Backyard Garden

Garden update July 5th. Lots of work in the garden as summer moves along. We had a long stretch of heat and no rain then days of rain, lots of growth and changes. I planted the empty row with our second round of lettuces, kales, chard, and more onions.We plan on one more set of planting in late July (before August but close to August) for early fall harvesting. It's hard to decide to pull plants from the garden but our lettuces had gotten very bitter, and the spinach was not producing anything. We had had a good run of eating lettuce everyday and then they started bolting.  The lettuce is a very tender variety and not great for cooking, if you have bitter lettuce you can soak it in cold water spin the water out and then cook it to get one last harvest. I let the sturdy and delicious asian greens go to seed (and they have such pretty flowers) to collect the seeds and try planting them.  We had out first harvest of lavender and mint to dry and store. Ginger growing in a tub. Cag...

The garden is doing well. We've been eating the salad greens and many of the herbs. The oregano and the sage came back from last year. The sage is just about flowering, so that's good for the bees. The Chives came back, and we finally gave them a permanent place in the herb garden. Jen's parents brought some rhubarb from their garden up in Sumner. We planted that in between the Pear and the Japanese maple. Next summer we should have our own. We have one row that we have not planted anything in yet. Likely we will use it to rotate out some greens. The rest of the garden is dotted with plants and flowers. At least it will be dotted with plants and flowers as soon as they grow. Now the battle for the garden begins. We had turned up out lawn, and this is our first year with the new garden, so the grass is coming back. It seems to like the new soil as much as we hoped our garden plants would. Along with the grass and weeds, we have a number of volunteers from where we added ...

The composted manure garden soil was delivered in the rain, and then the rain continued for a couple of days. That produced a soggy wet soil pile in the middle of our driveway. Saturday morning, the rain had stopped, and we were ready to lay down some cardboard and maybe some paper to kill whatever grass we were not able to destroy hand tilling it. The whole plan was a failure. The hand tilling we had done last week was nowhere near the kind of shape we needed it to be. It's funny to feel defeated so early in the process of anything you want to do, but there we were soaking wet topsoil covering our driveway and hand tilled slightly turned up grass in the backyard. We realized the mix we had bought was going to hold too much moisture and it would likely not work well for a garden if it was sitting on top of composting cardboard, this would have been the easy and quick answer to our garden dreams but we knew it had flaws already. We had to get a second opinion even though we knew w...

We bought our house 12 years ago, and our backyard was filled with concrete and a giant pool. It lasted one year before we had it filled in because it was a pool, and we live in Maine. Our entire property is only .15 of an acre, and we've always wanted it to be a garden. You can see on this blog a few of the things we've tried with some success. Our first gardens were raised bed square foot gardens with the fluffiest soil we could put together. They looked cute, and they did alright. Those morphed as the wood we used to build the raised beds decayed like they were supposed to. For the past five years, we have had one long raised bed in the back yard. The first year it was full of vegetables, and it was insanely full. The following year we did the same, but weeds took over, and we ignored it. The next year we changed the raised bed into an herb garden, and it was perfect. We grew tomatoes in pots around the driveway and back porch, and the raised bed was full of mints, flower...