Planting, Trellising, Mulching and Sowing!

     

As the temperatures warmed the peas broke through the compost layers and reached forward to sunnier days and warmer nights.

I spent a couple hours constructing a small cold frame using some found materials so I could get my seedlings out of the basement. The results were great until I had a few casualties due to a very early morning heading out to work when the temps were still below 40... by the time I got home later that day it was 80+ and the temp in the cold frame soared to 115. 

We also got a last minute appointment with a local arborist friend to come by and limb up the maples and oaks around the homestead that were long overdue for it and also had a few trouble spots that quickly got remedied. He always enjoys limbing, especially when I tell him to just leave the branches where they lay and I'll take it from here. Though it always translates into a much bigger mess than I anticipate. My general course of action is to go in with a big pair of lopers and clear out all the leaf bearing branches and start 4 piles. Green Branches/ Long Straights/ Short Straights and Firewood. This time I also made a point to set aside a dozen mushrooom growing sized logs as well!

Maple logs are ready for their mushroom inoculation!

(more on that process in a future post!)

 

Germination !

Hazel has been a great garden helper this year at age 3 and a half... her favorite garden projects are watering the thirsty plant and you may have guessed, DIGGIN BLACKBERRIES!

Everyday like clockwork Ive been hitting the trench with Hazel and our shovels, digging up the numerous blackberry shoots that pop up daily. Eventually I will either cover all this area with tarps to smother the remains or sheet mulch with cardboard and woodchips to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

Did someone say mulch? We got a drop from the local garden supply that gets their mulch from a local lumber mill and this one was hemlock which is completely natural and has some pest resistant oils that is a bonus for using around the perimeter of our raised beds. 

The process is pretty simple, make a woven layer of cardboard, make sure you remove all stickers and tape, I use some that have limited ink on them but not sure its all that big of a deal especially because Im mainly using this process in the pathways of my raised beds and to smother overgrowth. Anyhow, use a hose and wet the cardboard thoroughly and then apply 2-3" of mulch on top! 

I also used a hand edger and carved a nice trench with a shovel to delineate the line of grass and mulch that hopefully that will minimize the weeding in our growing space. 

Don't forget to make the homestead a little more homey with a fresh mulch on the front rock beds we constructed a few years ago too!

First section complete... now on to edging around the tomato bed and smaller flower beds.

Sugar snap peas are climbing, lettuce is getting harvested by the leaf, onion, kale, cabbage, various peppers, eggplant, beets, chard, pickling cukes, nasturtiums, corn and chard in these beds.

Three varieties of beans, osaka greens radish and carrots in this bed.

In the foreground is our potato tower that is sprouting with Adirondack Blues and Green Mountain taters followed by the added half moon bed thats planted with two types of cukes, sugarbaby watermelon, some strawberry transplants and marigolds.

I found the tomato bed to be successful but really only the left side receives enough full sun to ripen tomatoes to a suitable sizing, therefore I transitioned the right side into a salad bed where I spread various leftover seeds including multiple varietals of arugula, watercress and various lettuces along with cilantro and parsley! This section will get planted every 2-3 weeks and hopefully that will provide us with our daily salad provisions throughout the growing season.

Loving the organic curves of the beds as they lure me in and invite me to weed and pay even more attention than typical.

 Overall Im very excited and motivated to continue pushing the homestead into the next chapter and really harnessing the useful space by smothering the negligence of past seasons and enriching the productivity and potential of the rest of the land before us. 

Ladyslippers where in high production this year, usually I count 5-8 around the homestead, on one occasion this May I counted 14!

Stay tuned for a Mushroom Log Inoculation post as we wrap up this week

Raising Beds and Planting Heirlooms.

So after a long winter of contemplating what went right and what needed improvement with the first growing season at the Localrootz Homestead, a glaring issue was where to plant our tomatoes.  Last year I made the mistake with planting the 10-15 tomatoes plants in the middle bed of the the raised bed trio, using classic tomato cages and and a makeshift trellis system of wooden stakes and twine. After a few big thunderstorms it turned into such a mess and the placement of the tomatoes lead to a lot of shade space that kept some of our plantings from being as productive as we had hoped them to be.

In comes this springs project of building a separate bed altogether. The first step was dropping a couple of maple trees that were shading the new location as I wrote about in a previous post. After that I spent a couple weeks taking a little time every morning before work to cut back the brush around the location of the new bed. Once things were under control I flagged out a couple 2 1/2' x 20' sections and contemplated my next step. 

We had good luck last year building up the depth of the beds to 24" or more and had no issues with the suppressed underbrush growing up through the compost layer.  I chose to roll the dice and forgo the pricey and unnatural layer of weedblocker on this project. Instead I started with overlapping layers of cardboard as a base layer for the construction.

On top of that I started piling up a couple weeks worth of lawn trimmings.

As the layout came together I started sourcing some good lengths of blow down timbers from the surrounding woods, which with a little bit of searching always proves a simple task.  After felling a large rotting birch tree a few hundred yards from the new raised bed site, I did however have to call in a helping hand to maneuver what proved to be a pretty hefty piece of lumber.

As the framework started taking form with timbers and grass clippings I also started included some layers of shredded leaves from an afternoon mowing session along the surrounding forest. This provided ample volumes that made spreading 6-12" of mulch and clippings a pretty easy task.

As the layers increased I added more timbers till I was around 18-24" high.

It took some grunt work but in the end I was pretty happy with the framework and now it was time to uncover the compost bin and see if I had enough left from last year to fill the new bed.

My makeshift winter storage bin worked great for easy access to the black gold as I spent a good portion of the day shoveling it into the wheelbarrow and then spreading it amongst the raised beds. 

With the compost I piled on another 8-12" on top of the base layer of clippings and mulch until I made my way around the U-Bed and had a good base of 18-24" of growing matter in which to plant into !

A few tips on grunt work... having a shovel at each end of the project makes life much easier not having to hold the shovel while pushing the load, its those little things that make a afternoon of lugging load after load a little more manageable. Another trick to the timber frame raised beds is to use pieces of bark to block the inevitable gaps between the timbers keeping the precious compost inside the bed.  Luckily I had ample pieces that I collected while splitting our firewood last fall so I was well prepared to get this project finished to completion ! 

The final length of the beds ended up around 17ft long and I was able to transplant 30 heirloom tomato plants as well as a smattering of basil and marigolds to help ward of some woodland nibblers as I do not have a fence in place at the moment.

With 10 different heirloom varieties Im hoping all goes well and we should have ample tomatoes coming our way this summer as the season of juicy ripe homegrown tomatoes grows closer and closer.

Valencia, Black Prince, Black Krim, Big Beef, Sungolds, Amish Paste, Speckled Roman, Red Zebra, Black Chocolate, Muskovich.

In the next week or two I should have the trellis system Ive been scheming out in my head and on some scraps of paper completed. The goal is to keep things neat and tidy this year and use the old tomato cages from last year for my pepper plants this season ! The plan is to run a center bar down the middle of the two beds and by attaching twine from the center bar to some eye hooks sank into the top outer edge of the timbers. I can then train the vines up the twine and it will create a nice canopy of tomatoes that I can access from the outside and inside edge of the bed. More on that as the tomatoes get used to their new home and I rinse the nutrient drenched soil from my well worked hands.