The Main Fruit and Vegetable Garden

 Over the years Mona and I have tried a variety of gardening methods, yet the garden areas often suffer from neglect. We start the season well, plant lots of vegetables, but can’t keep up with the maintenance, and by the end of the season it is a disaster. Towards the end of the summer of 2023, we decided to turn things around. Here are a few ‘before’ pictures.

September 29, 2023….the ‘path’ to the greenhouse. This is after we have taken the plastic off the greenhouse at the end of the season. Believe it or not, there is a strawberry pallet garden along the left side, and a keyhole garden on the upper right where the beans are. Yes, those are beans, and yes, that is a pathway to a greenhouse. (I will need to post more blog entries to prove that)

The next picture, taken around the same time, is the southeast corner of the garden. The clean bed on the left, is the garlic bed, with a brussel sprout plant still growing. After harvesting the garlic, I always replenish the soil with sifted soil from other parts of the garden, and cover it with cardboard so by the time we replant the garlic, around the third week of October, there aren’t a lot of weeds. I tend to practice soil rotation rather than crop rotation.

The large masses of weeds, centre right, are actually bedding boxes. The one closer to the front is squash and zucchini; the one towards the top is a garden bed that was left fallow for a couple of years and gathered junk. I used it, temporarily (ish) to stash irrigation piping, tomato cages and other gardening stuff. Not shown in this picture, between the garlic bed and the fence, are two strawberry beds made out of tires. 2023 was a terrible year for strawberries and at the end of the season I replaced the tire beds with two new beds; built some other beds and put the fallow beds back into service. Part of the solution to the maintenance problems is to make the garden bigger. Go big or go home. I am not really sure that is sound logic.

A bunch of weed whacking, and some repair/replacement and it starts to show improvement. But don’t kid yourself, the weeds will come back; they always do.

This year I fixed up an old lawn mower and can now mow most of the lawn area around the garden beds. There is immediate improvement in the overall look of the garden. It is amazing how much better a yard looks right after the lawn has been mowed.

The photo below (June 29, 2024) shows an improvement in the area. The garlic bed, left of the wheelbarrow is in fine shape. There are strawberry beds to the right of, and behind the wheelbarrow. The bed at the centre of the picture is squash and zucchini  and there is a pea and bean bed, full of stakes, at the back. The fence line still needs to be cleaned up, but the area looks much better than a year ago, and is being maintained more often with less effort.

 

The next photo, also June 29, shows the path to the greenhouse. Although it is much improved over last year, and it is being maintained better, there are still a few challenges. Currently it is strawberry season, and the strawberries, as always, are encroaching on the path. Last year, after cleaning things up, and building more beds, I vowed to mow the path, regardless of the strawberries. Well here we are a year later and no, I am not mowing the strawberries down. At least not until after the strawberry harvest. As I edit this, July 6, strawberry season has begun and our strawberries are beautiful.

After the harvest I would like to clean out the pallet garden and redo it with fresh soil, and new strawberry plants. (That’s one of those hope to do items that sometimes come to fruition and sometimes not.) Finding new plants is easy. They’re everywhere. Plus, as I hope to show in a later blog, we have an amazing nursery system for growing beautiful strawberry runners.

The keyhole garden, centre right, is planted with onions. The left-ish half we planted from a package of about 80 bulbs of mixed types of onions; the right-ish half with walla walla starts. The bulbs seem to be growing better.

July 6: A bowl full of strawberries picked this morning.