Mid-summer plantings

The front perennial beds and the raised beds with herbs and vegetables are looking great.  It's so nice to have the front of the house softened by green, a welcome change from its previous mulched condition (see below).

early July, 2011

Here's a photo of our new gardening assistant looking out the door!

when there was just mulch (not to mention the gravel driveway, now covered with mulch and raised beds)

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Stone raised beds

Raised beds can be edged with landscape timbers, wood boards, concrete blocks, old railroad ties, brick, stone of various sorts, or nothing at all (just mounded up).

But we opted for permanence and appearance in these new beds, converted from empty 'driveway' space to growing space for vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

It was a process, but not actually all that difficult, although physically taxing (I knew I should have been spending more time lifting weights this winter!)

The sequence is hard to make accurate, as arranging images in Blogger can be quite exasperating -- but maybe I've fixed them with draft Blogger.

Hopefully, you'll get the idea.

Mocha (our gardening assistant) enjoys supervising.

And I'll have plenty of lovely 'top soil' created from vegetable compost and composted manure to nourish our summer vegetables.

We have more than enough stones (and 'soil') to create two more beds below the house.

That'll be a project for another weekend.

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Raised beds for vegetables

We'll be building new beds this weekend on some unused driveway space up in the mountains.

I know I'll be a happier gardener to be tending more vegetables and herbs, away from my main spaces, which will benefit from a break, especially the main vegetable garden, which needs to be fallow, to reduce root-knot nematodes.

But there are gardening activities here to be done, too. The major task is freeing many mulched beds from their cloak of (weedy) winter annuals. Uh, and my gardening companion has yet to get the lawn mower out; I'm not a lawn person, but what's out there is getting pretty sizeable. He's had other distractions, certainly, but hopefully he'll crank up the riding mower soon.

I'm afraid I've only mowed a lawn a couple of times in my gardening life, and that with a push gasoline-powered mower back in Statesboro, GA in our first house and garden, in the last summer there, after my gardening companion (AKA my husband Tim) had already relocated to Clemson, SC.

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Planning for raised bed vegetables

Looking towards summer, I'm planning what will go in our new raised beds in the mountains.

They're yet to be built, but we've scouted out the right sort of stone, that will be easy (for me as well as my gardening companion) to stack, and we'll get to work next weekend.

Quite handsome large stone blocks, of hefty proportions, were available, and would have made seriously sturdy raised beds, but I could barely lift one stone (I think they weighed about 50 lbs. each), so I'm hardly going to be able to help build that sort of wall. I'm not gifted in the strong shoulders and arms department, but I have built a number of nice retaining walls and an excellent front path, so I do want to be part of this endeavor.

I spent some enjoyable time plotting out the beds -- basically they'll be four long beds, two horizontal and two perpendicular to the house, on what's currently unused 'driveway.'

It'll hopefully be fairly easy to lay out; there's gravel below the mulch on the 'driveway' -- so we'll dig down to prepare footings, put in a bit of builder's sand, and build the stone walls (at about 14 inches).

These beds will be devoted to summer vegetables and herbs: tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, and basil.

The main vegetable garden in the Piedmont will be fallow this summer to reduce root-knot nematodes there. And the satellite vegetable garden, after the garlic and onions are harvested, will be devoted to winter squash, and cool season vegetables in the fall.

I've also just ordered some tough asparagus crowns (all male UC 157) to put in, to join the 'from seed' plants that I grew last year. (They struggled through the tough winter, so I'm thinking they need some reinforcements!)

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Preparing garden beds

Now there are lots of camellia flowers out the kitchen window.

A couple of years ago, I set up what I call the 'satellite' garden.

Originally meant as an experimental (uh, I'm not really expanding my beds, I said to myself) sort of plot, I decided to incorporate them into permanent beds to expand my (rudimentary) rotation scheme. Also, as the holly hedge near my main vegetable garden has gotten larger, my main vegetable garden is even more shaded in the winter than it used to be. It's a great summer plot, OK in fall, but only gets several hours of sun in the late afternoon, even now, in early March.

So, to have a sunnier space for late winter and early spring crops, my satellite garden is great. Last spring, a hungry young woodchuck was a nemesis, and was relocated, but a relative has now appeared, and I'm determined to find a better place for him/her (the Havahart trap is set).

The unseasonably mild weather has made preparing beds for carrots, beets, chard, and potatoes (as well as preparing warm-season beds) a joy. What fun to be able to be out there digging in early March!

Since this is the second year of serious cultivation for most of these beds, they still have lots of clayey soil, so more compost, composted manure, and mushroom compost is needed. I'd limed all the beds in the fall (our soil is quite acidic), so hopefully, that will help, too. I'm afraid this is all very unscientific (not recommended) and I DO need to do a soil test.

But the beds are looking quite nice, and are ready to plant.

And seedlings are popping up in my flats and containers. Hooray!

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Main vegetable garden

In the raised bed garden that's the 'main vegetable garden,' I try to practice intensive raised-bed gardening, loosely based on the square-foot method. I'm afraid I'm not methodical enough to be precise about planting -- frankly, I like to play with my garden, but I do try to rotate vegetables as I can.

We eat as much as we can from the garden, but having it look nice is important, too. The garden is right out the kitchen door, so I think about it as a perennial vegetable/flower bed, even if it's made up of annuals. I want it to be pleasing throughout the year. Rotating out plants, reseeding, and routinely adding more compost and amendments; all of these things are part of my gardening year.

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