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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: March 19 2012 at 7:52am | IP Logged
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I just started a thread on soil and a new gardening film Back to Eden.
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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Grace&Chaos
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| Posted: April 17 2012 at 6:32pm | IP Logged
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How are the potagers growing ladies? You've inspired me! Our little spring nature study garden area has officialy become my kitchen garden (don't think my dh and kids can handle potager yet   ) and is sprouting nicely. My husband says I've completely imprisioned my plants: I baracaded as much as I could without it looking to ugly. This is an effort to keep night friends out. I dug a few feet first and laid chicken wire for the burrowing friends, then covered the areas with soil. I was also worried that I planted right into the ground but so far our snap peas are taking off, our long beans have sprouted as have our cucumbers and carrots. My mom even started a chayote plant for me, which I already put in our garden. Our cherry tomato plant from last year is looking healthier along with the undestructable oregano from two years ago! I even planted the bottom of a bok choy and celerey stalk. They both have little leaves coming out of it. My marigolds are showing but no luck with my other edible plants like the lavendar, thyme, rosemary, and some alyssum for color.
I keep reading about small gardens and really would love to see a part of our hill, currently overrun by weeds, become a nice size potager with a few raised beds. I just ran into this post by Susan Branch and I just keep wooing the space/look.
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Jenny
Mom to dds(00,03) and dss(05,06,08,09)
Grace in Loving Chaos
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: April 18 2012 at 8:06am | IP Logged
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I'm so glad you were inspired, Jenny! You might look into some of the no-till methods of gardening, especially Ruth Stout, as you go forward. There is a video of her on You Tube that is short but very entertaining, imo. She was a rather disorderly but successful gardener and free spirit.
That post by Susan Branch is inspiring! It is nice how she shows the progression over the years, too, to remember that it took her a few years to end up with it!
I really hope I can blog a bit about our garden progress soon and share pictures. My husband took off all of Holy Week to work on getting the bulk of the beds in. We're making progress, though, there is little that is living in the garden as of yet . I do have lettuces out, and though I was a bit late, the peas are emerging, so I'm hoping for at least a small late harvest even if I can't take advantage of the full season.
I think I'm too late to have sweet peas this year  . We just didn't have the beds ready in time.
Fortunately, it is supposed to rain FINALLY this weekend and into next week. We desperately need rain and are in a sever drought. Great year to start a garden, huh? Though, the weather has made it easier to do the mechanical stuff (like putting in the fence and beds) that comes first. If the weather were like last year, there would have been zero chance for any Spring crops at all!
As it is, I do have Asparagus and Rhubarb in the ground as well as potatoes, peas, lettuces, and a few cabbages, cauliflower, and broccoli. I am just seeing my beets, radishes, chard, scallions, and carrots emerge (hopefully more will--this heat and dryness is AWFUL for germination, so hard to keep everything watered solely by hand!). I also got some onion starters and did a border with them. They are holding on okay in spite of the dry heat, but you can see they are suffering  . It just isn't right that delicate little seedlings should have to suffer 90 degree days and no rain!
I have some seedlings I started for some kale (late I know, but we'll see) tomatoes, peppers, basil, and my own cabbages, cauliflower, and broccoli. They aren't great, but I hope to put them out on Saturday while it is predicted to be a little rainy before the heavier rains (prayerfully) come on Sunday. I think this might give them a fighting chance.
Somehow, those same challenges in communication that happen in all marital projects have left me with full strawberry and summer veggie beds with nothing to go in them yet and empty herb beds with lots of plants and seeds stuck with no place to go , but I CANNOT complain because dh has done AMAZING work and was outside sun-up and into the wee hours Saturdays and holy week. We try to limit our work on Sundays to lighter things that we can enjoy together, and this does keep us further behind than we might otherwise be, but we still had fun laying out PVC to plan out our irrigation (dh even sampled some aged copper spray paint that we hope will be easier on the eye than white PVC). I lost a whole bed of lettuce seedlings a few weeks ago, and though it is unusually dry, it made us realize we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we don't take the extra effort to irrigate with such a large garden, especially since we didn't add vermiculite to the beds due to cost. Even so, we might find we need to amend next year.
It is a joy, but it is a TON of work. I can't believe how long our Fall to do list is already
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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JennGM
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| Posted: April 18 2012 at 9:14am | IP Logged
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I'm still not at the Potager stage...I'm more like Jenny. We added a 5th box, Square Foot Gardening style. I'd love to have a picket fence, but our HOA barely allows what we have. You should see my neighbor's boxes. He finally copied us...to a point. He made these massive cedar boxes. They are a work of art!
