Rain

Spent several miserable hours in the cold, pouring rain this morning leveling and positioning the last boxes. Also started to fill them, but the weather began getting the better of me. I'm about 1/4 of the way done filling them. Probably need to make another run for manure/humus/compost to fill them. Hopefully the rain will let up a bit tomorrow so I can finish. I would have taken a picture but it was raining and blowing too hard. Maybe tomorrow.

Gathering supplies

Picked up some more bagged manure and made a run to my vermiculite supplier and bought 4 bags. Just need another load of manure and some peat and I'm ready to mix my soil.

Leveled three of my four new boxes. It was a bit of a pain, and they're not perfect, but it should do. I'm sure they'll settle a bit as the season wears on.

Also been messing around with my layout. I think I solved my trellis-shade problem by loading one rear box with tomatoes and either trellis the north row and stake the front, or run the trellis down the middle and grow them up either side. Regardless, I will not be trellising the row of boxes south of those boxes and either set some stakes or put up small trellises (2-3 ft long -- sun will penetrate to northern box) in a sort of ad-hoc fashion as I need them.

So far, I'm very pleased with the progress so far. Another solid weekend of work, and all the major projects will be done. I'm hoping I can even get some onion sets in in time. I had my doubts that I'd make it a couple weeks ago.

New boxes are built

Finished building the new boxes on Sunday. Painted them with boiled linseed oil this time to see if that will extend the life of the wood a bit. I still have to dig the boxes in and level them.

Also picked up my first load of manure (13 bags). Need about two more loads of that to fill the new boxes.

Also realized I have a bit of a problem with my layout plan. I have two adjacent 2x8 boxes running East-West. Directly in front of these is another pair of 2x8 boxes. The north side of all these boxes will have trellises. I was hoping to space these 2 feet apart, but I'm now realizing the trellises of the front boxes may shade the back boxes at certain points of the year. Trouble is, I need the boxes fairly tight to each other to save space, but I also need the trellis space for tomatoes, beans, cucumbers and peas. I'm wondering if 3ft spacing will be enough?

Good progress

Over the past two days, our old metal shed was taken down, the wood foundation removed, some gravel shoveled out, and the ground leveled as well as possible. The ground has a slight slope to it and is not entirely even, but I think it should work. If anything, I may have to dig the high end of the boxes in a couple inches.

Last year's garden was four 4x4 boxes. I am reusing them this year (pushing them together in pairs so will effective be two 4x8's), and also adding four 2x8's which will have trellises along the north sides -- effectively 32 ft of trellis space. Total space will be 128 sq ft.

Last fall, on junk day, I found two huge coils of garden fencing with stakes. I should have enough to build a legit fence this year (rather than my jury-rigged chicken-wire cages I used last year). Gotta love free stuff!

It's been a while...

I guess I got pretty lazy with the blog late last season! Anyway, I ended up with just over $300 worth of produce from the garden. I could have done better, but had to shut the garden down a bit early to get some backyard projects underway. Didn't have much of a fall crop.

I moved last season's boxes to a staging area and a new wooden shed was built where the boxes were. I'm in the process of moving the contents of the old, metal shed into the new one. When done with that, I'm taking down the old shed, and that area will become the new garden. Last year I had the boxes sitting on gravel, but this year I can sit them on the native soil, which is quite good. I will also be able to fence in the whole area rather than attaching those chicken wire panels directly to the boxes. That should make working in them a bit easier.

Last year I had 68 sq ft (including 2 SWC's which largely failed). This year will be 128 sq ft. I still have a lot to do, and need to get it done by early March, so I can get my onion seeds planted. I'll post some photos of the progress soon.

Lazy blogger

I've been pretty lazy this month in terms of blogging, but rest assured, the garden is still producing. I've pulled a total of about 175 tomatoes (have canned a lot of sauce and salsa so far), 10 pounds of green beans, 3 slicing cucumbers (with 2 dozen baby cucs on the vines), and 10 pickling cucs (made 4 pints of refrigerator pickles), to mention a few crops.

The bell peppers have been strange -- I have 4 plants, only 2 of which have yielded some peppers. The others flower, but no peppers. I think I read somewhere that if peppers are exposed to temps below 55, the season is screwed up. We had a number of cool nights in June, so maybe that explains it. The Cayenne peppers are doing great though.

My tomato plants are all aflicted by what looks like early blight (although it's showing up late in the season). Yellow leaves with dark spots, that eventually shrivel up and die. The new growth still looks good (for now), and I'm still getting tomatoes, but this might be the beginning of the end. Walking around town, every garden I've seen with tomatoes has the same thing to varying degrees of severity. It's been a good run with them though, and I'm pretty pleased.

I transplanted my Fall brocolli and cauliflower today. I've been hardening them off this week in some pretty bad heat, and they've handled it pretty well so far. Considering I'll have to shut the garden down early this year to finish the backyard restructuring, I may not get any yield from these, but it's worth a shot.

It's been a while...

I know it's been a while since the last update, and I have no new photos, but I wanted to post a quick entry to try to bring things up to date.

The tomatoes are coming in heavily now. Pulled almost 60 tomatoes (plus nearly 60 cherry tomatoes) so far. I've canned several pints of sauce and salsa, used some fresh spaghetti and pizza sauce, and used sliced tomatoes for salads and sandwiches. Even the plants in the SWC's, which look awful, are yielding some tomatoes, so maybe that endeavor won't be a total loss after all.

The cucumbers are coming steadily now. Made 3 pints of refrigerator pickles so far, with more to come. Two good sized General Lee slicing cucumbers have been picked as well.

Picked my first two bell peppers this week. Also picked a few carrots, which while fairly small, were good none the less.

The yellow onions were a bit underwhelming. Ended up with about 30 smallish onions from 4 squares (16/square). Definitely usable, but I was hoping for larger onions. They may have been slightly crowded, or it may have been poor quality sets I bought (from Walmart).

The next round of bush beans are well on their way. Probably about 2 weeks away from being knee-deep in beans again.

I think that brings us up to date. I'll try to get some photos taken this weekend for the next post.