raised garden bed and sheet mulch

We built this raised garden bed with free wood from Craigslist!  I wanted a raised bed so that we could plant  more frequently harvested garden veggies like lettuce closer to the house and so we could easily put season extending hoops with a clear plastic sheet creating mini greenhouses in the spring and fall.

AND.  We filled the raised bed with sheet mulch - cardboard, manure, and wood chips (all of which we can source for free).  The layers should decompose over the winter and worms and other bugs should churn it up so that by the spring we have an excellent soil to plant in.  Here's a step by step:

Lay down a thin layer of manure.



Be sure to water each layer as you go.



Layout the cardboard.  Cover any exposed seams with newspaper.



Add some more manure.


Add a whole lot of wood chips.


We covered the top with leaves just because.

garden-work

Here's what our garden looks like these days. Some notes:

• Lots of calendula flowers. There were lots of self-seeded volunteer calendula sprouts since we didn't dead head that much.
• Lots of volunteer sunflowers as well. We kept two, one of which is the tallest plant in the whole community garden!
• Our onions (from sets planted in spring) seem to be doing really well. They all bloomed, which is less desirable since it makes the onions worse for storing. The flowers taste pretty good though.
• The sage and oregano are both doing really well.
• We are continually harvesting lots of lettuce and arugula.
• The chamomile is recovering quite nicely.
• Tomatoes are doing better after feeding them Foxfarm "Grow Big."
• Peas are doing well. Not really climbing their structure as much as we'd hoped. We cut them back a bit to make room for beans.
• We've been letting purslane grow as a live mulch and beneficial companion plant.

Here's a recent harvest:

perennial gifts

A fellow community gardener gave us some of her perennials—a gift that keeps on giving! As part of our end-of-season tasks, we cut them back and are drying them:

Chocolate Mint


Hyssop


And we're also drying coriander:

bringing in the tomatoes

We've started bringing in the tomatoes. For the record, the Amana Orange have been doing the best, although they have been cracking. Still delicious though! I'm a little disappointed in our four Roma plants--how do you get them to ripen all at once? I'm not sure if they are determinate or indeterminate...

garden defender

I've seen several grasshoppers on our chard as well as potato beetles on our tomato plants. I remember hearing somewhere that praying mantids are good for eating garden pests such as these, so when I saw a mantis on a bike rack, I gently transported it to our garden to hopefully eat some of those baddies.

hail storm

There was a big hail storm yesterday. At first I was worried about our tomatoes. It turned out that all the large tomatoes were fine, but a bunch of the still-green pear and cherry tomatoes got knocked off their vines. We'll have to pickle them or something. The real damage was to the chard, as you can see above. This compelled me to harvest much of the chard: a total of 5 lbs.

This much chard fills up our 16 quart pot. I'm getting pretty good at quickly blanching and freezing large amounts of chard:

1. Rinse a large handful in a large bowl or bucket.
2. Chop with knife.
3. Put in pot with a few inches of water.
4. Steam until soft, stirring often.
5. Rinse in cold water.
6. Put in freezer bags (in sheets for breaking later)

what is a weed anyway?

Ralph Waldo Emerson says a weed is a "plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered." In weeding our garden, there's just a handful of unwanted plants that I keep recognizing. One is purslane, a succulent edible that you often see growing in sidewalk cracks. I've also seen it featured in salads in fancy restaurants. Here it is growing out the side of our raised bed:

...that's probably a $20 salad right there.

So I've been leaving it in the garden if it isn't crowding other plants too badly. I just learned from Wikipedia that:

As a companion plant, Purslane provides ground cover to create a humid microclimate for nearby plants, stabilizing ground moisture. Its deep roots bring up moisture and nutrients that those plants can use, and some, including corn, will "follow" purslane roots down through harder soil than they can penetrate on their own. It is known as a beneficial weed in places that don't already grow it as a crop in its own right.

Another common weed in our garden and around town is mallow (malva neglecta):
I'm not sure if it is a beneficial companion like purslane, but it is a demulcent, so I've been picking it to make into a mucilaginous tea, which was nice when I had a sore throat recently (it's also an ingredient in the Ricola cough drops I bought recently).

chard au gratin

Our community garden newsletter had a recipe for this chard au gratin. It involved two pounds of chard, a béchamel sauce, goat cheese, and garlic-dill bread crumbs. Such creamy goodness!

warm crop transition

As we've mentioned, we've been harvesting a lot of arugula, lettuce, and radishes. I think it turned out to be pretty good timing; the arugula was bolting and the radishes were beginning to get pithy--just in time for warm crops to be planted. We planted 10 tomato plants (4x Roma, 2x yellow pear, 2x Amana Orange, 1x Czech, 1x mystery) with water walls for cold/hail protection.

lessons learned for the spring crops:

-if seeds don't sprout when you expext they should, don't hesitate to replant
-using row cover seemed to help get seeds started in colder weather
-carrying jugs of water 2 blocks to the garden before water is turned on is a pain but worthwhile in getting spring plants established
-don't plant crazy amounts of arugula! plant more spinach instead
-bush sugar snap peas are growing better for us than the pole/climber version
-chinese rose winter radishes grew way too much foliage; plant more globe radishes next year (though the globe radishes had a low germination rate)

jardin esplodin

Our garden has been exploding in the past week. I've harvested two bunches of arugula and one of oak leaf lettuce, which is so delicious!

But the thing that looks the most monstrous in the garden is our radishes ("Chinese Rose Winter")--on the left in the photo. I'm a little disappointed that even though the leaves are at least twice the size of the regular "Early Scarlet Globe Radishes" (on the right), the roots are the same size or smaller. I know, the greens are edible, but not as enjoyable. Next year, I think I'll skip the Chinese Rose Winter radishes.

Left: Chinese Rose Winter; Right: Early Scarlet Globe

drip irrigation

We got drip irrigation system in, just in time for days and days of rain! We're using branches of drip-a-long (6" spaced holes) coming off of a 1/2" diameter main line. For our 100 sf, we spent under $100, including timer, pressure regulator, brass splitter, connections, and tubing (some I found in a freepile!). These compression fittings are pretty nice compared with the barb and hose-clamp type.

By the way, watch out for Gilmour brass splitters. I was about to buy one because it was the only one that was all-metal including the valves, but then read on the package that it contains lead--and to wash your hands after handling--yikes. So I went with an almost-all-metal one instead.

Also, we harvested our first radish....yesssss!

planting

This past weekend we got our garden plot started. We started by loosening the soil using the double-dig method. We then amended the soil with the three bags (~9 cu. ft.) of compost that we picked up the previous weekend. Finally, we planted seeds for peas, radishes, arugula, lettuce, spinach, rainbow chard, broccoli, and mesclun (lettuce mix). In addition to all of those fresh plantings, we inherited a strawberry patch and a few onions in our plot! Thank you previous gardeners!

To get ready for summer planting, we started seeds indoors for tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, tomatillos, broccoli, basil, and other herbs.

Since we are new to gardening in the ground, we've needed to find good information from websites and books. The Boulder Culinary Gardeners' website has an excellent Boulder/Denver planting guide. We have read a few different gardening books as well, including How to Grow More Vegetables and Square Foot Gardening. I like the detail and explanations in How to Grow More Vegetables. What's your favorite gardening book or resource?