Nothing is in. I was going to add the soil this week sometime. We have light rain today...dry here, too. And rain possibly this weekend. With our new baseball player here, less time to garden. We travel too much in the fall to keep up fall plants. I also find we barely have spring here. It starts cold and then it's hot so fast, so the spring spinach and lettuce are never successful for me.
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Jennifer G. Miller
Wife to  & ds1  '03 & ds2  '07
Family in Feast and Feria
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Grace&Chaos
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| Posted: April 18 2012 at 10:39am | IP Logged
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Jenn, it's funny you mention travel time and the need for rain/water. This is a concern for when we actually have raised beds in the area we want them. It might take dh a while to put in an irrigation system at the top so I've been researching possibilities to aid in hand watering not to mention that we have very warm summers and so little rain. I found in the Urban Homestead site that Angela mentioned some information on using an Olla (clay pot) system for irrigation. It's sounds perfect and so simple 
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Jenny
Mom to dds(00,03) and dss(05,06,08,09)
Grace in Loving Chaos
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JodieLyn
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| Posted: April 25 2012 at 3:10pm | IP Logged
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I got my cold frame all put together and the plants that can handle it are OUT of my house. 
Still too cool for the tomatoes and peppers to go out but anything is helpful in recovering my table. 
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Jodie, wife to Dave
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stellamaris
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| Posted: April 28 2012 at 7:50am | IP Logged
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I'm so back and forth, I can't figure out how to do much vegetable gardening anywhere! But I did put in some more herbs in Delaware last weekend. I already had rosemary and chives, so I added sage, nasturtium, parsley, and a sweet cherry tomato that I hope makes it through the summer when I'm not there to water/weed very often. My raspberries are leafing out, so I think they will make it. I'm planning on transplanting some tarragon and thyme from our Virginia house.
In Virginia, I'll plant basil mid-May and probably also a few tomatoes and peppers.
Wish I were in one place to actually have a real garden!
All of your gardens sound so lovely!
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Caroline
Wife to  dh 30+ yrs,ds's 83,85,89,dd's 91,95,ds's 01,01,02,grammy to 4
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: April 30 2012 at 8:01am | IP Logged
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I keep meaning to come in and share some new books that I've really, really liked.
We are big Taunton Press fans, and Taunton's Complete Guide to Growing Vegetables and Herbs is excellent. It has gorgeous photos of kitchen gardens, and lots of useful instructions, step by step guides, etc..., including a growing guide arranged alphabetically.
Also, I picked up a copy of The Art of French Vegetable Gardening a few months ago after seeing it recommended but not in my library system. I was going to recommend it here is a bargain since I only paid $8 for it total, and now I see the lowest used price is $24 before shipping on Amazon! It is a beautiful and interesting book, so I highly recommend it, especially if you found it cheap or your library has it.
If I could only buy one of these, it would be the Taunton book. In fact, if I could own only one gardening book (perish the thought!), it would probably be the Taunton guide.
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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stefoodie
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| Posted: April 30 2012 at 3:48pm | IP Logged
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I planted out ~10 plants today -- flowers. The tomatoes, eggplants and peppers go in tomorrow. After that I've got 15 or so more plants that I'm waiting on to grow a bit more.
My 2 favorite books:
American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Gardening and The Complete Gardener by Monty Don
The French vegetable gardening book looks wonderful, Lindsay! Putting it on request at the library now. Hm. Maybe I'll request the Taunton book as well, since you recommend it so highly. Thanks!
Jenny, thanks for the info on travel/irrigation. I was just going to place an order for a garden timer at Amazon for when we travel this summer. I don't think I'll be buying ollas anytime soon, but ideas are forming....
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stef
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stefoodie
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| Posted: April 30 2012 at 3:53pm | IP Logged
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Here's an idea: Pop-Bottle Drip Irrigation
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stef
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Mackfam
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| Posted: May 03 2012 at 8:02pm | IP Logged
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JennGM wrote:
| I'm still not at the Potager stage...I'm more like Jenny. |
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I INSIST that we call our little kitchen gardens a *potager*, ladies! INSIST upon it! Never mind how modest your little potager may be!
Our own little potager is coming along quite nicely!
