The garden this week

Here are a few pictures of the garden this week.

Illijana and the scarecrow (protecting raspberries!)

Aromatic rose arch

David Austin rose (transplanted this year and doing better)

Dortmund Kordesii climber rose

alstromeria in full bloom

Dortmund and front garden bed

Moss Terrace daylilies beginning to bloom (with echium)

broccoli, beets, parsnips, summer squash

peas, squash, jerusalem artichokes, celery

roses, valerian, going toward upper beds

roses

Leontine Gervais rose over dog run, echium, ocean

Planting strawberries

To finish the strawberry bed project detailed in the previous posting, I planted strawberry plants in the new raised bed today.  We used a variety of strawberry named "Albion" which is an everbearing strawberry with disease resistance to verticillium wilt, phytophtora crown rot, and resistance to anthracnose crown rot.  And they taste great!
The first photo shows the planting process, and the second shows the completed planting.  I dig a hole with a trowel, put liquid fertilizer in the hole (we use Maxsea, a seaweed based fertilizer), and place the plant roots in the hole, and cover them up.  We should have edible strawberries in late May onward.  Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Building a garden bed for strawberries

     Over the last several days Illijana and I have set about to construct a dedicated strawberry bed in our garden space.  We needed a sunny spot and found one that fit near our greenhouse.  We dug up the grass at the edge of the gravel pad we had put down for the greenhouse, dug up the weed mat that underlaid the gravel, moved some of the gravel, and laid out the bed shape.

Cutting the edge

Laying out the bed shape

The next step was to construct the raised beds using recycled deck boards given to us by our neighbors.

 

We laid out the boards, cut them to size, and used an Illijana inspired design nailing them together.

I then used a garden fork to loosen the soil at the base of the bed (like a double dig technique).  In the background you can see some of the soil conditioners I used in the bed.

I amended the soils we gathered from around the yard with a mixture of blood meal, bonemeal, cottonseed meal, greensand, and lots of compost.  The next photo is of our compost screener (a recycled plastic bread tray) as we loaded compost from the bottom of the pile to place in the new bed.

Finally, after many loads of soil, amendments, and compost were added, the bed was done.  Here is what it looks like before the planting of the strawberry plants.

Creating edges and walls in the garden

Lately, we have been working on replacing the edging on some of our garden beds.  We have used limbs from downed trees as edging on some garden beds, but the limbs tend to decompose quickly and are a bit messy.  We decided to use recycled concrete pieces for the edging on one of our backyard beds.  Here are a couple of pics of the newly constructed concrete rubble edging.

Click pictures to enlarge them.








We also had a spot that needed a "retaining wall" in the newly created garden bed area.  We used the larger pieces of recycled concrete to create a small wall.  This is a picture of the new wall.

Flowers (while never absent from our garden) are now becoming more numerous.  Here are a few of the current flowers in bloom.

crocus

daffodils

huckleberry flowers

Finishing the new garden bed area

The last few days have been busy with finishing the new garden bed area by constructing the beds, nailing them together, getting chips from my neighbor, and adding the chips to the new walkways between the garden beds.  Tasks to be completed include fertilization of the beds, and adding compost.
Here are photos of the process:  The first photo is of me dumping the chip material on the walkway.

The next two photos are different views of the completed beds and paths. (Click to enlarge).

2nd new garden bed; weeding Moss Terrace

Illijana spent the day weeding the section of our yard known as Moss Terrace (named for our friend Larry Moss).  It is a sloping section on the eastern edge of our property which we bordered two years ago with a used concrete wall.  You can read more about it here:  Moss Terrace.  It has been overgrown with weeds and plants growing wild.  Illijana did some weeding, cutting back on the overgrown plants, and moving some plants into more favorable locations.  There is still some transplanting of rhododendrons and azaleas to do tomorrow.  Here is a picture of the area with the transplants ready to go in.

I spent the late afternoon working on construction of the 2nd new garden bed in the former blueberry patch.  I laid out the recycled lumber, nailed it together trying to keep an interior dimension of about 41 inches.  The two photos show the completed bed and a bit of the construction detail.

We want to construct some steps down into the garden and a third bed by the back wall.

Moving blueberries, and new garden beds

We have been working in the garden between rainstorms.  The big project at the moment is moving the blueberry plants which were in the back of our garden to the front (west side) of the garden.  We are using the vacated space to build three garden beds out of old scrap lumber we have been saving for just this purpose.  (The lumber came from Pierson building supply and cost either nothing to about 50 cents apiece.)  I am nailing them together, and learning to use a skill saw in the process of fitting them together. (My wife is the teacher.)

Here are the blueberries after the transplant to the front of the garden:

This is the vacated area which we then weeded and dug up.

We then laid out the space for the new beds using the scrap lumber:

Finally, I constructed the first bed today, trying to keep a constant size across the bed:

I will try to finish the bed construction over the next few days.