We got most of our garden started, a bit yesterday and more today. The metal raised beds (17 inches tall) are new this year. It would be quite expensive to fill them entirely with good quality soil, so about the bottom half of each is a quasi-Hügelkultur mix of sticks, twigs, and partially composted yard waste. The top part of them, and all of the material for the shorter raised beds, is filled with soil that we built.
Mel Bartholomew’s square foot gardening system recommends building soil from three equal parts — 1/3 peat moss or coconut coir, 1/3 vermiculite and 1/3 blended compost. We’ve modified that a bit. Ours is 1/3 coir, 1/3 perlite, and 1/3 a mixture of compost from our yard and composted manure. Gotta admit that when it comes to the vermiculite versus perlite debate I’m a bit agnostic.
I put nine sweet peppers (3 Chocolate Bell, 3 Candy Cane Red, 2 Yellow Sparkler, and a Golden Bell) in the first tall raised bed, watered them, and added straw mulch:
In a different raised bed (not pictured) on a little strip of otherwise useless space on the side of our house near a neighbor I planted three more starter peppers, and (from seeds) red cored chantenay carrots and cylindra beets.
Then my wife went to town:
I couldn’t keep track of it all, so she texted me:
Here’s what we got in the ground over the last couple of days: four kinds of lettuce, kale, Swiss chard, bok choy, shallots, tomatoes, cabbage, eggplant, peppers, sunflowers, scarlet runner beans, spaghetti squash, zucchini, butternut squash, strawberries, basil, oregano, chives, carrots, beets, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
In the background of that pic are some second-year raspberries and a Honeycrisp Apple tree that produced heavily last year.
We’ve yet to plant any hot peppers, they’ll go over on the other side of the house in an attempt to limit cross-pollination. Not sure what I’ll add to the raised bed that has the three peppers, carrots and beets. Some beans to fix nitrogen certainly, possibly onions and/or scallions. And I’ll be planting red potatoes in containers.
Is it suburban homesteading if we’re not raising any livestock, or just gardening? Meh, there’s a lot to be said for being able to step out your back door and harvest your dinner.
@dozePost beneficiaries:
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