CSA Week #6

I can never decide if watermelons are worth the amount of space they take up.... until, of course, we eat them at the end of summer.  Then I'm convinced all over again about how delicious they are and worth their space in the garden.

Cara is always up for hanging out in the garden with me.

The ground cherries this year have been super plentiful -- it's amazing how much only three plants produce!  In my opinion, they are best covered in chocolate.

There's nothing like the morning in the gardens.

In other exciting news, our fig tree is producing!  We may actually get to eat some homegrown figs this year!

CSA Week #1 & Spring on the Farm

Last week was the first CSA share pick-up of the season at Knapp Homestead.  It was a good early harvest of greens, mostly.

First share: head lettuce, baby radicchio, baby spinach, arugula, picnic radishes, kale, microgreens, and a potted herb seedling.

Other spring images from around the market garden...

Leaf and head lettuces planted out early spring in low tunnels.

Our personal potato crop is looking great this year.

We've also started a small strawberry patch of Seascape strawberries.  I'm looking forward to a long summer season of continuous harvest from these.

Garden Plan for 2016

We have a lot of plans for the garden this year.  For one, I am so excited that we actually get to participate in growing some spring lettuces and cooler crops -- last year we didn't get the garden in until early June because of the septic installation.

Taking from our experience in the garden last year and the crops we grew, we decided that we need to double the size of the garden.  We want to add about seven more raised beds to grow some other crops we haven't tried yet.  So by the time we are completely installed, the garden should be 50 feet deep by 50 feet wide.  I guess it sounds big, but there's also space to walk around and enjoy the experience of being in the garden... and that really excites me!  I would love to get a bench or something to put out there.

We also have some plans for installing a garden fence.  In the late fall I found a guy selling 200 linear feet of basic fence post with rails.  It was deeply discounted and the guy offered to deliver, so all winter we have had tons of fencing sitting in our garage.  I know we are both looking forward to getting that out of there to get the tractor in to work on it (that's a whole 'nother story/issue that hopefully we will be exploring in a few weeks...). But we should be starting garden fence installation here in a few weeks, which means digging post holes and lining up fencing.  With the amount of fractured shale we have around here, digging the post holes should be pretty interesting....


Ok, back to plants and gardening.

(I have a seriously nerdy way of planning the garden.  It must be the teacher in me!)

Last year we grew: 4 different kinds of tomatoes (but didn't have 100% success because of some blossom rot), lettuces, kale (lacinato & curly), broccoli, English peas, golden beets, red onion, carrots, herbs, collards, cantaloupe, butternut squash, radishes, tatsoi, nasturtium, cucumber, eggplant, red and purple pepper,

This year we are continuing what we grew last year, except for a few that we discovered we weren't that fond of, and adding: spaghetti squash, corn, sugar snap peas, strawberries, garlic, asparagus (we don't expect to harvest this for a couple years), ground cherries, pumpkin, and potatoes.

Last week when I planted the garlic, asparagus, some beets, radishes, and lettuces, I put some chopped up leaf matter in the beds, turned the soil, and then topped off with more of our stash of gardening soil.  All the current beds are ready for planting...

I also have my seed starting operation up and running in our basement, which is awesome!  I have a lot of seeds started, but I really need to start some more of the plants I need to wait until after Mother's Day to plant.

(Two shop light fixtures per row; one cool and one warm bulb in each fixture -- that way you get the whole light spectrum for the plant babies to grow up!)

How do you all start your seeds?  For the past few years I've been very must dependent on the lights-in-the-basement system, but I'd really like something more environmentally friendly.  I would LOVE a passive green house, but a hoop house is probably a good intermediate step?  Not sure about these options yet, but I would be excited to know what others use and have found to be the most efficient.  Obviously hoop houses and green houses serve different purposes (extending season v. seed starting), but I'm just looking for some anecdotal evidence from people who use them.

Cheers!
~L

The Dream Garden (Planning, Construction, & Planting)

Even when we temporarily moved to the condo weren't sure if the sale was going to "go through," I started seeds anyway.  I know now that wherever I am, I need to have a garden.  It gives me such pleasure, I couldn't live without it.

Seed starting operation.

Dark & stormys on snow days are perfect for garden planning

I had an idea of where I wanted to garden to go and about how big we should make it.  To put things into perspective, when Mike and I first moved in together in Hippie Village we had two small raised beds and mostly did container gardening.  Then in Lambertville, it was a similar set up with some slightly larger raised beds and lots of container gardening.  So with this place, the space is endless and we wanted something fantastic.

Playing around with garden bed layout.

There's no better feeling than seeing these little seeds pop up.

Building the boxes and securing them into the ground was certainly harder than it would seem.  What helped enormously is getting a pallet of lumber delivered from Home Depot so that we always had wood on hand to build new boxes.  Leveling the boxes was kind of a nightmare, because this part of our property has a slight slope.

The arbor in the garden was made by my brother-in-law and we got married underneath it.

When it was time to get soil we ordered a dump truck full and had it delivered to the house.  Unfortunately, we had it delivered to the other side of the property, so we took dozens and dozens of trips with the wheel barrow to move the soil.

This is the view from our bedroom upstairs.

And finally we were able to put in some plants and seeds into the beds.  I did my best to make an optimal companion planting plan so each plant would do as best as it could!  For the most part, that was true.  However, we did run into some soil deficiencies, such as calcium, and we did have some crops that just didn't take very well (like lavender!).

These zucchini plants produced an insane amount of fruit.

Here you can see a few weeks into our season, the garden was filling out.  Also, we got a super late start on the season because of septic work, etc.  It should be a nice treat to garden right after the last frost this year!