Friday, January 03, 2014

New year and new garden

The new year is here, and I am excitedly flipping through the pages of my Territorial seed catalog hand picking the babies that will be growing in my garden come spring.  With each moment I add another to-do to the big list, research a bit more, and flush out a few random ideas.  Do I want to do french intensive gardening, or square foot, or classic rows, or maybe haphazardly sprinkle the seeds everywhere and see what the hell comes up?

This year I will be trying to fix some of the mistakes from last years garden.  Primarily the Tomatoes.  What an awkward disappointment.  They grew and grew, and got bushy and bolted even after I whacked off tons of growth, and gave me only a few handfuls of mushy fruit.  I had such high hopes for them, only to realize that I wasted about 25 bucks on set plants of various determinations and flavors, to get maybe ten tomatoes.  Thinking back on it over the past few months I have come to realize that the conditions were never hot enough to give a good crop.  So, this year, that is priority number one.  FIX IT! I am going to make the soil warmer by installing raised garden beds, and black plastic around the tomatoes. For a little bit I toyed with the idea of doing them in tires, but I couldn't get past the hobo looking factor.

This year, along with other new things, and changes, I have thrown my hat in and signed up to be a beekeeper.  Right now I have a small Mason Bee Box on reserve that will be delivered sometime in spring.  These natural little pollinators will be helping with all of the plants in the garden, and I am trying to plan accordingly.  I want them to be happy and have lots of little flowers and buds to enjoy while they flit and fly and pollinate all of the vegetables.  They also need mud -which I am not worried about since it will be a garden with a sprinkler- and sun.  So excited!  Will update weekly with my thoughts. 

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