These are our garden boxes. The first 3 are 4 ft. x 4 ft., and the garden box is 4 ft. by 12 ft. A good thing to remember is: the length of a raised bed doesn't matter, but it shouldn't be over 4 ft wide. That way you can easily reach across it from both sides.
The first box is currently our salad bowl. It is planted with a mix of leafy greens.
Looking close, you can see the salad greens are already just beginning to show. The next box in line is our asparagus box, but it is currently dormant so we didn't include a photo for it. By next month however the lil asparagus spears will be showing. We can hardly wait.
After the asparagus box is the strawberry patch. The plants are growing, and if you look closer they are flowering.
We have seen several flowers but no berries yet. We think that's due to the lack of honey bees which seem to be napping now because of the cold spells we've been having of late. There are plenty clovers in the yard and as soon as they bloom I am sure the bees will return.
We had to put up kitty fences on acounta our garden boxes look like litter boxes to them. We didn't put the fence up til today 'cause we figure a lil kitty fertilizer wouldn't hurt. We decided not to plant a winter garden this year, so last November we covered our garden with hay. The kittys helped keep it stirred all winter and now its well on the way to compost. The only thing growing in the garden now is green onions to the left of the picture, and Some romaine on the right that we sprouted from store-bought lettuce remains. We figured 'stead of having them come up in the compost pile we would give a few of them a chance in the garden. The hay makes a wonderful mulch for the garden. You can see here that it is also a wonderful organic weed controller.
When we first put it down, it required some weeding as the hay seeds sprouted. After the first cold snap it calmed down and is doing a great job. We plan to spread little bare spots in the hay, exposing the soil where we'll plant each seed next month, then as the seed grows into plants, we'll move the mulch/hay back in closer to keep the plant from drying out and to keep weeds at bay. We hope you find this helpful and informative, and plan to do more gardening posts this year in an effort to share our yard and gardening techniques with you. We don't know it all, and don't pretend to, but we keep learning; most of the time, the hard way. But we succeed enough to make it fun enough for us to keep trying.
So, get out there and play in your yard when you can. We do, and the benefits are too numerous to mention, but top of 'em all has to be, its tasty!
No comments:
Post a Comment