2013 Garden

We were scheduled for a vacation in May as we had not found the time for one in 2012...and since we were going to be gone for two weeks, I wanted to get a garden in before we left, we invited J and A and family to come for dinner on my birthday and to rototill a new small garden in front of the addition where it would get full sunlight.

He did it and also rototilled the growbox garden in the field as a bonus gift!  I was so pleased.

Since gardening before Memorial Day in our neck of the woods is a little iffy, I went to Longacres' gardening center and purchased some metal rods to use as hoops and some agricultural cloth to go over the hoops to protect the garden in case of frost while we were gone.  I didn't worry too much since the seeds would not really be damaged by any frost, I thought.

So, on 3 May (the morning of the day we were leaving)  I worked like a madman or woman as the case may be, and planted sugar snap peas, wax beans, black-seeded Simpson lettuce, romaine lettuce, radishes, spinach, and dill.  Inside I planted cucumbers, zucchini, carrots, beets, and bell peppers in peat moss disks that I had re-hydrated and placed the pan on top of the freezer in the pantry.

Recently I had been reading Square Foot Gardening by ________________ and decided to give this a try.  (I chose to take that book with me on vacation as reading matter of choice in hopes I would finish it and find out more good things to do to the garden as the summer went on....)

In the first picture you can see the grid I marked out in the garden. I did not actually use a ruler, but made approximately 3 by 12 one-foot squares to plant.  You can see I was doing this very early in the morning, before the sun came around the east side of the house.

"Square Foot" grid for planting.

The second picture is taken from the porch, about the same time of day but after I had planted the seeds and placed my homemade seed markers.

Seed markers made of skewers and paper with the named seeds covered by Scotch tape to keep out the rain.

 Finally the garden was planted and covered.  Dear One came out and helped me with the heavy timbers that surrounded the garden as well as found the smaller pieces that we placed over the ag cloth to keep it down in case of wind.  I had put duct tape on both sides of the of the ag cloth where the metal rods were going to punch through the fabric.  It just seemed like a great idea.

Now the waiting was at hand. We went on vacation with a hope and a prayer and (mostly) forgot about the garden for two weeks.