The Ups and Downs of Gardening

I'm long overdue to write about this year's garden, so here it is. Each year our garden gets a little bigger, and we're a bit more organized. Unfortunately, that doesn't always mean that the garden will produce more or be healthier or fuller.

We continued building out our garden this year. The garden layout stayed the same this year: 16 beds, 4' x 10' each. I built two more of the simple raised beds this year, for a total of 4, with the other 12 beds remaining simple mounds. By late May, the snow was gone and the weather had turned warm enough that we were confident that we were beyond the last frost.

Last year we brought in over 2000 lbs of compost from a local orchard to enrich the garden soil. This year's compost would come from our own piles. There are two ways to manage a compost pile:

1. Carefully monitor the carbon (brown) and nitrogen (green) components of the material you add to the pile. Frequently turn and water the pile to maintain the correct temperature. Collect finished compost every 6-8 weeks.
2. Throw compostable material on the top of a pile. Collect compost sometimes, when you think of it.
   

Since the last time we collected our own compost was almost 2 years ago, guess which one we do? It took several hours for us to go through our 3 piles, but we were pleasantly surprised at how much compost was produced: 6 wheelbarrows full! Once we got over the idea of sorting through material covered in bugs, it was fun to sift through the remains, trying to determine what various chunks used to be. Corn cobs, mussel shells, banana peels - we encountered lots of partially decomposed material. By far the strangest find, though, was a green dinosaur ring. We certainly didn't put that in our pile, so we're still mystified as to where it came from. The compost we extracted was spread around the garden and some of the flower beds around the yard, while the remaining un-composted material (minus the shells and occasional bone) went back into the piles for another go.

The next step was to start the planting. Since we still don't have a fence around the garden, we tried to stick with the plants least likely to be attractive to deer: onion, garlic, herbs, some short-season melons (a new experiment this year), and lots and lots of squash. The one exception to the rule that we just HAD to have is tomatoes; we expanded to 3 beds of tomatoes, and put a makeshift fence around just those beds.

I had started some seedlings inside a few weeks earlier and had also bought some starts from local growers, but we also had a number of plants still in the garden from the previous year. Garlic is planted in the fall, since it needs about 9 months in the ground for optimum growth. We planted one of our raised beds with garlic last October, just hours before the first snowfall; when spring came, the garlic took off.

The rest of the growth was a happy accident. We had lots of carrots and onion still in the ground last year that we had intended to harvest, but we just never got around to it before the snow came. We had a pretty heavy snowpack all winter, so I think it provided enough protection that they all survived through the winter and have continued to grow this year. Our perennial herbs - parsley & chives - also came back, which I hadn't anticipated. It's amazing how motivating it was to see something growing in the garden even before you've done anything new that season.

On Memorial Day weekend, we managed to plant virtually the entire garden - that's the earliest date ever! We still had some tomatoes to put in and a few squash mounds to fill (we ran out of some seeds), but overall we were in very good shape this year.

We initially had some trouble with our irrigation system that threatened to delay our planting. When I went to turn on the breaker box for the system the first time, absolutely nothing happened. After last year's irrigation troubles, I was worried that this would be another month-long process of troubleshooting. I called our PUD (Public Utility District) to let them know about what appeared to be a problem at our 3-phase electrical box. Within a few hours later that same Saturday, two PUD servicemen came out to check the box. They replaced a fuse, we fired it up the system, and everything worked! Crisis averted.

I connected an overhead sprinkler to a hose in the garden, as in previous years, but my ultimate goal was to put in a drip irrigation system. I figured that a drip system would be more efficient with water, would allow us to work in the garden while it was on, and would significantly reduce the weed growth in the garden area. It took about a month of research and numerous trips to the local irrigation supply company, but we now have a drip system that feeds each bed with individual drip emitters (squash, melons, tomato) or localized sprinklers (herbs, garlic, onions, carrots). The system has 4 "zones": the 8 East beds, the 8 West beds, the North flowerbed soaker, and a pre-existing dripline for the young trees surrounding the garden. Each invidual bed also has an on/off valve, for more fine control. It's a manual system; there are no timers or automatic switching, since the irrigation pump has to be turned on manually anyway. There are still a few kinks to work out - like the fact that the system will occasionally have a "blowout" when a connection fails, and will send a geyser shooting into the air - but overall it is working well.

The best laid plans of mice and men...

Despite getting the garden in earlier than in any other year, it just wasn't growing. The weather was extremely hot for about a week in June, then cooled down to below the germination point for most of the seeds. Many of the seeds just never came up. We were so busy with other things that we didn't get around to replanting most of them.

Speaking of busy, our watering schedule wasn't as frequent as it should have been, either, which I'm sure didn't help. Nor did spending the better part of a week in Boston with no watering. (We have a housesitter for our trip to Denmark, so we won't let that happen again.)

And as I alluded to in the previous post, we also had a gopher discover the garden as well. We didn't see too much immediate damage other than the mounds and tunnels, but I'm sure he was chewing on the roots and stunting growth. And unfortunately, the gopher that Max captured was not the one from the garden. Dang.

So, the garden goes on. It will likely be a smaller harvest than we would have liked, but we will have a harvest. We've also agreed on a rough plan for the type of fence that we would like to put in at some point, so hopefully we'll get around to that soon (though the likelihood of this year goes down with each week.)

- Mike (& Corinne)