For Mother’s Day this year, I gave my mom a row in my garden.  She planted zucchini, carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, lima beans, beets … and left space for tomatoes and peppers.

We’ve had non-stop rain since then, so I’m sure her garden will grow!

Two weeks later we finished spreading the compost and tilling the garden.

Jessi’s half is on the left; Chris’s half is on the right. Let the games begin!

One long weekend, sunshine, and several shovels full of dirt turned the giant mounds of compost pictured in my last post into this:

We actually expanded the garden a bit this year, so the first step was renting a sod cutter, and removing more grass. Then we spread the compost, amended the dirt with lime, rock phosphate, and green sand … and Chris tilled! This is only half of the garden – there’s still another pile to be dealt with.

We got a second arbor, which I put up this weekend along with some sections of the fence. It’s getting there… I’m hoping to find time to dig out the rows in this half (“my garden”) this week and start planting next weekend. Chris already has one row in “his garden” planted.

Last year, we amended our new, sandy garden with seven pickup truck loads of compost from the Free Compost Site in our county.

Since then, the truck was sold for $300 (it was worth nearly every penny, too…), we moaned and groaned about the sand, and had a mediocre garden.

Welcome back to VEGarden!

The sun is shining and though temperatures are still in the 40s, we have hit some 60º F days – spring is just around the corner! And this means that it’s time to start planning the garden!

So, the first task: starting seeds.

Chris prepared the soil mix: 3 parts peat, 2 parts compost, 2 parts water, and a handful of cottonseed meal. He sifted the peat through a screen to remove some of the large lumps – this left him with a very nice, smooth soil mix for making blocks.

So, we moved.

Across the state.

I’m sorry that it has been so long since I’ve posted here! Pictured above is our new garden, on our new one-acre lot. We have already planted carrots, lettuce, spinach, chard, peas, beets, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and onions. Since we *live* on this property, I am sure this garden will be much more bountiful than the one-acre garden we semi-maintained in 2007.

Life gets in the way of things, some times. Hopefully I will have time this spring and summer to post some garden pictures and write a bit. The site needs a major software update and design rehaul; I’ve been busy making websites that pay the bills, so unfortunately this one kind of got shoved aside.

Check back. I promise to be more diligent about our VEGarden.

I never thought I’d see it! We have about a dozen broccoli and cauliflowers forming. As you can see the leaves are getting eaten up. I’ve picked off a good number of cabbage moths. I’ll probably get BT for the kale and turnips and things I’m planning on putting out soon.

Last week I watered on account of the lack of rain and I also applied some liquid kelp to the brassicas and tomatoes. I also spread some clover and vetch around the plants hoping they’ll germinate and provide a little nitrogen boost.

Still no tomatoes besides a few cherries, but there are lots of fruits we just need a decent rain. Who knows, maybe it’ll rain in august sometime.

If my counting is correct, we got in 280 tomato plants and 300 brassicas this weekend. We still have eggplants, peppers, and okra transplants to put in. The southeast corner of the garden tilled up the nicest, so after the hard work digging holes and planting tomatoes, we planted a lot of seeds: onion sets, lima beans, and various squashes and cucumbers.

Lisa came on Monday to help us again, and the work goes by so much quicker with a third person. Unfortunately, she is moving back to Duluth this week!

I leave for a workshop in Utah on Thursday, and I’ll be gone until June 11th. So hopefully Chris will have time to keep this website updated… I want to see pictures while I’m away! It’s up to him now to finish the transplants and decide if any more seeds will be going in. Oh, and figure out where to get a lot of compst and mulch!

Today we are hoping for rain. The forecast says 70%… but that really doesn’t mean much any more.

When we got out to the garden this morning, the guy who had plowed was out there with his tractor tilling for us. The ground is much more workable than it was before, and we’re lucky to have him helping us out a bit.

Unfortunately, someone came by and ate a lot of the corn and squash seeds we had planted… and we can’t really tell what got eaten – there are just empty shells where pumpkin seeds once were, or pieces of corn with the germ eaten laying all around. SO… I think we’re going to have to add some more seeds back in, and maybe add more rows to the three sisters.

Our transplants are sick of their small homes and are more than ready to go in the ground. The tomatoes are starting to yellow – I’m thinking they may have gotten sunburned. But they seem really healthy, so hopefully they’ll come around.

Today we planted 200 more brassicas and the 20 Great White tomatoes. It’s a long weekend, so we’ll be out there Sunday and Monday – hopefully spending long days out there and getting the rest of our transplants in. We had a new friend helping us today – it was a pretty good time for all!

We haven’t gotten any rain for two weeks, which is really frustrating. We have been watering the transplants, but we can’t stretch the hose any farther into the garden. MAYBE it will rain Tuesay… we’ll see.

That’s about a third – maybe even less than a third – of our seedlings. They have become family, and I hope they all make it into the ground. (Except for the okra in the very front left corner – Puck snapped it in half while running too close… oops!). I always forget the camera when we go to Morning Sky Greenery, but I’ll try to remember to bring it tomorrow.

We started hardening off the tomatoes, peppers, okra, eggplant, and brassicas. They spent about 1 1/2 hours out in the sun and wind – sheltered as much as we could shelter them. Now we increase their time outside every day, and hopefully get the brassicas in the ground next week and the tomatoes by Memorial Day.

Very unfortunately, the hand tiller that we had planned on borrowing for the summer needs to be repaired. So I reserved the biggest tiller that our local hardware store has for rent, and tomorrow Chris is going to spend the entire day – 8 to 5 – tilling as much as he can possibly till. An acre is A LOT of land to hand-till in one day, and the tiller is also fairly expensive to rent… and since it runs on gas, there’s an added expense.

I hope Chris can survive the day! Unfortunately I have other work to do, and quite honestly I don’t think I can manage a tiller of that size very easily. But the land has been broken, so it won’t be as tough as it was when we tilled up the back yard for our home garden. The immediate plan is that enough of the garden will get tilled for our three sisters planting (corn, beans, and squash/melons): our weekend project!