Wattle time! A few weekends ago our neighbors B & M were trimming the leader sprouts from their apple trees and I jumped at the chance to get my wattle fence started.  From the two trees there was just enough to start building one panel of the fence. It isn't perfect, but it is fun to put together and I think really adds to the overall appearance of the garden.  A bit less of an eye sore for the neighbors, and a welcome hand built addition to the garden.  Especially as I look into a few cottage flowers that can be grown along the fence that are not of preference to the deer. (since nothing is truly deer proof, they will eat anything, I just need it to be non-preferential for them to avoid it if they have good food elsewhere)

The weather has been difficult over the last few weekends, and in conjunction with my injury, work, and other commitments, it has been too difficult to get the garden beds built.  grrr. This does not bode well for the next few months.  Driving by others garden I am starting to notice the overturned soil, the building up of the internal structures, and a few other critical winter projects.  I am not 'behind' on my ultimate timeline, but, with each passing weekend it means that more needs to be crammed into the few weeks before planting. 

I am excited thinking about the garden. It livens my spirit and gives me a positive surge of emotion.  A much needed jolt to my psyche when there are other stresses from outside that are pushing me down.  That.... is for another post however. 

Nearly forgot it was January

The past two weeks it has been hovering around 50 degrees.  Not warm, but not cold. This morning I awoke to a brisk 34 degrees and a heavy fog hanging around the lake. With the warmer weather I found myself getting into that dangerous precedent already, 'can I plant early this year?'.  Yes, I know, it is way to early this year. Especially with this year on average being colder than last year.  The most likely first day that I will be able to plant in the garden is near the end of April. Sometime around the beginning of April I will start some seeds in the house, or on the windowsill at work in an attempt to get a head start on the better and hardier varieties.

This little rash of cold weather reminds me that we have roughly a cord of wood at the house left to burn to keep us heated through the winter.  Since sadly the home we live in, while beautiful and overlooking an amazing landscape, was built as really only a summer home, it means that the heating bill can be upwards of $300 a month during the coldest months.  As you can imagine this is a horrible strain on the pocket book, when the summer months only cost us $30.  (and that is WITH a green energy purchase) There is nothing we can realistically do about it, other than burn wood instead of burn electricity via the base boards. As a house warming gift when we moved in over a year ago, mom and J gave us a set of finely sharpened axes.  A welcome addition to when you need to do a bit of splitting for kindling.  Tonight I will be working up a sweat when I get home by splitting a weeks worth of kindling, before heading out for Roller Derby practice.

Weekends are f'ree?

This weekend we were out of town, which usually means that eating habits get thrown out the window.  Add in to some personal issues and I was perhaps at my most grumpiest when it came to food.  All I wanted was a steak, and some deep fried goodies, and if both were smeared in dark chocolate, I would be all the better. In the previous post I mentioned how there was some forethought to preparing and taking food along with us, and generally we did good. (I fought those cravings! and maybe splurged a little).  Food issues aside, I was happy to find that there was a gym in the hotel we were staying at.  5 min warmup on the elliptical followed by a shortened version of Zuzka's HIIT workout.  I felt the squats later during our pairs kite performance.

Anyways, lets bring this blog back to the gardening side of the house; as I am sure by this point you are simply annoyed with my fitness and weight posts.  It is winter, what can I tell you.

Friday evening before we left there was a nice package on the doorstep from Territorial Seed Company.  Since we were in a rush I didn't get a chance to open them, but they were waiting for me when we returned. I am not sure how to describe how it feels to open up the package and neatly arrange each little seed packet.  Each with it's own beautiful hand drawn picture of the vegetable on the cover.  Yes this is about $55 of seeds, which seems like an awful lot for so little, but this represents potentially 2 years of vegetable garden growing.  Or put in a different light, nearly 300-400 lbs of food.

In the next month we will be building the raised garden beds, and starting some of the hardier starts indoors. 

Moan-day, Rainy-day, blues-day

Was a rather active weekend.  Thinking more about the garden, finally sending the check in for my seed order ($60), and pricing out options at the local hardware store.  Sometime last week I had posted on the local craigslist that I was in search of 5 gallon buckets. Today I checked my email, and there were a few responses as to where I could find free ones, both 5 and 8 gallon size!  My thought process is that they can be used for safe container gardening of highly reproductive and invasive plants like Jerusalem Artichoke. (a nutty tuber that is actually related to a sunflower, and has nothing to do with it's pokey namesake) It will also expand the garden growing space outside of the actual garden, without requiring any buildup.

As the garden now stands -excluding the containers on the deck and the potential 5 gallon buckets- I will have, at best, 190 sq feet of growing space.  This really is not a lot.  In fact, this hardly is enough for a simple cottage summer kitchen garden.  While it alleviates some of my issues about complexity and multi-season gardening, it wont meet the needs that I have set out for myself.  At best guess for our household, we need about 1,000 sq ft of garden space to provide enough vegetables for the majority of the year. We do not own the property and in combination with the HOA rules bootstrapping us, this simply is not a realistic size for me to achieve. (albeit we would no longer have a yard that needs mowing, and instead a garden that needs eating!) 

So I am breaking down my basic issue here: SPACE, and we are not talking about the final frontier. How do I create more growing space, without taking up more ground space and potentially pissing off the neighbors?  Well, let me be honest, we have GREAT neighbors.  In fact they were over for a little potluck at the house on Saturday, and we just chatted, hung out, and I told them about the bees that will be coming soon.  It was so nice to have a relaxed friendly time with those that physically live so close to us.  I also know a secret weapon in the good-neighbor-relations that my grandmother taught me - sharing your bounty and not your workload will bring you closer together.  This is not to say to not share the workload, but when your neighbor says "eat as much as you want from my garden that I worked so hard on", they think nothing of coming over and giving you a hand when you need to split a cord of wood. 

This means that my neighbors mean a lot to me when it comes to the planning of the garden. B and M's bedroom is about ten feet from it, and B and A look down on it from their home.  So a sloppy haphazard garden is out of the question.  At no point do I want them to look out their windows and see 50 buckets and a bunch of blue tarps holding things together.  I would care less if we owned the land and were up in the middle of the woods. 

My plan is to line the south side of the garden with the buckets of Jerusalem Artichokes, and to build up vertically along some of the fence posts.  While I will reserve a fence post spot for the bee house, I am looking into building simple rails between the posts to support some flowers and herbs.  Please excuse this horrible drawing of what I am talking about.

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.