Veggie Gardening - hey, it's progress

Hey, a cucumber and some Thai basil !

My latest, grandest attempt at veggie gardening on our mostly wooded lot hasn't completely failed. Earlier this summer I hauled nearly 9 yards of compost into an old dog run to create a raised garden bed, resistant to deer and not mired in heavy clay. It didn't take long to realize that all of that work was certainly not going to pay off in spades. My plants were quickly yellowing and sad. The potatoes were particularly hard hit. The leaves yellowed and fell off continuously, leaving only a few small emergent leaves grasping at life, in a cycle that lasted for weeks. It became clear that something was afoot with my compost. My expensive compost. My expensive compost that took days to haul from pile to garden bed. This manure-leaf litter mix compost was $27/yard, so you'd expect great things. You certainly wouldn't expect it to stunt your plants. But the problem wasn't obvious. The plants weren't burning, like you always hear about with incomplete compost. They were just plain sad. A soil test eventually revealed that the compost was indeed nitrogen poor, a result, I think, of the incomplete breakdown of the elements.

So, in theory, next year my bed will be fabulous. This year, I was quite hosed. I added nitrogen, but this is a losing battle. The tomato plants responded by shooting up in height - skinny as a rail, but tall - and producing very limited flowers. My tiny tomatoes have produced a handful each, but the heirloom varieties haven't bloomed. Several plants never grew past a foot in height. This leaves me to buy from the market. Tomatoes are an expensive fruit, maybe the most expensive at the rate we can eat them. We'll easily devour a huge Brandywine - sliced and drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and pepper.

this tomato plant is so sadly skinny you can't tell it's 4' tall

I've learnt though that cucumbers are less picky about their environment. In the past, I've successfully grown two cucumbers. Really. Two. But this year, the plants have done very well, or at least, in my perspective, very well. I have three varieties growing - two slicing and one pickling variety - and I've harvested over a dozen. Small cukes cover the vines and they seem to grow at a tremendous rate. The one thing I have found is that they can easily hide in the vegetation, so it's almost like a treasure hunt trying to find them. So, I'm looking at their success as a great step forward.

the cucumbers have been romping

And, even though my veggies haven't been super successful, my flower beds this year are unbelievable. June was a particularly beautiful month, and the Fall bloomers are all setting themselves up for a great show. I have Japanese irises whose greens this year exceed 5', something I've never seen. And my English style, a.k.a. let the plants and the "weeds" fight it out themselves, has given off a crazy array of color. It's always hard to photo the garden, I think, because there always seems to be a lighting issue of some kind, but I've put a bunch of the plant photos on Picasa. The hydrangeas (I have more than 25 bushes) have almost all bloomed and are now changed to their deeper colors. I'm going to add some photos of them and the late bloomers as I can.

If you want to check them out, here they are:  My Garden Photos

On an unrelated note, I have successfully convinced all of my neighbors to move their trash and recycling off of the storm drain. For fourteen years, our trash and recycling collection has been on this concrete pad at the bottom of the driveway. Inevitably every few weeks, trash would litter the entire area for one reason or another. That was bad enough, but one day a few years ago I actually looked at where we put things for collection. I mean, of course, I know where we put stuff, but I never saw that it was the storm drain leading directly into the Patapsco River. Of course, then I immediately noticed that the garbage didn't just litter the common property but tons of bottles and other trash would fall into the drain. There is no filter of any kind between the street and the river. I guess that's so it won't back up.  This spring, I was able to organize our neighbors into a clean up, and they pulled some 13 garbage containers full of trash out of the stream. Perfect timing to propose we move the pick up. Only one neighbor resisted, but now several weeks later our road is no longer polluting that stream on mass. Yay!

The Dream of the Summer Veggie Garden

Nearly finished veggie garden

So, as I explained in my earlier post about my dream for the winter greenhouse, in which I don't dream of having said greenhouse, but dream of having something happen within it, I live in the woods. In fact, we are pretty darn ensconced in woods. Even with a deciduous forest, my greenhouse simply doesn't receive a ton of light, making growing all things a challenge. Having said that, I picked and ate my first onion from the greenhouse this week. Never mind that it was 2" in diameter and one of probably fifty that I actually planted - success !  It tasted wonderful. You really gotta have optimism to garden, particularly for food, in these circumstances.

Optimism I have. Indeed, maybe a bit too much. But maybe it isn't optimism, just tenacity. Or could be determined stupidity. I recently heard a great talk where the speaker said, "I am a great optimist, even in the face of all facts to the contrary."  So the grammar isn't great in that sentence, but the sentiment  describes me pretty accurately, I think.  I would like to grow summer vegetables (and winter veggies), in spite of all the evidence that it won't be easy.