I have a 50 foot berry orchard planted with 3 blueberry bushes and 5 raspberry bushes. I have some free raspberries coming and I'm not sure where I'll put those yet. I covered the entire berry orchard with pine straw mulch and wood chips and then we edged it in oak 4" x 4" timbers. It's a very nice look.
My Lovell Peach tree will be here soon and I'm excited to get it planted and established.
And I'm getting some Highbush Cranberries (5 of them - they were a steal at $5 each) to plant across the front of the side area which has our potager. These cranberries are a little more tart than traditional cranberries, but the bushes are prolific. Traditional cranberries are much lower to the ground in growing - almost groundcover - but the highbush variety will grow up to 10 feet tall and 8 feet across, which I hope means plenty for our birds and some for us.
Our first 8 vegetable beds are built and set up (with the exception of two that need their trim) and it's really so lovely! I have three of them planted, but will plant more this weekend. My heirloom tomatoes and leeks are thriving and so is the basil and flat leaf parsley. My dill is looking iffy. I'll plant beans, corn and potatoes this weekend.
Just under that pin oak, and just out of the picture (on the far right) is a bench situated just perfectly under our pin oak. Oh ladies! You simply must consider a simple bench, comfortably situated in a spot of shade near your potager!
Strawberry beds are doing very well, too!
Our chicks are in and doing wonderfully!
We have found a great resource: a local family lumber mill. It's been so fantastic for us that I really want to share in case one of you might want to look into it!
We found a wonderful family owned mill just 10 minutes up the road from us. They mill rough cut lumber for us (oak is plentiful here so that's what we ask for), and the prices are so reasonable - our 3' x 6' x 10" (high) beds with a 2" x 4" lip around the top of the bed (so you can sit on it to weed/harvest/tend the garden) costs us $30 each. And they didn't mind milling a little at a time for us so we could order as our budget allowed. Since this lumber comes directly from the mill, the boards are a true 2 inches by 4 inches. We love working with the family lumber mill!
While we were there picking up lumber one weekend, we noticed a massive pile of wood chips in the back. We inquired about it and the price is $10 for a pickup truckload full.   Astounding! It is rich, steamy hot, beautiful wood! Exactly like Paul describes in his video! And again...so affordable! We've gotten 5 loads so far and have thickly covered our potager, the berry orchard, and my front gardens.
We've done so much through this family lumber mill near us that I really wanted to encourage y'all to seek out a lumber mill that may be near you and inquire about wood for garden boxes and wood chips through the lumber mill directly rather than going through a larger garden center, which is much more expensive!
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Jen Mackintosh
Wife to Rob, mom to dd 19, ds 16, ds 11, dd 8, and dd 3
Wildflowers and Marbles
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Servant2theKing
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| Posted: May 03 2012 at 10:12pm | IP Logged
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Jen, your gardens are so very lovely and inspiring! The bench sounds absolutely delightful! Thank you for sharing the tip to inquire about local mills. What a wonderful idea! We have many Amish nearby, and I would have never thought of checking with them for lumber, silly goose that I am!
Of course, we're not even close to embarking on the kinds of projects all you lovely ladies are accomplishing, but a girl can still dream! We'll be fortunate if we can clear several downed scrub trees in our hedgerows, left over from late winter storms. Our crew has whittled their way through about half the mess (yes, pun intended, as they're working with inferior tools that make the work seem much more like whittling than chopping or sawing)! "Oh well, I'll think about that (gardens or potagers) tomorrow", said Scarlett! Happy gardening, or potagering, everyone!
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Angel
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| Posted: May 08 2012 at 7:59am | IP Logged
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I'm just getting a chance to sit down and take a peek at the newer posts on this thread. Jen, your potager looks so nice, especially with the red barn in the background. 
Mine can hardly be called a "potager" at all at this point, I'm afraid, but I will continue to use the word at Jen's insistence. My husband put in a couple of new beds, but apparently the dirt we had brought in was full of bermuda seeds??
And I'm late on my warm weather veggies. I have beans, squash, and cucumbers coming up, but I'm relying on volunteers from last year as far as tomatoes and melons go right now. I have no idea when I'll be able to carve out time to go get plants.
My peas are producing like gangbusters, though, even in the heat. Thank goodness we got some rain yesterday, though, because we were really suffering from 90 degrees and lack of water.
Oh, and it's such a weird year -- I have ripe boysenberries and blueberries, and they are DELICIOUS.
