Friday, March 18, 2011

Tripling the size of my garden

This will be the fourth year for my vegetable garden.  Every year I learn something new about what works and what doesn't.  I'm getting a better feel for what vegetables it's worth my while to plant and which ones aren't.  For example, even though everyone in the house likes peas, it takes up more space than it's worth to me to plant more than one or two meals worth.

One of my goals with this garden has been to grow and preserve my own tomatoes.  It's been slow work trying to figure out how many plants I need to get the harvest I want.  It didn't help that the first year I had tomatoes in the garden was the year of the Awful Tomato Blight, making it difficult to separate my mistakes from other problems.  Last year I came to the conclusion that I just needed a bigger garden.  Yesterday we had a rare combination of warm weather, and my son having a half-day while my daughter did not, so I had extra help rearranging the garden fence!  The new fence arrangement will give me about three times the garden space!

 The bottom right corner with all the dead leaves is the old garden space.  You can see the fence near the house - this is all now new garden space!  I'm going to spend most of this afternoon measuring out and removing sod from the new plots.

One of my beds has morphed into a perennial herb plot.  I cleared last years leaves away, and look what I found!
Oregano
Thyme
Sage
I didn't harvest any of these last year because the plants weren't that well-established.  It looks like at the very least I'll be able to start using my oregano soon!

4 comments:

  1. Wahoooo!!! It's so exciting to start to get in the gardening mindset again. I think we'll go to the resourcing store and see if they've got another bookcase...

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  2. You can never have too many bookcases! Except in my case, where I no longer have room for them. I've started applying shelving to the empty walls instead :)

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  3. I love those herbs, my parsley, oregano and thyme comes back too, and the dill self seeds so readily it now pops up all over my beds randomly every year LOL! I think I know what year you are talking about, many of us had horrible blight on the tomatoes that year - best of luck with the new layout!

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  4. I think it must be time to plant my tomatoes. Hard to get it going this year, but I'll be glad I did it pretty soon. Just been crazy busy and hard to find the time!!
    Happy gardening!

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