Three Sisters

I finished the planting at McCormick today - this is the Three Sisters garden with corn, beans, and squash, all destined for our wedding feast.

Two weeks ago I planted the corn in 14 mounds. As you can kind of see in this photo, it's now up and growing quickly, which means it was time today to plant the bean and pumpkin seeds. The beans get planted in the mounds with the corn, to grow up the corn stalks. The pumpkins go in mounds between the corn.

The little corn plants are looking good.... and growing really quickly. Hard to believe that it will (hopefully) be knee high by the Fourth of July, but if all goes well it will be.

Lots and lots of weeds had also germinated in the last two weeks. Step one of my work today was to cultivate between the mounds.... just a 45 minute job, but the 90 degree heat made it seem much longer.

These two five gallon buckets are all the compost that our kitchen and chickens created last summer. Amazing how it shrinks. I brought it over to give the pumpkins, corn, and beans a much needed boost.

Here are the pumpkin mounds created and seeds planted. I worked more of the free city compost into the new mounds, along with a shovel-full of the homemade compost. This soil is so poor, I will still need to fertilize it as it grows. Hopefully all the compost will at least give it a good start.

The last step was to mulch the whole thing with straw. Two bales perfectly covered all the space I needed it to. It should keep the weeds down at least a little, and it will make good organic matter to incorporate next year. Now we just have to wait and hope there is enough fertility in this soil to grow a decent crop.

I should show you the Main Street garden while I'm at it. This garden has none of the soil issues that McCormick has, and consequently gardening seems like a breeze here. All the help from the fam doesn't hurt either. Things are finally all cleaned up and planted.... looks good, huh?

These tomatoes have a long way to go to grow into their cages.

Soon I will harvest and dry some of this mint for our wedding... peppermint tea after dinner is the plan.

The potatoes are up! These are also for the wedding.

The snap peas are looking good. We planted melons and zucchini in mounds in front of them, and cucumbers in a row behind them After the peas are done, the cucumbers will grow up the trellis and the melons and zucchini will spread out in front. At least that's the plan.

Little baby cucumbers. Hard to believe how much they will grow.

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Digging in the Dirt

I got a good workout on Monday. I found myself telling Stanley that I just had to "get the corn in" this weekend, and he laughed to hear me talking like just another Wisconsin farmer.

The corn is Cherokee white flour corn - an heirloom variety bred specifically for making corn meal. It's going to be the base for the cornbread that we'll serve at our wedding in October. My task on Monday was to finish preparing the soil and get it planted at our community garden space, which just two years ago was a highway on ramp to US30.

Even after one year of work, the ground at our plot is heavily compacted and the soil is very low quality. It resembles cement more than anything else.... but there's lots of sun, and if we can build it up it will be a wonderful spot in years to come. There's a part of me that loves the fact that I'm turning a little patch of Earth that would barely grow weeds into a lush garden using just my own (and Stanley's) manpower.

The ground is so hard here that last year we ended up working it a little, but mostly just growing in compost spread on top. This worked wonderfully for a month or so, until the roots hit the hard soil - they plants did miserably after that and we barely got anything at all from it. This year we took a different tact. Stanley did the bulk of the hardest work, turning the soil and loosening it up about a a foot down.

I then trucked about 14 large wheelbarrows full of compost (the city drops is off for free) and worked it in, leveling and breaking up the clods as I went. This was hard work, but quire rewarding in the end. This is actually starting to resemble something that might be called a growing medium!

My plan for this garden is a traditional "three sisters" garden, with corn, beans, and squash. All of it is for the wedding: dry beans for baked beans and pie pumpkins for our cake. Renee's Garden has a nice description of how to do the Three Sisters planting which I followed almost exactly.

The plot is 16' x 25', so I used twine and a measuring tape to measure 3 long rows. It's hard to see in this picture, but I used rocks to mark every 5 feet staggered along the rows. This is where the corn and bean mounds will go.

Here are the completed mounds, with the fence that Stanley built to keep the critters out. I loosened the soil underneath the mounds really well and used a little more compost to build them up. I was careful to incorporate some of the existing soil as well so that the plants aren't shocked when they find out what this garden plot is really made of. Each mound has four corn seeds planted in a square. Once the corn is up, the beans will get planted in the same mounds (they'll grow up the corn), and the pumpkins will be planted in mounds between the corn/bean mounds. Cool, huh?

I realized that I have way more space than I need for the few pie pumpkins we'll use for the wedding, so I ordered four different varieties of pumpkins to use as decoration at the wedding: Cinderella, Velenciano (a white variety), Black Futsu, and Musque de Provence. How fun!

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Flying By

We made it. We're finally to that magical week of the year when things seem to grow overnight... all of sudden we've gone from a gray and brown landscape to a lush green growing flowering one. So what if it's not as warm as I might like?

First, the community garden on Main Street......

The garlic I planted last fall is beautiful, as is the lettuce that Mom put in in April. I don't know if she meant to make a smiley face, but she did. I like it.

