Mission Endure 60: Garden Update

We spent quite a bit of time in the garden this week tidying up the garden and harvesting our first few Tomatoes, Garlic Scapes, and a few more Green Beans. It is amazing how fast the garden grows once the heat of June arrives. We are seeing new growth every day. That is exciting!

One of the things we like the most with the Minibeds on Plastic system is that there isn’t a lot of weeding to be done in the garden. About 75% of the garden is covered with plastic mulch (and in our case with rock or wood mulch on top of the plastic), which means that most of the unproductive areas of the garden are not going to produce weeds. The growing areas are heavily mulched with bark mulch and don’t grow many weeds either. This year we have spent about a half hour per month weeding the garden.

The back of the garden was a mess, so we cleaned it up a bit. We did not have it mulched and there were no good places to walk. The back corner of our garden sits next to a gully that is slowly eroding, so we have turned that into our compose area and are putting both our left over dirt and lawn clippings in the gulch to try to slow down the erosion. For the most part it has not eroded much in the last couple of years. Here is what the back of our garden looked like before we started working on it this past weekend.

The messy back of the garden before we cleaned it up

Last fall we moved some Irises, Daylilies, and Bunchgrass plants from the side yard to along the back of the fence. We seem to have more of these plants than we ever need, so every couple of years we have to thin them out and either move them around or give them away. We thought we would move them to the back of the garden to create a small natural fence to eventually keep some of the pests out and to stabilize the hillside. We see lots of deer, foxes, raccoons, rabbits, and squirrels back there. Everything is growing quickly. This spring we planted bareroot Fuji apple Jon-A-Red trees from Stark Brothers Nursery, Cucumbers, and Butternut Squash, along with Marigolds. The deer have been nibbling on the apple trees, so we also wanted set up a system to protect them this weekend. We planted a Granny Smith apple tree farther up in our yard and it is not been bothered by the deer and is growing well.

The cleanup in progress

We are tired of walking across the back of the garden and always slipping and sliding on the wet plastic or feeling like we were headed down the hill. We had some leftover walkway stones from a previous landscaping project, so we used them to create the garden boundary and give us some nice solid footing. This area was minibeds two years ago, but we decided the hill was just a bit too steep to make for effective use of the minibeds, so we left it fallow last year and then last fall we planted what we see there now. We did not have any mulch in growing areas of the old minibeds, so they were covered in weeds. We cleaned them out and organized the area much better.

At the end of the project the back of the garden looked much better

We weeded the back area, placed our stepping stones for the back boundary, broke the soil with a shovel and planted grass seed at the back, covered the rest of the area with wood mulch, and created cages to deer proof the two apple trees until they grow larger. We still have a lot of Irises, Daylilies, and Bunchgrass we can move down when the time is right, but we are happy with how it looks now and we will give it a couple of months to grow into its new space. The following photos document our garden on the July 4th holiday weekend.

Strawberries Tomatoes, and Tomatillos are looking good

The garden looks good in general and is ready to start producing. You can see a nice, red Tomato that we harvested later that day

These are the Garlic Scapes at the top of the Hardneck variety of Garlic we planted last fall. We probably should have cut them off before they started to flower

The Garlic is about ready to harvest. We cut the Garlic Scapes off and are using them in our cooking to flavor food. This is our first time growing Garlic and we are really impressed with it.

Tomato row!

The Granny Smith apple tree is growing very well