The is the front garden. In the half towards the street, you see flint corn growing. The other half is beets, carrots, and onions. Between the rows of corn, I planted rows of winter squash…acorn, I think. Within the rows of corn, between the corn plants, I planted pole beans. This is my own take on the “Three Sisters” technique. Native Americans traditionally grew corn, beans, and squash together, but all together on little mounds of soil. By doing it this way, I retained the benefits of the Three Sisters technique–nitrogen from the beans feeding the corn, the corn stalks serving as poles for the beans to climb, and the squash spreading out to smother the weeds all around–while maximizing the use of space and speeding up the process by using the hiller/furrower attachment on my tiller to make rows instead of hand-building mounds.
Out back, here’s what it looked like before I pulled up the garlic:
Since harvesting the garlic and hanging it up to cure…
…I tilled up the garlic plot. Here it is after planting a row of bok choy and a couple rows of broccoli yesterday:
Last night I picked the first couple handfuls of hot peppers and gave them to the neighbor across the street who gave us the pepper plants. You can see the pepper plants in the picture above growing immediately to the left of the three newly planted rows. The weedy looking things in the middle are tomatoes. Toward the top of the space between the bok choy (the new rows) and the tomatoes is mint that I’m going to cut this evening. As soon as I’m done with this post, I’m going to go out and plant some red cabbage and Brussels sprouts in that space between the bok choy and the tomatoes. I’ve got a lot of half-ripe Indigo Rose tomatoes–purple on top, but still green on the bottom. Maybe I should offer them as-is and call them “Joker tomatoes.” To the right of the tomatoes, you can see some young summer squash plants. To the right of that, there are late plantings of collards, chard, and potatoes but you can’t really see the sprouts yet in this picture.
The deer have completely given up trying to eat the gardens, but we’re battling groundhogs now. At least it’s a battle and not just unfettered destruction on their part. We often scare them away while they chew grass outside the fence, but we have seen a lot of plants that have been nibbled. They’ve eaten pepper and tomato plants, some collards, and a bit of chard (visible just to the upper-left of that yellow watering can, near the top point of this diamond).
I’m still pulling out cart-loads of rocks. I’ve been using them to pave over the muddy spots on the trails throughout the property, but I’m starting to run out of muddy spots! I may have to start making French drains and filling them with these stones. I guess I could use the soil I dig up to build raised beds.
