A little background: My husband and I moved to USDA zone 8, in the Pacific Northwest, about two years ago. Up until now, I've lived in zone 10 climates and have mostly been a container herb gardener, but now I'm branching out into veggies, fruit, and a cutting garden-- while the existing ornamental beds go neglected ;-)
My current project: digging deep beds for my first vegetable garden.
It took four days to clear out this 15' x 20' patch of sod and weeds because I was more meticulous than I should have been. But my hand tool collection is pretty limited, so simply tilling things under wasn't really an alternative. The remaining patch of green is rhubarb, which came with the house and is staying in place until I divide it in the spring.
After clearing the sod, it was on to digging deep beds. Deep beds allow you to plant more densely than you would with a conventional bed, and since my patch is a bit small for my vast ambitions, space is a major concern.
How to dig a deep bed: first, you dig a trench one foot deep, then fork down another foot (loosening the soil without disturbing the soil strata too much). After that, you add a layer of compost, mix it with the loose layer of soil, then fill the hole back in with the removed topsoil and more compost. Each row of beds is taking me about a day to complete.
The local soil is a kind of sandy loam; the substrata is yellow, sandy clay. Yay Washington. Even though the soil is pretty nice to start with, I'm amending each trench with about six inches of organic matter (compost, manure, etc) to give my seedlings plenty of nutrients.
I still have one more bed to dig. Will be going out to do that as soon as I've posted this!
Clockwise from top left: buttercrunch lettuce plug tray and snow peas in cups; arugula and mizuna in trays; Roma and Brandywine tomato seedlings in cups; Quinalt everbearing strawberries in 4" pots and hollyhocks in cups.
These are about half of the reasons why those beds must be dug-- and soon! Most of them have been hardening off since the day before yesterday in preparation for going into the soil. It may be too late for the snow peas, greens, and lettuce (they should have gone out early last month), but I'm going to put them out in a shady spot and see how it goes.
2 comments:
wow, your garden is making some progress! love all the stuff you bought to plant. i don't think i've heard of the Brandywine tomatoes - i'll have to keep an eye out for them the next time i'm at the farmer's market!
Hi sillyduckie! Brandywines are large and flavorful-- the seeds came from a plant I bought two years ago (it's an heirloom variety, so it should come up true). Now I just have to cross my fingers that we have a long enough season for the little guys to set fruit!
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