No string yet, but I pounded in the posts for the snap peas' trellis on Sunday. Zucchini and cucumbers will go where the weeds currently are, and I'm carving out some space behind the peas for melons. I'm growing HaOgen melons, not too many, but after my melons failures last year I had to give it another shot.

These suckers are ready to grow. I realized after I planted them that these are Nicola potatoes, not the Yellow Finn that I ordered. Oh well, they'll work. These are destined to be roasted for our wedding feast.


Two rows of Mountain Rose (not for the wedding) and five rows of Nicola.


Dave planted a bunch of onion sets - over a hundred onions I think.



The broccoli and cauliflower that I started from seed way back in mid-March is planted and starting to grow. April was a cold, wet month, and the plants took a beating when I took them outside to harden off. They are making up for it now. What doesn't kill them makes them stronger?


OK, now for the home garden.....

I have all but two of the five beds in the side yard planted. Here are the shelling peas, salad mix, and lettuce.

This one is planted in yellow onions (for the wedding!). After I took this picture I filled the back third with statice that I started from seed. Very soon I'll plant globe amaranth seeds as well. I'm growing many more flowers than usual in hopes that I'll have enough for the wedding. Getting married is fun.

The third bed is planted with cilantro and bronze fennel seeds (not up yet), and a few bells of Ireland seedlings that I started way back in March. I didn't have great luck germinating them, but if all goes well I'll have at least a few to dry for the wedding.

The strawberries that I planted in April are starting to leaf out. There are a few blooms starting on a couple of the plants. This year I'll have to pick the flowers off... next year we will have berries. It's hard to plant something and then have to wait a year to see any harvest, but it will be worth it no doubt.

Today I planted a bunch of my strawflower seedlings on the North end of the strawberry bed. I love the semantic connection.

The little bed in the patio is really coming together. So far I have a few ferns that I transplanted from the side of the house (they were nice plants but in a horrible spot right by the trash can), an alchemilla, oregano, two nice hostas, lamb's ear, a delphinium, catnip. I should really stop.

I thought the ferns were molding, but when I looked closer I saw that these are spores. It's fern sex! What's the difference between spores and seeds? Seeds are the result of sexual plant reproduction. Spores have male and female parts inside of them. It's only after they've left the plant and the "conditions are right" that they get together and make baby ferns.


Don't forget our cute little apple tree. This is the dwarf honeycrip that we put in bare root in April. It's going to flower!

My remaining seedlings... strawflowers, cherry tomatoes (Mom has the rest of the tomatoes), asters, a little more statice. Mostly what I have is strawflowers - a lot of them. They will be abundant at our October wedding.

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Spring?

Just when we thought warm weather was finally here to stay, it had to go and snow. April snow can be some of the most demoralizing weather - winter just doesn't want to let go of it's grip on our great state, but it has to, eventually.... Right?

I planted my bare-root strawberries two weeks ago, and they just had time to sprout new little leaves before they were hit with the cold slushy snowstorm that came on Tuesday. They're hearty little things though, and they didn't seem to mind it one bit.

As I write this it's warmed up into the forties, and it's raining outside. A cold rain for sure, but a springy April sort of rain that does promise to bring May flowers.

Here's the strawberry bed from afar. You still can't see the little sprouting plants, but they are there, and despite the cold they're still very much alive.

I took advantage of some warm sunny weather last Sunday to finish the majority of the digging of the new beds in the side yard. Two are approx. 4x8 and the other three are 4x10. I edged the bed with logs from the big Box Elder that we had taken down last fall, and the paths between the beds are covered with wood chips from that same tree. I still have some work to do on the beds themselves, and I want to make the edging a little better, but the majority of the digging is done. It will be time to plant peas and cilantro as soon as the weather decides to cooperate.

One of our neighbors gave us these two grape vines, which I also planted in the side yard. It's kind of hard to believe that these two inert looking sticks will grow to be big healthy vines, but stranger things have happened.

I didn't get a picture, but the side-yard is also now home to a little semi-dwarf Liberty apple tree. We really wanted an apple in the patio, and in order for it to pollinate we needed two, so we got two.

We have now made two trips to the garden center for topsoil to fill the big hole in the patio, and we still don't have nearly enough. This is where the box elder was, and we've decided to put a little garden bed there since the ground is sure to settle in the next few years meaning that repaving it now would be silly. So far we've planted a dwarf honeycrisp apple tree and two Virginia bluebell plants.... I have plans for ferns, an elephant ear, and perhaps a few hostas or other shade loving plants. Ornamental perennials are not always number one of my list of things to grow, but this seems like a good spot for them.

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April Overexertion

Goodness, it is easy to bite off more than you can chew in April! This Sunday reached 80 degrees for the first time, and all of a sudden we remembered why we love summer so much.

My first task Sunday morning was the yearly chicken coop deep-clean.

