2023 Garden Recap Part One

2023 had its ups and downs: death in the family, death on the farm; some long days, and not nearly enough words written for my liking. But one of the bright spots was the garden - which was, incidentally, the cause of so many of those long days, but well worth the effort. 

Gardening has always been one of my mom's passions, and though I resisted in my teenage years, I finally began to understand the therapeutic aspects, as well as the simple joys and satisfactions of it, once I became an adult. The farm had sat empty and allowed to grow unkempt and derelict before we moved in back in 2006, and transforming the blank canvas of the yard into a cottage garden has been a long, slow process. This year, we decided to try our hands at a cutting garden. 

Work began last January breaking ground on a blank patch of yard between the side of the house and the pasture fence. My veggie garden - seen inside the white picket fence in the pics below - was over there, but it was an otherwise root-filled, dusty stretch of nothing. 

Here ↓ you can see the first of the six new beds we put in last winter, and the patchy, rock-strewn ground around it. 

The veggie garden has raised beds, built of untreated lumber, which works great for a small area, and means that compost and soil can be dumped in without any need to dig into the rocky, red clay earth below. But that approach didn't make economic sense given the dimensions of the cutting garden beds. We had the space, we had the tools, we had more than enough compost to amend the soil, and labor is free around here. 

Step one was mapping out the bed placement, and then using landscape bricks, string, and spray paint to draw the edges. 

Then there was nothing left to do but dig. And dig...and dig some more.

Each of the six beds is lined with landscape bricks, and each is a different length in order to avoid the diagonal slant of the water line that runs from the well to the house. Of the two pictured above, I used the smallest on the right for cosmos last year, and the one on the left for zinnias. 

Some of the grass in the planned bed spaces was the much-coveted centipede we're trying to cultivate across the whole of the yard (it doesn't get tall, and makes for a good, non-invasive ground cover, unlike bermuda) so it was lifted in sod plugs and transplanted along the edges of what would become the new gravel bed. 

In this pic, you can see beyond the table toward the fence where the chicken house would eventually go. 

To avoid the hassle and expense of renting a sod cutter for this job, all the digging, lifting, and transplanting was done by hand. 

Once the beds were all in place and lined with bricks, it was time to amend the soil. It was March by this point, and Strider and I made many, many trips out into the pasture to dig and cart the old, black-gold horse manure from the back of the pile. Each bed was heaped with composted manure and thoroughly turned several times to add much needed nutrition to the soil. 

 

By March, Cosmo's pink dogwood tree was blooming, and just a few weeks later, the chicken house arrived and was set down in the blank patch just beyond it. In this year's pics of the blooms, there'll be chickens in the background. 

Next up: planting seeds and tubers.