The Garden Experiment Begins

Both of us have always been interested in gardening. Perhaps it is the fantasy of fresh, chemical free, and "free" vegetables straight from your own yard; perhaps we like the idea of "living off of the land"; or maybe it's all of those fond memories of our childhood gardens. More than likely all of the above. Anyway, now we finally have enough room for a real garden!

In April and May we took a series of organic gardening classes from a local AmeriCorp member, Kji McIntyre. Topics in the class included: Propagation, seed selection and season extension; Garden design; and Bed preparation, cover crops and compost. The classes were very interesting and included hands-on so that we could (attempt to) replicate at home what we learned in the class. So now it was our turn...

In late April, we ordered some seeds from Seeds of Change, thanks to a gift certificate from Drew & Michelle. Shortly after they arrived, I planted some of the seeds in seed trays inside; believe it or not, the danger of frost in Trout Lake typically doesn't subside until mid- to late-May! This makes it difficult to grow certain crops without starting them inside, then moving them into a cold frame. (Thankfully, our property has a cold frame already built and installed!)

Now that at least some of the seeds are ready to be transplanted into the ground, and the last frost had likely already occurred, it was time to prepare the ground. We have a rather large section available for gardening, but we only plan to utilize a small portion this year, for several reasons:

1. We don't really know what we're doing
   
2. The countryside is full of wildlife, and wildlife is hungry

We see the evidence of both deer and gophers on a daily basis; for the gophers, it's mounds of dirt all across the yard; for the deer, it's droppings or the animals themselves. (The deer have already trampled one of the peonies we planted a few weeks ago...) It's a two-pronged assault: the deer eat from the top, and the gophers eat from the bottom. So rather than spend a lot of time, money and effort to feed the animals organic vegetables, we thought we'd use this year as an experiment.


Thank goodness for modern machinery! Here I am tilling the section that we don't plant to harvest from this year, preparing to grow our summer cover crop: buckwheat. A good cover crop will prevent weeds from growing, make nutrients more available in the soil, and provide more organic material to the soil when they are incorporated (aka tilled in to the soil) at the end of the season.


One (mostly) finished bed! Unlike the cover crop section, this bed was tilled by hand using the "double dig" method. 4' x 14', this bed contains sunflowers, marigolds on both ends (supposedly deer don't like them), and a mesculin salad mix.

Next weekend: prepare the remaining beds, plant more seeds and seedlings, and irrigate!

- Mike (& Corinne)