First sprouts!

Radishes!

Planting potatoes (on my birthday)

I spent my birthday in garden. And that's actually a good thing. First of all it meant the weather was nice. Secondly I do enjoy it, so it was a treat. Potatoes are kind of a Casey crop focus after my experiment last year and my focus on growing volume of calories.

Potatoes were crowded out of the expanded garden by many varieties of a lot of fun stuff, but I insisted on potatoes. Having already invested in the materials for a lot of new raised beds for this season, we are trying something different. We had read about growing potatoes in bags so that you can gradually fill up the bag with soil as the potatoes continue to grow up. This "hilling" process can be done on flat ground if you have enough soil to gather up, but we don't (screw this cherty clay). Our experiment this year is going to be round mounds. Three of them, at the ends of the rows of raised beds. The idea will be to add soil (cross fingers that we will find more compost) to them gradually during the growing season and end up with a mound of potatoes. I think we are going to make chicken wire walls to help hold the mounds together.

4' diameter circle, basically just dug over 4-6 inches deep. Left the sod in to decompose. This was the first one...middle grade in the crappy soil quality of the three circles.

Nearly all of this chert came from the second bed....horrible cherty clay soil. Most likely from a pad of clay laid for the foundation of the house when it was built. The red clay around here is the leftover residue of millions of years of erosion of limestone with thin layers of chert in between. The limestone dissolves almost completely leaving behind the cherty clay. Ugh.....

Each broken up clay circle got two inches of the chunky compost scraped from the raised beds.

First bed is 13 generic red potatoes.

Second bed is 6 generic purple up front and 6 generic red in the back.

Third bed is 8 Yukon Gold at the front and 5 generic red at the back.

I spread about 3 inches of this mixture on top of the potatoes. This is the chunky compost scraped off the tops of the raised beds plus the remnants of the leaf piles that were attempted to shelter the soil from the winter weather.

The three potato beds. Chicken wire walls to come later.

Spring workday in the garden

This Saturday in the garden was an EARLY one. 7AM because I had to get to a mini-retreat for the county party and Kyle...wait, I don't know why Kyle was up that flipping early. Anyways, some early work plus returning in the afternoon made for a big jump start to the spring.

Prepping the existing beds this year meant raking off the leaf cover and the big chunks that had "risen" through the compost. The loose soil barely needed a two inch deep raking to fluff the soil for planting.

Not purely the square foot method, but marking the areas this year with string helps us know where and when we are planting what.

Most of these long strings have quick maturing radishes planted under them for a living divider. Several large section of lettuces planted as well.

Early Direct Seed: carrots

Early Direct Seed: leeks (that's the garlic in the background)

Onion rows as dividers.

Old fence sections for trellis. This will be for cucumbers.

Planning helps....this map changed several times and is bound to change again.

Just another day of glass :-(

Where to put your compost pile

I am a compost convert...I am completely sold on the idea of closing the nutrient cycle of everything that grows and comes onto someones property. Of course apartment dwellers can't do this easily, but so many people live on suburban lots. There are lots of excuses why people don't compost and most of them are crappy ones. Basic knowledge shouldn't be one of those excuses. You can find all kinds of advice...everything from detailed scientific or pro-farmer experiences all the way down to average yokels like me. Here is one simple lesson.

Where to site your pile is a common question. Common pointers: not near trees (roots will suck nutrients), not in the shade (heat helps decomposition), close to your garden (for convenience). Sometimes they add "close to your kitchen." Well...guess where mine is? Not close to my kitchen. Look below:

All the way at the back of the lot near the corner of the neighbor's fence.

Do you know why they recommend putting it near the kitchen? Because this is what you collect to put in the pile:

Not exactly what you want lingering in your kitchen.

Now Northwest Arkansas has mild winters...but this one was extreme. We had four snows in a six week period. The first was the dusting above.

The second was several inches..okay, normal. And usually it melts off fast.

The third was a very decent snow by our standards. And some very cold weather to go along with it.

The fourth snow was 14 inches at our house. A record during my lifetime for Fayetteville. And BITTER COLD for days. (don't the raised beds look like shallow graves covered in snow?)

Well guess what happens when you don't want to trudge through knee high snow at 4 degrees?

PILEUP!!!!!

Lesson learned.

