Gearing up
There are so many cleanup & improvement tasks in the garden that I don’t even know where to begin.
1) I need to expand the chicken coop, for soon there will be 12 chickens in there.
2) I need to buy and replant a cherry tree because mine died. Come to think of it, I’d like some blueberry bushes too.
3) I need to whack down and dig out my ginormous, wickedly thorned & sour blackberries and replace them with a thornless variety.
4) I’d really like to plant a bunch of flower bulbs for bouquets.
5) I need to manure all the planting beds so the manure can age before I till in Spring.
6) I need to completely rip out and re-lay a whole bunch of pathways (all of which are sunk at least 5″ under a layer of well-matted weeds and compost at this point) so the garden can be laid out on a grid instead of curves.
7) I want to plant a thick new raspberry bed, but don’t know where. Raspberries are awesome. “Heritage” is the tastiest variety I’ve found.
8 ) I need to relocate the beehives, and while I’m doing it I plan to put them all on a custom-built stand with posts set in concrete: because constantly shimming & leveling the hives as they teeter upon their individual stacks of bricks is no fun at all.
Each of these tasks alone could take a couple weeks with the lack of time I have… so I’m having to pick and choose.
I did at least get this done – I transplanted some strawberries.
The strawberries I planted way back at the very beginning of the garden were getting kind of sparse.
Strawberries are fairly short-lived and hungry plants, and need to be transplanted every few years (some folks do it every year but I lack the energy). The original plants are gone, but these are their grandchildren, transplanted to a freshly tilled bed with about an inch or more of chicken compost mulched around them (I hope it doesn’t burn them – if it’s as well composted as I hope, it should be fine) for to provide infusions of fertilizer tea every time it rains.
This bed is not only way better manured than their orchard bed ever was, but it gets much more sunlight too. The only problem is that as it’s up on Backfill Hill, I will need to remember to water (NOT one of my strong suits.) If it all goes according to plan, the strawberries from these guys should be delicious. I hope at least they’re worth all the work!
September 21st, 2012 at 1:02 pm
wow, the work never ends. great for the strawberries. Hope they work as a babysitter for Alea as they did for Sofia when you worked in the patch. Are there any thornless good-tasting blackberries? Maybe you should finish that deer fence first…Too bad about the lovely patch design. It was visible in google earth pictures.All that work.All that designing. Can’t you just till the paths under or just fill them up with compost and manure and let it ferment till spring? Sorry about the tiller. It would have saved so much time and sore muscles.It looks like you have so much to do. But don’t forget to take care of yourself!