ensure that we had plenty of light for our growing plants. The guidelines for fences in our community state that a perimeter fence in the rear yard cannot exceed six feet. This became a bit challenging when we installed the fence around the old sugar maple stump. Talk about uneven ground and roots galore! As you can see, we were able to get the main piping in the ground and the supporting poles installed.
The final step for the main part of the fence was installing the chain link fabric. It was my job to pull with a funny tool my husband bought, while he secured it to the main poles and the upper supporting pole. While not as perfectly straight as I would have preferred, we had to work within the guidelines and the really uneven ground around the tree stump. We only managed to get the three main sides installed before we had to stop for the winter.
As soon as our Wisconsin weather started to warm up, we began to tackle the garden and the fencing again. We started out by tackling the wood scrap pile. Many of these sticks are leftovers from the 30 cedar trees we removed four years ago. While I worked on removing the grass and weeds from the garden, my husband spent two days burning the smaller sticks, twigs, and kindling. I hauled the grass and weeds to the local compost area while he sorted out the garbage, burnable logs, and mulch. We had to stop burning a few times in order to let the fire pit cool. We moved all the ash into the garden, where I worked it into the soil. Once the wood was taken care of, we needed to deal with the compost pile.
Each year after harvesting the garden produce, we pulled the remaining plants and corn stalks and threw them into a heaping pile that grew, literally, every year. We always had the intention of cleaning it out and someday putting in a real compost bin - we just never got around to it. We were really dreading bagging all of that rotten mess up and hauling it to the city's compost pile. So, you can only imagine our surprise and delight to discover that only the topmost layer was still plant material. Over the past four years, everything else underneath had broken down into the most beautiful and rich composted soil. There was enough there to spread over half of the garden, smothering the remaining bits of grass and weeds that I had not been able to remove.
Once it was all cleaned out, we installed another section of fencing from the main section to the shed. As you can see, we also removed the rotten lean-to. Later this year we plan on installing another section of fencing with a gate at the front of the shed, further enclosing the area and creating a nice, shady dog kennel.
We replaced the temporary fencing between the shed and the garage with a shorter, permanent fence. We reused the gate that we had originally installed; we just reinstalled the posts in a more permanent manner. Our land is not even close to being level and so we decided to install the fence so that it was straight at the top and will gradually fill in the bottom with soil and more wood chips as the plants grow.
We had one final section to close off, between the main fence on the property line and the garage. We didn't want anything too tall, since we like to visit a bit with our neighbors while they are working on their garden. Plus, we will be tying into the main fence with the wooden privacy fence and will want to remove this section. We just needed it to close off the garden to any little critters that might find our tender plants appealing.
Once the fence was completed, it was just a matter of getting some new wood chips. We had not laid down a layer of wood chips since our initial loads were delivered in 2011 and 2012. It was time to get a really thick layer down, which we did with four small truckloads from a local landscaping company. Finally, it was time to get planting! By cleaning out the compost area, we expanded the usable space in our garden by about 20' x 60'. I decided to rearrange some plants, and add a whole bunch of new ones! In the single row of tires below we planted salad greens, such as spinach, salad burnett, crisp mint lettuce, buttercrunch lettuce, etc.
The stack of tires in this picture are two tires tall and house our seed potatoes. We planted three of the tires with red potatoes and two of them with Yukon Gold. Between the two sets of tires we planted zucchini, peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, beets, radishes, cabbages, and other similar types of plants.
Between the potato tires and the fence running almost the full 60' of the garden we planted four rows of corn. We companion plant our corn, so the corn rows to the left of the huge tree stump were planted with kidney beans and butternut squash. We have done this in the past and it worked well. Along the fence lines themselves we planted bean and parsnips together on a 30' section, peas and carrots along five fence sections, and climbing pickling cucumbers on two fence panels.
A couple of years ago, we were surprised with a small patch of rhubarb growing behind our shed. We never planted rhubarb and we stored the empty tires and tomato cages there over the winter. We thought we most likely killed the rhubarb since we didn't see any of it last year, with all the junk on it. To our amazement, it came back strong and healthy again this year. Rather than continue to fight it, we fenced it in with some short plastic fencing and planted around it. Behind the rhubarb in the other fenced in area we planted 20 strawberry plants/roots. This is my third attempt at planting strawberries! Hopefully, the nutrient rich soil and the full sun that this area receives will help them to grow and flourish. That whole back area from the rhubarb to the fence used to be the heaping compost pile.
When we first started our garden I planted a row of asparagus seeds along the side of the shed. It was really hard to not cut and pick any of it while we waited for it to grow and take root. This was going to be our first year of harvesting the asparagus and lo and behold, we only had three stalks! Something must have happened since prior years shows a full row of little baby stalks. We were so disappointed but decided to invest in some asparagus root and plant again, rather than using seeds. We are back to the waiting game, but the wait should be much shorter this time around.
While it was a lot more work this year to get the garden ready and planted, we did it and are looking forward to another great year of gardening. We love the Back to Eden approach since we will not have to continue watering the garden once the seeds begin sprouting and our weeding should also be minimal. And finally, here is a picture of one of our happily transplanted tomato plants.
Be sure to stay tuned and we will share more photos of our garden as it grows over the season.