The Garden Awakes!

After a bitterly cold winter with far above average snows, Northwest Arkansas is getting a taste of a traditional spring. We had several warm days that saw 70 degrees and sun. We have had several VERY rainy days complete with thunderstorms and hail. Cloudy, mild days into the 50s feel like normal. It's enough to warm the hearts of gardeners and the soils of their gardens. Seed orders are coming in and we are already procrastinating on the indoor seeding. I took a walk around the garden and realized that it has awoken, despite the hard winter.

Garden looks pretty boring here...depressing even. Notice the newer beds on the outer edges. These additions add 176 sq ft of raised beds, bringing the total close to 400 sq ft.

Garlic is up and ready for warm days. As opposed to last year, I got these in the ground in the late fall rather than waiting until the spring. That is the way it is supposed to be done evidently. These overwinter just fine. I have a challenge among a few friends for the best garlic to be pulled on July 4th.

Parsley overwintered just fine and is starting new growth. Curly leaf parsley on the left, flat leaf (Italian) parsley on the right. You can't see it but behind the parsley the chives are pushing up mounds of soil in their effort to break through.

This bed is the permanent strawberry bed. It was started last year with just one row up front of everbearing plants. The rest of the box was filled in the late fall with first year transplants from our friend's borrowed box in our garden and his pots. We needed to dump a lot of new compost in his bed and I feared the small pots would not protect the plants during the winter. The potted strawberries also had many runners that had rooted into the rest of the box. The whole thing was a mess....the friend hadn't visited his plot in months. So his have now filled the back of the bed. Some were everbearing and some June. Kyle added 3 or 4 inches of compost right on top of the plants and the existing mulch.....I feared that this would hurt the strawberries, but I think it actually provided great insulation. He was careful to make sure he gathered the plant leaves up and spread the compost all around them. I imagine as perennial plants with quick rooting, the strawberries will just gradually raise their root level and thrive. Let's hope.

Brand new growth of strawberries. They are ready for spring!

Mint. This is a 2x5 raised bed that is completely segregated from the rest of the garden. Mint can be very invasive, so we planted it away...in the shade...and we kind of ignored it as it is just far enough out of sight and hard to reach with the hose. It didn't do very well at all last year, but we sort of don't mind. We dumped 3 or 4 inches of compost on top and just let it sit during the winter. All kinds of new growth...but we may have killed one or two of the varieties planted in this box. We will see.

Is anything waking up in your garden/farm?

Is this healthy for my soil?

Remember the beautiful compost I was so excited about? I commented that I found a few pieces of glass in it, but that I was still happy with it. All it took was a few rains for the truth to come out...our UP rather.

So we spread about 4 cubic yards of this stuff in 400 square feet of raised beds. This much glass has come up so far...and I imagine there is a lot more of it in the soil. The rain will settle it but how much of the soil's rising crap does this represent? Just the first inch or so, right? We put 5-7 inches in most of the boxes. Is there really five or six times as much glass still left in our soil?

I am a little disappointed in the quality of the compost from the City of Fayetteville. I guess we will continue to pull glass piece by piece for years to come. There goes running my hands through soil....without gloves at least.

Three motivations that drive me as a "farmer"

These are not all the motivations, but they are contradicting ones that battle for primacy in the hierarchy of vegetable garden planning. I stumbled over three articles in the same online publication and thought it odd that the ideas compete with each other to some degree.

Volume of Calories Grown
Beyond Salads: Planting a Garden to Feed a Family

vs

Most Nutritious Options
Top Ten Most Nutritious Vegetables and How to Grow Them in Your Garden

vs

Quick Growing and Producing
Quick Growing Vegetables for the Impatient Gardner

The first person to say "You don't have to sacrifice those things" will get a boot to the head. If I had one square foot to plant in, I would have to make a decision. One corn plant...one sweet potato slip...two crops of spinach....or early radish and late beets. There are always decisions and they do weigh on people, especially beginning growers.

Identifying your own personal goals is probably more fulfilling than ignoring them. My roommate likes variety. I tend more towards the quick producing and volume. I am far more interested in doing back to back crops of early and late vegetables than growing Mint or Basil.

My green beans are quick, prolific, and voluminous (in fiber, but not calories really). Probably why I like them.