We purchased a much needed wheelbarrow, which made the job possible. I have a "poop board" under where the girls sleep that catches most of the manure.... that gets scraped off and put in the composter once a week. The bedding in the coop was relatively clean of manure, but there was plenty of it, and plenty of feed that the girls insist on kicking out of their feeder. I like a nice thick layer of bedding in the winter to help insulate the concrete floor.... but it's warm enough now that they don't really need it.

I schlept about 8 wheelbarrows full of old bedding from the indoor coop and deposited it in the run. I don't know if this was the best idea, but I didn't want to put it directly on the garden beds since there is some "hot" chicken manure in it, and there was definitely no room for it in the composter. The floor of the run tends to get muddy, and I figured the extra wood chips would help alleviate that, and also help raise the level of the run up a little and make it harder for any sort of digging predator to get in. The hens loved it - suddenly the old bedding they had been living with all winter was new and exciting.

Meanwhile, Stanley was hard at work on the ongoing project of digging up our side yard. We marked off the shape with logs... it's going to be really nice! The plan is to divide it up into beds. Our ultimate goal is to make raised beds with cedar boards, but we have other financial priorities this year, and cedar isn't cheap, so this year they will be beds that aren't significantly raised. The soil that we're turning up is quite nice, so I'm not too bummed to have non-raised beds.

Needless to say, digging out all the sod by hand is quite a chore. I'm so glad I have such a wonderful man to share the work with!

We also worked on finishing up the strawberry bed yesterday. I edged it with extra patio bricks to give it at least a little "curb appeal." I swept and tidied up the patio, and dumped in all of the half decayed leaves that I collected. Stanley dumped what was left of last years ashes from the grill on top. This should make for some very nice soil in this brand new bed.

From there I headed over to the Main Street Garden to drop off some seeds for Mom to plant.

I was greeted by the stench of Dave's composting brewer's grains. He's an avid home brewer of beer, and also an avid composter, and those two hobbies resulted in this huge pile of stinky half rotten grain... he was turning it and putting it in a black Earth Machine composter to finish up doing its thing. I'm sure it will make beautiful compost, but right now it's pretty darn gross.

I put this picture in for all of the Madison beer lovers out there. This is Moon Man, the huge cat who lives across the street from our Main Street garden and who lends his name to a popular brew from New Glarus Brewing Co. He is a great hunter, and does his part to keep rodents away from the garden. Sometimes I think he knows that he's famous....

It's hard to believe that this barren garden will soon be a veritable jungle of vegetables.....

The garlic I planted last fall is up! It seems to have survived really well over the winter.

Mom happily planting peas. She put in some salad mix seed too.... so good to finally get our hards in the dirt again!

The day ended with a lovely dinner with Stanley, Mom, and Bruce in the patio. How nice to eat outdoors again!

Stanley slathered this chicken from our meat CSA with his signature "New Bay" (like Old Bay, but different) spice rub and grilled it nice and slow. Yum.

I made the first potato salad of the season - old crop local potatoes, fresh hard boiled eggs from my girls, asparagus and snap peas (no, these aren't local, but they fit the spring theme).

For desert I combined last years frozen cherries and some frozen peaches from the Main Street garden into a simple fruit crisp.

Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up to horrible pain coming from my left shoulder blade. I don't know if it was the chicken coop cleaning, or any of the other garden work I did, but man do I hurt today.

Nevertheless, I had strawberry planting plans for the day that I didn't want to wimp out, so I doped myself up with ibuprofin and did the best I could. Hopefully I don't regret it tomorrow!

Stanley and I headed to the garden center to buy the strawberry plants.....

I couldn't decide between varieties, so I ended up getting two: Wendy (an early season variety) and Jewel (a late season variety). It's hard to see the tiny little plants in this photo, but they are there - 26 in all. We won't get berries until next year, but at least they're started now.

Of course we couldn't go to that garden center and only get what we had planned on getting... while looking for the strawberries, we ran into the bare root apple trees, and decided that we had to get one.

We had a huge box elder taken down from our patio last fall, and we are planning to put landscaping in it's place this year. When we saw the dwarf apple trees on display we both new we had to have one for this space. We chose a dwarf honeycrisp that will only get 6-10' tall.

When we talked with the saleswoman at the nursery, she reminded us that you need two apple trees in order to adequately pollinate and get fruit. So, we got two. Since there isn't room for two trees in the patio we settled on a semi-dwarf Liberty that we plan to put in the side yard.

With a little bare root tree waiting to be planted, suddenly prepping the soil int he patio became more important. Stanley did all the shoveling, and that was a good thing because my back wouldn't have let me do it. It was harder than we thought... he removed 6 or 7 wheelbarrows full of wood chips from the tree stump that was removed last year, and about the same amount of fill gravel that was used in the construction of the patio. Whew! We were left with a large crater that now needs to be filled before we can plant anything.

I told you it's easy to bite off more than you can chew.

This is where the Liberty apple tree will go - at the end of the garden across from the chicken coop. It will be lovely!

Whew! What a weekend.

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