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

#80

 I haven’t been blogging for a while because I haven’t been doing anything worth talking about.  I’ve started to fire the work from the last blog post, but I’ve blown up a few in the kiln.  This doesn’t make me too happy; I have about 5 out of 10 left from these last ones I threw.   I have been working in the garden a little bit.  I planted some herbs, flowers, and a couple Japanese eggplants.  It’s been really wet around here for the last week or so, I’m going to wait till it dries out and then plant our seeds directly in the garden and see what happens.  Today I’m going to get some more clay and make some more work for this new(ish) project I have, and I’m going to have dinner with Keturah at our favorite Pho place up in okc.

House of Dreams

So I put the front and back wall on the hoop house this morning, and I thought I would share what they looked like.  So here’s the north side (this side faces our house and will get the most wind during the winter months),  I still need to put the guide ropes back on, but I had to call Keturah to get her advice on the best way to go about it.

 

This side is what we are calling the front or the south side.  This side is where we have our entrance, which is basically just overlapping sheets of plastic (which is kind of hard to see in this picture, but trust me it's there).

So that’s it, our next step is to cut back the plants inside the hoop house and take some clippings of the tomato plants that we wanted to winter in the house.  I might transplant our jalapeno plants into the hoop house; they didn’t make the cut when the last set of pvc pipes broke.

House of Hoops

So we decided to try and winter some plants this season.  We are planning on taking some cuttings from a couple of our tomatoes and bringing them inside so that they would be ready as soon as spring comes.  Also, we are trying out a hoop house on half of our garden to see if we can keep those plants alive throughout the winter as well.  We were planning on building it this coming weekend but the weather over here took a turn for the worst today.  Today started out nice but this afternoon brought in the north winds and a cold front with it.   So our plans were pushed up and I started work on the hoop house as soon as I got off work.  I spent a half an hour at Lowes collecting all the bits that I thought we would need to build it.  This is what I got on that trip (see if you can spot what’s wrong with this list) :12 sticks of 1 inch thick and 10 feet long thin walled PVC, 2 ½ inch 10 foot long pvc sticks, 2 10 foot 1 by 2’s,  4 cross connectors ¾ inch thick, 2 tee connectors ¾ inch thick, 50 feet of rope, 12 inch stakes, some screws, and 2 10 foot by 25 foot plastic sheets.  As you can see I purchased 1 inch pvc and ¾ inch connectors, so I had to go back and switch out the connectors for the 1 inches ones, but was okay because I had forgotten to get some poly pipe to pack clamps out of so I would have had to go back anyway.  So the actual construction went like this, I cut the ½ pvc down to 2 foot lengths and used them as stakes to attach the 1 inch pvc to, and then I screwed the two overlapping pvc’s into the inside of our raised bed.   I then began to attach the connectors to the 1 inch pvc pipes, only to find out that there was too much pressure on the joints and they kept popping off (which was kind of scary).  So I took the whole thing down and decided to screw all the connections to the 1 inch pvc, which you can see here.

 This worked out pretty good at first, I got the first side on pretty easily, and it wasn’t until I started on the other side that things went wrong, again.

 

As I bent them into an arch I broke three of the pipes and ended up having to pull the whole thing down.  It was about then that Keturah came home from work, to see pvc pipe waving at her from the backyard.  Since she was home I put her to work, we pulled the whole thing down again and flipped the broken pipe around and screwed them in again.  This time we only broke one pipe and a tee fitting, so we decided to make the hoop house a little smaller than originally planned, which worked out because it ended up being 10 feet long which is how wide the plastic sheeting was.  Skip ahead a little and we have put the plastic sheeting over the hoops (with a little trouble and one or two holes in it), and we screwed down the strips of wood on each side where the plastic was able to be folded over a couple of times.  

We did this as the temperature was dropping and the wind was picking up quite a bit, so it wasn’t that much fun…  After we got the sheeting on and screwed down we made some clips out the poly pipe and snapped them on the outer hoops, they worked surprisingly well.

 

 And finally we attached some rope to the top point of each side so that we could anchor it down for the night, by this time it was quite cold and we were both hungry and slightly irritated.

So I will work on this a little more tomorrow, I plant to put the end walls on and add a door on the south side.  I will post some more pictures (if it is still standing tomorrow morning that is) when we get this thing finish, which should be tomorrow because tomorrow night it gets down below freezing and if we don’t finish it all our plants will die off.  I’m now off to eat some dinner and post this blog.