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Planning Hedges

January 30th, 2017

I’ve been thinking a lot about hedges during this winter season. As I walk around the sleeping garden, I’m trying to decide where hedges will help with snow drifting, wind, and provide much needed structure and interest. I’m also in need of hedges to close up spaces and break my very large garden into smaller, more intimate areas. I’ve always been enamored with hedges, I notice and photograph them everywhere I go. One place I particularly loved the hedges was in Sweden.




At the moment, I’ve selected a few different hedges to instal this summer. One is going to be a particularly large undertaking, around 400 beech plants around two side of the main garden in the back. This spring will be spent preparing the ground for them and hopefully I will be able to order them and get them planted in early summer. Here’s hoping we don’t have another drought this coming summer!

Do you have any hedges in your garden? What’s your favorite hedge plant?

Spicy not so micro Greens

January 26th, 2017

So my spicy microgreens are long “micro”. They’re on to the baby greens stage, which is fine by me. They’re just as tasty at this stage and add a lot of flavor to a salad. In fact, they have so much flavor they’re good on their own with just a bit of vinegar and oil.

If I want to eat them at the micro stage, starting a flat every 3-5 days is probably the best option. Though I like them at this stage so maybe two flats every 10 days would work as well. Either way, I love that I’m growing some of our vegetables in the middle of winter!

What’s on your plate from the garden?

Winter Mix

January 25th, 2017

Even though freezing rain and ice storms are a pain, generally because we lose power, they’re quite lovely. Everything becomes jeweled with drops of ice. If the sun comes out the next morning it’s even more brilliant.
ice storm
This winter I didn’t get my rain chain taken down, so it was dripping with lovely icicles yesterday when the freezing rain was falling. Things like this are a good lesson to find beauty in the inconvenient.

What beauty are you noticing around you these days?

Setting Intentions

January 23rd, 2017

As I’m looking through seed and plant catalogs, I’m thinking about what my intentions are for the garden this coming year. What do I want to accomplish? What can I improve? Where do changes need to be made? What are my goals with and in the garden?
mulching with pulled plants
One thing keeps coming up when I think through things: implementation. As I’ve lived here over the past four summers, I’ve been coming up with ideas and plans in my mind. The edible gardens have been expanded to their full size.  Now it’s time to implement plans for hedges, perennial beds, gravel patios, rock walls, asparagus beds, blueberry hedges, raspberry beds, etc.
blueberries
The good thing is that these things will all be easier for me to postpone for a year if the need arises (read this post if you’re not sure what I’m talking about). My vegetable growing efforts will be a bit more conservative and my implementation of hardscape and permanent plantings will be my focus. It should go nicely with my shifting schedule. I’m hoping I can get a lot of things checked off my list. One of the benefits of my intentions this year is that it should give my garden better structure and an underlying foundation to build on in the future.

What are your intentions for your garden this year?

Keeping in Going

January 19th, 2017

I mentioned last fall that I potted up some kennilworth ivy to bring indoors over the winter in case the stuff in my rock walls didn’t survive the winter. It started out as a small bit in a large pot and now it’s taking over the indoor garden area!
kennilworth ivy
I need to fill a cell flat with soil and put this pot beside it so that it will spill over and start growing out into the plugs. Then in early summer I’ll have nice little plugs of kennilworth ivy to put in the rock walls around the house.
kennilworth-ivy-4
Even if it doesn’t survive the winter here in Maine, it’s easy enough to do this each year to have this wonderful little plant blooming in the rock walls all summer and into early winter.

What’s your favorite creeping plant? 

About

This is a daily journal of my efforts to cultivate a more simple life, through local eating, gardening and so many other things. We used to live in a small suburban neighborhood Ohio but moved to 153 acres in Liberty, Maine in 2012.

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