Now, it's not that I'm an inexperienced gardener. I have very large showy flower gardens. Ok, so I insist on pushing the boundaries of "sun" plants on my "part-shade to shade" lot, but I have found that I can get a lot of things to bloom and reproduce in this environment, just not at the rate they would under ideal conditions. Neither my sun exposure or ridiculously heavy clay soil are ideal conditions. Still, the flower gardens do quite well given the circumstances.

But on-and-off over our fourteen years here, I've tried to plant a range of veggies in the summer. I've carefully studied the sun patterns and then tried different locations around the property. I finally found an area where a few fallen trees gave it some degree of sunlight for at least eight hours a day. Whoo-hoo! So, as I said, we live in the woods. It turns out, other things live in the woods too. Like herds of deer. And deer are particularly fond of many of the same things people are, not only daylilies and irises, but summer squash and other produce plants. So, I had romping squash plants last summer covered by a mesh deer cover, but it was too tempting. They came in, ate a hole through the covering and took at the squash plants overnight. Boom, gone.

I still want a summer veggie garden. During the Winter last year, a friend pointed to the pieces of an unused dog run in our back yard (read: storage area) and asked whether that was my garden. Light bulb!  Wow, what a great idea. I could have a garden in this 10'x10' run that has 6 feet solid steel mesh walls and a door! Talk about deer off! I was set onto a project idea during the winter olympics last year. Now, just where to put it?

The other thing about gardening, gardeners know, is that it is a very strategic activity. Well, unless you only plant annuals. But for the most part, gardeners are planning out 1-3 years in advance, at least. You really have to be okay with delayed satisfaction and having a big picture view that will likely take some time to complete. I began planning this new garden in February 2010. Last Spring, I had a friend come cut some fallen trees into chunks and moved it all out of the way of the chosen area. I studied the light very carefully, and used tires as containers for growing tomatoes and other plants right near the selected area last Summer. This way, I could see how the container plants did in that location. They did ok.

Last year, the area looked like this

The area I selected for the new veggie bed, besides having the fallen trees, was really an underbrush nightmare. It looks like the photo here of the area currently adjacent to it. Starting last spring, I began piling on plywood sheets and cardboard to kill off the zillions of vines growing there. The ground is an absolute massive tangle of vines and sticks and all kinds of crap. Cleaning that out and getting to dirt, which is undoubtedly clay, would be a nightmare. I decided to just go over it. Layers and layers of cardboard will create a sheet mulch, and I'd build a raised bed over the top of it.

By the spring, it looked like this - trashy!

This Spring I had nine yards of compost (manure and leaf) delivered and dumped on the side yard. Nine yards is a ridiculously large amount of compost. I had used a yard calculator to figure out how much I needed for the raised bed, plus adding three inches to the top of all the flower beds, and then rounded up. I think I rounded up at each step. Did I say nine yards is a whole heck of a lot of compost?

Photos don't do justice to 9 yards of compost!

I began moving the compost first to the flower beds, since they were going to soon be covered in plants and difficult to spread compost over. This proved to be quite a challenge, particularly one flower garden that has a giant magnolia in the center. The bed is probably 20'x30'. Getting compost around the edges wasn't a problem, but I really wanted to cover the whole bed. My solution? I ended up on the other side of a fence from the bed, my back turned to the tree, and literally aiming and tossing shovels of compost over my back. My son provided feedback about my progress. Crazy, but it worked.

I added to this bed, partly by flipping dirt backwards over that fence

After hauling compost for hours, it looks like this. Big Diff, eh?

We finally got the dog kennel set up in on top of the cardboard and I've got 1"x12"x10' planks lining the sides to create the raised bed. I began carting wheelbarrows full of compost down to the bed in increments. A wheelbarrow of compost is heavy. It's been raining constantly this spring. A wheelbarrow of water-laden compost is ridiculously heavy. In the end, I've poured 35 wheelbarrows of compost into the kennel. A veggie garden is born.

This 10'x10' kennel has sat unused for years - perfect!

Will anything grow? Who knows. I am definitely taking a risk by using all compost, but this seemed like the easiest route. The plants might burn from nitrogen or the water absorption might not be right. But I got the recommendation from farmers, so I thought it was worth a try. It's possible that eight hours of sun just won't do the trick, or the eight I get there won't. But, one things for sure, the deer aren't getting a single bite.

The last thing to do is insert the final board and level the compost out

This post will be part of Real Food Wednesday at Kelly the Kitchen Kop and Simple Lives Thursday at Sustainable Eats this week.  Stop by there are check out other sustainable living related posts.