Planning My 2010 Garden

Earlier this week I sat down to figure out what seeds I needed to buy for the coming gardening season. A cup of coffee and a few seed catalogs is a great way to spend a winter afternoon. I have a lot of seeds left from last season that are still viable, but some seeds like onions, beans & peas don’t germinate as well the second year. I really want to grow a lot of onions and peas in my mom’s garden plot this year, she doubled the size of her garden so I could have space for these items. I’m hoping the full sun will produce bigger onions that I can grow in my shady gardens. That means I’ll be buying some pea seeds and some new onion seeds.

I decided I’m going to focus on growing things that are difficult to find or more expensive to buy at the farmer’s market. Things I can get easily I won’t be growing (like popcorn and maybe squash). I’d like to grow some shelling peas for the freezer and I’d love to grow a nice batch of carrots. I definitely want to grow some pickling cucumbers, we’re really enjoying all the different pickles I canned. I want to grow a bunch of potatoes, perhaps try a few interesting varieties. I’m definitely going to grow Principe Borghese and San Marzano tomatoes again this summer and I want to try a few new varieties as well.

Are you growing anything new and interesting this year?

Playing in the Dirt

Gardening is a matter of your enthusiasm holding up
until your back gets used to it.

~Author Unknown

This past week I’ve been putting in a new flowerbed in the front yard. I’m liberating about 100 square feet of lawn along with part of the woods on the side of the property. This bed is going to be about 8-10 feet wide by about 30 feet long. It’s going to be a beneficial border of native plants and flowers for the bees and humming birds. I’m also hoping to have a few spots to tuck in some herbs and veggies.

It sure is hard work digging up sapplings and tree roots along the edge of the woods. I don’t mind though, one of the things I like most about gardening is the manual labor. I like that I don’t have to worry about going to the gym to get my exercise, I get it in the front yard while doing something constructive. It feels good knowing that all of my hard work will have a beautiful reward later this summer.

Do you like the manual labor of gardening? Or do you prefer the easier tasks?

Liberating More Lawn

“But each spring…a gardening instinct, sure as the sap rising in the trees, stirs within us. We look about and decide to tame another little bit of ground.” — Lewis Gantt

With the coming of spring I’m planning out my gardens and inevitably I don’t have space to grow everything I want to grow. So I keep eying different areas of my yard wondering what I could convert to growing space. I’m considering bringing the lawn in from the edges of the property in the front yard by 4-5 feet on each side, that would give me a good 500-600 sq ft of growing area on one side and 200-300 on the other. One side is bordered by an empty wooded lot, so I wouldn’t have to worry about neighbors, but the tree roots pose a bit of a problem.

The other side is behind a fence, I cleared the area of saplings last summer but never planted anything there. I’m thinking both of these spot are prime for tomatoes and other full-sun vegetables. I could also expand our front flowerbed in from the road some more and that would also add a few hundred square feet of growing space. In one of these areas I’d like to grow a lot of flowers like zinnias, cleome and globe amaranth for the bees and other beneficial insects. I also would like to put a 1-2 foot wide flowerbed by the rock wall that flanks our driveway, that would be lovely with a big row of lavender.

Whatever I decide it’s going to be a lot of back building work digging it all up (you remember our rocky soil), but it will be worth it in the end.

Are you thinking of liberating any of your lawn to expand your veggie beds this year?

What’s Happening in the Garden?

Yesterday was a beautiful day here in NE Ohio. It was sunny and in the 50’s; just the kind of weather I have been longing for. Naturally we spent the afternoon working the gardens getting ready for spring.

So what garden chores did we do yesterday afternoon? Here are the tools we used.

The supplies we used to complete our chores, all measured and ready to go.

The supplies after we had been working for a while. Can you guess what’s going on here at Chiot’s Run?

Plants for Thought

I’ve never been a lover of coniferous plants. There are a few I like, but I think I have seen far too many blue spruce and other evergreens thrown in front of new homes with a little mulch around their feet and been called “landscaping”. I only have 2 coniferous plants in my gardens, they were planted by the original owners of the home (I had 2 more but they were oddly placed and they were cut down during the first summer we lived here). I have never had much of a desire to add conifers to my garden, I always felt like they would be out of place and boring (since they are around every new house you see). I’m a big of a cottage gardens, large, boisterous and messy and I always felt like the orderliness of evergreens would seem out of place here are Chiot’s Run.

While reading through, A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden I came across this photo and thought to myself, “perhaps I should include a conifers in the gardens here for winter interest.” This is photo of their conifer border, it really is lovely I think. This paragraph from the book sums up why I have always disliked conifers and why I should give them a second chance:

These (conifers) are all known in the nursery trade as “bread and butter” plants, for they may be rowed out as cuttings and grown to a salable size quickly and without much trouble, thereby supplying nurserymen with reliable income. They are the darlings of developments contractors also, for they are relatively cheap, easy to come by, and they may be plunked down against the foundations of a raw new house to give it what they call a “finished” look, though of course it rarely is. The ubiquity of these conifers in new housing developments and in front of filling stations causes many sensitive gardeners to shun them; but the very qualities that make them so treasured there also recommend them strongly to the gardener for they are easy and quick to grow, are often amenable to shaping, and are relatively disease-free.

I’m hoping to add a few conifers to my gardens this summer. I already have a small Frasier fir from the farmer’s market to plant this spring and I’m sure I’ll be buying a few more. They will definitely help add winter interest to the gardens and they’re beneficial for birds (which we also like around here).

Do you have a kind of plant that you dislike? why?