New Beginnings & The W-O-R-D

Today, I finally got out and picked up some extra materials to start my new lasagna bed for the year. I got two bales of peat moss, some compost/manure, a bag of potting soil (for containers) and my tool for the year, a spaded fork. I looked at plants at both Wal-Mart & Lowes, but they looked nutritionally deficient.

I weeded my bed from last year. (I thought the idea was that you wouldn't get weeds?), and actually built some walls from some freebie lumber. I took the old wood scraps to lay out the new bed, but it was getting too dark to do any more. In the next couple of days, I hope to get my broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprout, & onion plants. Ace has had decent plants in the past, for better prices actually, and I have also been dying to check out the local feed & seed store I just found. I will lay the compost/manure as a new layer and get that bed planted. Hopefully, I will get my new lasagna bed made and planted in the next week or two as well. We'll see what I get done.

I just finished The Vegetable Gardener's Bible: Discover Ed's High-Yield W-O-R-D System for All North American Gardening Regions by Edward Smith this last week. Over all, it has pretty similar concepts to the Lasagna Gardening method. WORD is an acronym for Wide Rows, Organic Methods, Raised Beds, and Deep Soil. Smith does choose to till the ground rather than building the soil up, but the concepts remain basically the same. The plants, including the roots, need lots of room to grow. He has good information on composting, disease/pest control (with recipies), companions, rotating, and a huge section on individual vegies/herbs with everything you need to know from sowing to storing. I wish I had discovered this book earlier because it is a better one-stop source for info instead of the two or three other books I read for specific stuff such as companion planting. I took a lot of notes and definitely plan to copy a few of his charts/recipies. At some point, I will probably add it to my library as well.

The Herb Spiral

In my perusing around today, I discovered a neat little technique called the herb spiral. This is a beautiful and simple way to create microclimates for all of your herbs. It's basically a pyramid in spiral style created by rocks or bricks. As you water the top, the water seeps down. So, the herbs at the top require the driest conditions, trickling down to the ones wanting the most water at the bottom. Then of course the ones that want more sun would be on the south side.

I would like to try this at some point. However, my question is how do you keep certain plants (like mint) from getting out of hand?

First Blooms of Spring

So here I show you spring, and it's fixing to snow! We're pretty confused around here, but we're never bored. Anyway, I picked up some spring onion and black-eyed susan seeds at Wal-Mart this week. They tell me plants should arrive in a couple of weeks. Hmmm.... I also picked up a book at the library that I especially liked last summer: The Backyard Berry Book by Stella Otto. Eventually I would like to add this and it's companion, The Backyard Orchardist to my collection. They are both very informative with a lot of specifics by fruit and region.

It's Spring!

It was 74 degrees today, and my daffodills are beautiful. The tulips and day lilies aren't far behind. My windows were open, and I sat perusing seed catalogs while recovering from the lovely crud that's going around. I can't wait until April when it will be 6 months from transplant, and I will be officially allowed to garden again.

I actually did a basic garden plan a couple of weeks ago. My big goals are to add another lasagna raised bed, really get into growing herbs, and build up the soil along the fence to add raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries in the fall. So without further ado, here's my basic plan:

Small bed: Rotated to 3 sisters (corn, pole beans, squash), possibly adding peas in the fall.

Last year's established bed: broccoli, cabbage, brussel sprouts interplanted with dill, romaine lettuce interplanted with radish, bell & chili peppers, cucumbers, okra, and possibly peanuts if I have room (but likely not) --- I might also what doesn't fit in containers.

New bed: Swiss chard (we just tried it, very yummy!) interplanted with beets, carrots interplanted with onions, parsnips, more carrots interplanted with green onions, leeks (if I can find them) interplanted with sage and chamomile, turnips, and sweet potatoes --- again, some might go in containers

Rose bed: Tomatoes (hopefully Brandywine, a striped kind (maybe Big Rainbow?), an early one, and a grape) and garlic in the fall

Office bed: Sunflowers underplanted with cantaloupe.

Containers: strawberries, spinach, leaf lettuce, Roma tomato, eggplant, Sugar Baby watermelon, basil, chives, rosemary, thyme, mint, lavender, and bay

I wasn't going to mail order seeds, but actually Pinetree Garden Seeds, recommended by Foodie Farmgirl, has better prices than Walmart, for the most part. So, I'm happily making up an order. Tomorrow I'll see if my mom wants to share an order with me for her garden.

So, in the next couple of weeks I want to get any mail order out, put up our bat house, and build the raised beds. Hopefully in the next few days I'll have a few pictures of spring for those of you who haven't seen it yet. :P