2023 Garden Recap Part 2

 

In Part One of my 2023 garden retrospective, I talked about planning, outlining, digging, and then prepping the beds for the new cutting garden. That was in January/February. By April, the soil had been amended multiple times, and the farm was starting to well and truly come alive for spring.

Green grass, green leaves. 

Iris and shrub roses in full bloom. 

The next step in the process was to get three of the six beds ready for planting dahlia tubers, and that began with driving in the T-posts. 

When the horses first came home to the farm, the perimeter fences were all board, but a lot of temporary fencing on the interior of the driveway had to be put up in a hurry, and that was done with T-posts and electrified tape fencing. Eventually, we got board fence up on every pasture, and pulled the T-posts up and stored them as we went. One of the chief rules of farming: don't throw things away! Over the years, the T-posts have come in handy for all sorts of tasks, even if using the hammer to drive them into the ground is a special kind of torture - if you know, you know. 

We set up the posts at intervals along the edges of the beds, and then used bird netting on the exterior to keep the dog from digging in them. *sigh* You can't ever forget to factor in Strider.

This would have been the time to set up the supportive netting, but alas, we didn't have it ordered yet. 

Next came the landscape fabric, to act as a weed barrier and a means of keeping all the freshly amended soil from eroding in the spring rains. 

Then, it was time to plant the tubers. 

The tubers themselves were ordered and purchased in the months leading up to the last frost date - April 15th here. A mix of locally-bought tubers from the hardware store, and some ordered from Eden Brothers and Breck's Bulbs. Since this was our first time planting dahlias, we wanted to make sure we had some of the trendy staples - like Jowey Nicky and Cafe au Lait - and then filled in with some more economical, but beautiful varieties from Lowes. 

We cut holes in the fabric, buried the tubers horizontally, eyes up, and labeled each carefully, in the ground and on paper. Then, it was time to wait and see what germinated. 

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. 

 

July in the Garden

Dahlia Cafe au Lait 

July in Georgia is best described as hot. Grass-killing, breath-stealing, flower-wilting, wring-out-your-socks hot. It's oppressively humid, you could fry an egg on the hood of your truck, and the chitter and drone of the cicadas is so loud you have to shout through every outdoor conversation to be heard over them. That's nothing new, though. Welcome to summer in the South. I'm grateful we got all the way to July before the air started to boil and am dreaming now of fall and all its splendor. 

The heat - and the dry spell; please rain! - make for early mornings and late nights, juggling plant and animal schedules in an effort to keep everyone and everything cool and watered. I tend to squeeze in a little blogging time right after breakfast, write during Strider's late afternoon nap, and spend the rest of the day doing farm stuff. 

Spoof (red and white) and Lily (chocolate and white)

I mentioned on Instagram that one of my minis, Spoof, gave me a bit of a health scare a couple weeks ago. Thanks to some electrolytes and Cushings disease meds, he's feeling much better. All three of my geriatric equines have metabolic issues, which makes rich summer grass a challenge. Spoof is missing quite a few teeth, so for him it was a med issue rather than a dietary one. He's so skinny! Which makes me sad. But it's best for now. Hopefully as the weather cools, and once his system is more balanced, I can up his feed a little and beef him up for winter. 

The flowers, though, thanks to manure, Miracle Grow, and judicious watering, are in general pretty happy. It's been exciting to watch the cutting garden go from an idea, to a dig site, to now a daily, fresh-cut bouquet. 

Dahlia Sweet Nathalie 

The dahlias have been the undoubted stars for me. I'm using my Instagram (@hppress) to document the different varieties so I know what to expect for next year. The zinnias have been gorgeous, and a huge hit with butterflies and bees. This was the first year growing sunflowers, and while they didn't come is as thickly as wanted, the bees are all over them, and they add a very charming, cottagey touch to that side of the house. 

I'm also growing pumpkins, and we've started putting up a T-post and cattle panel trellis to help them grow upward rather than across the ground. I've got ornamentals, including gourds from down at the barn, along with a cantaloupe and watermelon.

While there's still some finishing work to be done, as well as an exterior skirt to keep the hens and predators from digging, the chicken run is done! The chickens now have a nice roomy outdoor space where they can run, fly, and scratch around. They seem pretty happy about it. 

Sunflowers

Accidental manure pile gourds 

Zinnia Benary's Giant Enchantress 

Dahlia Mystery Day 

Velvet Queen sunflower 

Tomatoes like crazy 

Happy hen 

Swallowtail butterflies in the zinnias 

Dew-drenched dahlias (Linda's Baby)

Start of the pumpkin trellis (feat. Strider)

Baby watermelon 

Thanks for walking through the garden with me! I hope you're keeping cool, wherever you are. 

July also marks the release of part one of Lord Have Mercy! The all-new Dartmoor book ten starring Mercy, Ava, and their extended Lean Dog family. You can find out more about it here. 

Happy weekend, everyone. 

 

Garden Update

 A few weeks ago, I blogged about the new cutting garden that my mom and I are putting in on the farm this year, and we’d just planted 70+ dahlia tubers. It’s been a busy span of time since. 

Most of the dahlias are either fully up, and have been pinched back to promote branching and more flowering later in the season, or are showing at least a few signs of life. We had a few duds, to be expected, but just a few so far. Dahlia can be finicky - it's time to put out slug bait, for instance - so I'm hoping or mild-so-far Georgia temps will get them started well. Right now, the three dahlia bed are encircled by bird netting to keep Strider out of them  - ha! - but soon we'll put up the supportive netting in layers that will allow the stems to grow tall without flopping over in the wind and rain. 

We set up some of it today on the other three beds, where this week we planted peonies, and sowed sunflower and zinnia seeds - also to keep Strider out. He's a garden criminal. 

Next to the cutting garden is my little veggie garden, which has become something of an obsession for me over the past two years. This year, I went tomato-heavy, with lots of heirloom varieties, some new, from seed packets, and some from seeds I collected, dried, and saved from last year's harvest. All are up, thriving, and either in bloom or about to bloom. I've even got a few baby tomatoes on the stems. 

A new addition is the chicken house, delivered this week and installed at the back of the cutting garden, against the big pasture fence. Once it's retrofitted, and equipped with an outdoor run, it will be the new home of the six buff Orpington pullets currently living in temporary digs in the garage. There's nothing like buying chicken before you have a place to house them. 

I try to post weekly, if not daily garden updates in my Instagram stories (@hppress), so you can follow along there for more details and tomato closeups, lol. It's also where I post my "walks" through the cottage garden around the house. I'm big into bloom portraits. 

I'm hoping the next few months yield lots of color and spectacle from all that's been planted so far, so I'll be back with more progress photos and hopefully a lovely bouquet or two.