Garden Expansion

 

This blog is all about the new expansion to our garden.  I have been thinking about expanding our garden for a while, and I’m just getting around to it.  When we made the raised bed garden that we are currently using, I thought that it was pretty big (at least if felt pretty big as I was hauling all of the compost one wheelbarrow full at a time…), but the more experience I get with our garden the more I realize that I would like to have a bigger garden.  So we can grow more of our own foods, and we can experiment with different types and varieties of vegetables.  I would like to grow at least two new types of vegetables per season to see how they grow and if we like them or not, and the new garden space will give me the room to do that, as well as the space to grow the staples that we love. 

To start I had to figure out where a good place to put the garden would be.  When we did the raised beds we got lucky, we didn’t see where the shade was during the day, and we only had one place to put it, which was on top of a bunch of grave someone had used to fill in a storm shelter.   It worked out pretty good because it gets plenty of sun during the day, and allows the soil to drain really well.  This time I had some knowledge of where the shade is during the day, since this time I could put the garden anywhere in the backyard that I wanted, I needed to know this.  I decided to put the new garden just south of where our raised beds are.  This gives them the most sun during the day and a wind break because there is a fence just to the west of the new bed. 

 Here is where I plan to put the new garden, next problem is how to get rid of the grass.  Last time I put a garden in the yard like this, I just tilled the ground and raked up most of the grass.  This seemed to work for a while, but after about a month it was completely over grown again, and now you cannot even tell where we had that garden (it was also right under a tree that shaded the whole bed all day).  This time I plan to kill the grass first, then till and rake all the roots out.  To kill the grass I laid out a 4 mill sheet of clear plastic and placed bricks around the edge and a few in the middle to keep it from blowing away.  The sheet of plastic is 10 feet wide by 25 feet long, which gives us a new garden bed that is 250 square feet; I believe this more than doubles our current garden size (I’m very excited about that).

 

This is as far as I have gotten so far, the plastic has been down for about 5 days and the grass under it has turned brown.  I’m not sure how long I will leave it down, but in the mean time I need to plan what I want to grow this fall and spring and map out where in the garden all of these plants will go.  I also plant to grow our tomato plants a little differently this coming year, I’m going to try something called espalier, which is the idea of training a plant to grow in/on a flat plane.  It should at least be interesting to look at.

Here is a list of the seeds that I recently purchased, they are all heirloom varieties, and hopefully will be tasty.  Please let me know if you have any suggestions of what else we should try to grow, I will gladly try to grow anything!

Bean (Pole): Blue Lake Green Bean  

Bean: Romano Pole Bean  

Broccoli: De Cicco  

Brussel Sprouts

Carrot: Scarlet Nantes  

Cauliflower: Snowball  

Chia  

Cilantro

Common German Chamomile  

Corn: Golden Bantam Yellow Sweet Corn  

Cucumber: Boston Pickling  

Cumin  

Dill Dukat  

Echinacea Purpurea

English Marigold  

Hyssop  

Kale: Dwarf Blue Curled Scotch Kale

Lettuce: Parris Island Cos Romaine

Lettuce: Rouge de Hiver Romaine Lettuce  

Okra: Emerald  

Oregano  

Parsley: Single (Broad) Leaf  

Pea: Early Alaska Pea  

Pepper: Cayenne Long Red Thin Hot Pepper  

Pepper: Jalapeno Pepper  

Spinach: Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach  

Spinach: New Zealand Spinach  

Squash: Prolific Straightneck Summer Squash  

Thyme: Common Thyme  

Tomato: Cherokee Purple  

Tomato: Large Red Cherry  

Tomato: Roma  

Vera Lavender  

Watermelon: Sugar Baby  

Wild Bergamot  

Yarrow - White 

Zucchini: Black Beauty Summer Squash

Zucchini: Round Zucchini Summer Squash

A Horse with no Mane

Keturah convinced me to throw some pots so we could do a horse hair firing.  So I threw a few 1 and 2 pound forms, it ended up being about 50 or so pots, 25 of each weight. 

Here are a few of the 2 pounders.

 

After I trimmed them I allowed them to get bone dry, and then rubbed them down with some steel wool to smooth out the rough edges.  I then rubbed them down one at a time with vegetable oil, and then burnished them with the back end of a spoon.  Here are a couple of pictures of the burnishing one static and one action shot.

 

Here’s a group shot of the first batch freshly burnished, you can see our kitchen light reflecting off of the surface of the pots.

 

Here’s a close up of one of the vases.

I then loaded the kiln to the brim with the pots, and fired the kiln up to around cone 010 (1657 f, 902 c), and then let it cool down to about 1100 f.  We then set up a station on the other kiln with a lazy susan, some kiln shelves, and a piece of fire blanket.  After the kiln reached 1100 f we began to take the pots out one by one and lay the horse hair on them, and allowed the hair burn and sizzle on the surface.

  

Here are a few photos of the hair being burned on the surface of the pots.

  

A group shot soon after we finished the last one.

  

A group shot of the pots after we washed them off.

  

After the pots dried we took some wax and polished the burnished surface to bring back some of the shine lost during the firing.  It ended up being about 23 pots that we finished this time around.

Here are a few shots of individual pots, look for these on our Etsy site in a couple of weeks.