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Angela
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: May 08 2012 at 8:44am | IP Logged
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Your pictures are SO lovely, Jen. I love the ledge on your raised beds for sitting while working. So "comfy." One thing we didn't really calculate is how much the wood chip paths would effectively lower the height of our beds, so it really is more like working at the ground height. Not bad, just not so comfy
Wow, Angela! Ripe blueberries! That makes up for any perceived lacking, doesn't it?
We wanted to do blueberries and raspberries, but I think we'll have to save those for Fall/Next Spring projects. Just too much this year, both in work and cost.
I've been blogging a bit about our garden, so if you'll forgive me for any sense of self-promotion, here are some pictures and journaling about what we've been up to.
The weather here is beautiful this morning after a few days of BLAH and BLEAK, so, I think I might ditch my morning chores and tackle some of that grass you see under the fence behind the strawberry bed (it goes all the way around) so we can put in the outer perimeter bed this week.
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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Servant2theKing
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Lindsay, your blog and pictures are wonderful! Such cute helpers! Love the name, "Lost in the Cosmos", too! It's so nice to see and read everyone's pictures and descriptions ~ I'm enjoying all your garden endeavors while we wait to attempt more meager efforts in our humble little garden patch later this month! Our crew is also much less ambitious, or otherwise occupied, these days! Thank you all for the inspiration!
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lapazfarm
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| Posted: May 08 2012 at 2:12pm | IP Logged
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just an fyi for all you potagering ladies, Currclick is offering a free download of a "Get Ready to Garden" lapbook from Hands of a Child this week. Could be fun for the kiddos to follow along as you plan and implement your potagers.
Get Ready to Garden lapbook free download page.
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Theresa
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: May 17 2012 at 2:46pm | IP Logged
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I read this article that made me smile, and then, I lost it. I could not find it again!
So, for the past several weeks, I will periodically mix up google phrases that I could somewhat recall from the article, and today, I finally found it again.
It is not an amazing article or anything, but I found it witty given my own experiences installing a front yard vegetable garden.
This is a review of the garden in the movie "It's Complicated," which I have no desire to see in its entirety, but the garden is amazing.
This is the passage I found amusing
Quote:
| When I started my kitchen garden, the neighbors thought it was a pet cemetery perhaps, a formal rose garden at most. When they saw it was a garden that produced food in the front yard, the opinions were mixed, fifty/fifty at best. Unlike the movie version, where everyone admires Meryl; so earthy, so romantic, I was just "the nutty woman on the corner." I guess I was just ahead of my time. |
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That's how I feel. The nutty woman on the corner. Everyone thought I was C.R.A.Z.Y. when I said we were putting a vegetable garden in the front yard, but most of those people have changed their minds after seeing it Not sure they've changed their minds about my mental state , but at least are slowly seeing that what we have in mind is nothing like what they envisioned!
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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JennGM
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| Posted: May 17 2012 at 4:23pm | IP Logged
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That is a fun article!
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Jennifer G. Miller
Wife to & ds1 '03 & ds2 '07
Family in Feast and Feria
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JennGM
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| Posted: June 07 2012 at 10:15am | IP Logged
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My potager is not faring too well. I did start many plants from seed, direct sow, and some seedlings from indoors. We've had torrential rains the last few weeks, which caused some drowning.
And now something is snacking on some of my seedlings and marigolds. I think one plant's damage is a cutworm, and so I have put a collar around the beans.
What kind of creature just cuts off marigold flowers at the stem and then doesn't even eat the blossoms?
One pea plant has a few nibbles. But the lettuce isn't being eaten (and we do have rabbits), so I am a little baffled.
I usually put a little fence around our garden, and I guess it's time to put it up.
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Jennifer G. Miller
Wife to & ds1 '03 & ds2 '07
Family in Feast and Feria
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CrunchyMom
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| Posted: June 07 2012 at 10:45am | IP Logged
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We're having awful problems with earwigs, Jenn. They have devoured my parsley and made swiss cheese of my cabbages. I've heard of others having earwig problems this year, so maybe the mild winter made them more of a nuisance than usual?
You might try going out with a flashlight after dusk. That is when most pests are active, and you can identify just what is attacking your plants.
We thought it was just slugs until we did this and discovered we have both 
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
My Symphony
[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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4Real Forums : Our Lady's Loom, Larder, and Laundry
Topic: Potager Plans
