Actually, winter is fast approaching with the first snowflakes falling in our area today.

We ended up neglecting this blog (and the garden a bit too!) this year, as life quickly got in the way of leisure time. Chris and I were married in September – we had a pretty fun wedding with some of our homegrown sunflowers, great vegetarian food from Holy Land, good friends, a beautiful day for an outside wedding, and a mime to entertain our guests! I’ll put up some pictures of the day eventually. I figured the blog deserved a small garden update first, though.

There are still Brussels sprouts out there, and Puck munches away on them whenever he gets the chance. We’re hoping to order another truck load (or two) of compost this fall, and prepare the beds for spring – but that will depend on how long the snow holds off.

You can see the concrete block bed in front – I did manage to fill that with strawberries this fall, so hopefully they will get a jump start next spring!

My nearly two-year-old nephew visited last weekend, and enjoyed eating these out of the garden. Puck also found them…. go figure!

These are finally starting to produce after two years. It’s a pretty small bed, so not enough for jams or pie yet, but they are a nice sweet morning or afternoon treat!

Three months after moving in, we had most of the yard fenced in for the dogs. It’s a big yard, so we picked the cheapest option with the intention of turning it green.

The first summer, we transplanted a bunch of wild grapes from my parents’ cabin. I thought they were a complete failure but they are doing very well now!

A few months later, a local restaurant called “The Vineyard” closed its doors, and I called up the owner to ask about their vines. Obviously, a restaurant named “The Vineyard” is required to have some pretty spectacular vineage going on outside their front door. The plants were more than 30 years old and too large to transplant, but we spent a day taking cuttings, and two days rooting them. I didn’t think they amounted to anything either – but there are quite a few coming up this spring!

The second summer, I bought six “real” grape vines.

Those are doing very well this year. But after doing a ton of Google research on “how to make a green fence”, I realized that we needed way more than some cabin and restaurant transplants to green our fence.

Being the impulsive buyer that I am, and also the impatient type who doesn’t want to wait 10 years for the wild grapes to take over…. I found a Minnesota Vineyard, and ordered an ungodly amount of grapes.

This is a Somerset Seedless grape from Great River Vineyard, which is located in Lake City, Minnesota. I ordered 100 vines from them (5 different varieties) – and all but *maybe* 5 of them look like this, or better.

We didn’t do anything special with planting; simply dug holes around the fence, plopped in the vines, covered and watered.

The grapes are planted about 2 feet apart (5 grape vines per 10-foot fence section), and since this is the first year I don’t have much else to report! I did take four of the best edible varieties and plant them on my arbors in the garden; the primary purpose of these fence-grapes is to cover the chain link and provide some privacy. But we do hope to enjoy a small crop every year for table eating, jams, and maybe one day wine.

The garden is seeded and planted; rain is in the forecast. Now we just sit back and watch it grow!

I got a question on our facebook page from John about planting fruit trees in the Anoka Sand Plain.  My answer got too long so I am putting it here:

John I can tell you what I have done and plan to do.  take it with a grain of salt because we just moved here and just planted fruit trees this year…

compost:  i priced out compost from plaisted and the price was quite a bit higher than the municipal place in coon rapids. that might change if you were ordering larger quantities than i did.  if you go with them i’d ask plaisted if they have tested their compost and can send you the report. i also bought some greensand for micronutrients and water retention and rock phosphate for phosphorus.  I’m pretty sure fruit trees in the rose family like their phosphorus.

fruit trees:  from what i’ve read its not a good idea to get dwarfs in the cold windy sandy area we live in.  we ordered semi-dwarfs.  i had trouble finding the varieties i wanted locally, but getting them from a good local nursery would be ideal (if they have some brand name tag on them i assume they were brought in by the nursery and in that case I’d ask them where they were grown).  make sure to get disease resistant varieties.  our crabapple trees had some nasty apple scab this year.  i got one late ripening keeper and one early variety.

i wanted to get rid of the grass around our fruit trees.  it competes with their roots.   after mowing low around the area for a couple weeks i sheet mulched with compost, leaves, wood chips and cardboard this fall, but ideally this would be done along with planting.  i made sure not to mulch too high trees don’t like that, but keep in mind if sheet mulching it should shrink quite a bit over time.

this year we will plant nutrient accumulators, nitrogen fixing cover crops and beneficial insect attracting herbs and flowers under the fruit trees.  i will not be spraying our trees except for a an oily solution early in the spring (i found the recipe in The New Self-Sufficient Gardener).  the plants in the understory of the trees will be the pest management.  not sure if you have heard of this before it is based on the idea of apple tree guilds.

hope that helps – thanks!

As great as it would be to have a nice, long growing season … I wouldn’t have it any other way!

The 2011 Seed and Fruit catalogs are already rolling in, and Chris picked up a stack of gardening books from the book store the other day. Winter is a great season for gardeners. It gives us time to think about previous years, and dream about the new things we want to try in the spring. (Artichokes, perhaps? We read a very interesting article in one of Chris’s books about growing artichokes in cold climates).

One of the things that I’ve been researching is the best – and quickest – way to make our fence green. We put up a functional, but not terribly pretty, chain link fence closing in an entire acre of land. I think we are going to break down and buy 100 second year grape vines (wine, table, and cooking/jelly varieties) to plant along the 180-foot stretch of fence across our front yard in the spring. There is a Vineyard in Lake City, Minnesota that looks like it has quality plants at a pretty good price. According to one of the gardening books that Chris got, “grapes thrive in less than adequate conditions” – so with any luck, in 2012 we will see a small crop and a green fence filling in.

We’ve never successfully grown melon before, so it was really neat to walk out to the garden last weekend and see a whole bunch of these small, ripe fruits.

I brought in about 15 fruits that had fallen off the vines. They are much smaller than the cantaloupe you typically find at a grocery store – some just the size of a softball. But they taste so much better, and they are ripe all the way to the skin – hardly any melon rind at all. The perfect size to eat a half (or a whole!) with a spoon for breakfast. Chris has been enjoying them every morning with some Wildwood Soyogurt.

We have honeydew as well – though I’m not quite sure when to tell of those are ripe. They seem a bit green still, but I bet we will be enjoying them next week!

I had some extra garden space this spring, and decided to pick up some cantaloupe, honeydew, and watermelon seeds when I was out running errands one afternoon. We tried a couple of melon plants last year, but they didn’t produce any sizable fruit.

These are doing really well, and are quite healthy. They don’t appear to be touched by any type of pest. We do have a woodchuck who lives under the shed though … hopefully Puck will do a good job patrolling the garden and keep him away from these!

We fenced in our entire 1+ acre lot last summer, and we planted a lot of vines in hopes of one day having a “green fence.” I know it takes a few years, and I’m not quite sure how close you are supposed to place the vines to achieve full coverage.

We ordered a Nichols plum tree and Goldrush and Williams Pride apple trees from One Green World.  They came in last week, but I forgot to call to get the lines marked beforehand so we had to wait to plant them.  They sat in the crawlspace and the plum tree decided to flower.  All are semidwarf and disease resistant varieties.  Goldrush ripens late and William’s Pride early.  We planted them by our crabapple trees in the front yard – hopefully they’ll get enough sun!