The permanent garden begins

I knew the permanent garden was going to take time to create. Here the planting season is really year round but I was focusing on a spring planting which is January for blue & black berries, asparagus , grapes and march 15 for some cooler soil tolerant seeds.

We picked a spot in the front of the property that was already cleared . With the help of our neighbor with a bobcat we cleared back another 30 ft or so and cleaned the area of trees that were felled 20 years before.

Another neighbor with a tractor smoothed the land out. I can not say enough about buying into an area with great ,helpful and reasonable neighbors When you live in the country it is so important to have barn raising minded people surrounding you, we are very grateful.

The next step was to determine the paths and planting beds which I marked with stakes and string. I decided to make the paths 2 feet wide and the beds 4 feet wide. I covered the beds with 6" of compost and added Basalt, green sand, soft rock phosphate, molasses, organic fertilizer, lava sand, humate, corn meal, Epsom salt and gypsum, all this because I started with sand. The paths I covered with 4" of cedar sawdust because it is very cheap in our area and it will keep the weeds out, the moisture in and distinguish the path from the beds.

We borrowed a tiller from another neighbor and mixed every thing in. The soil is black gold!

More Fall Clearing

Here we cleared out dying and crowded trees giving us more options for buildings.
We have found that is helpful to clear an area to the point that we can pull a measuring tape to establish the boundaries of future buildings. What we do is use red flag wire markers which are easy to move. This has given us a visual on how far apart the buildings will be and how that placement will feel. Many buildings have been plotted and moved by this practice.

In fact we had planned a storage building in front of the closet . When we flagged where the future house would go we discovered that a building in that space would have not fit , so back to the drawing board. It is so much easier to move flags than to move buildings.
The most important part of planning is to think from the end as much as possible. This is something we are consistently aware of and we have make mistakes ( like the first building starting out as a tool shed we could whip up in a month turning into the office that we are living in) We are trying to think through our priorities keeping in mind our the end vision.
There is the balance of comfort, necessities and beauty which are tugging on each other all the time.

The August Jungle has arrived....

The garden around the house has really matured with the help of rain and not too hot temperatures.


The barrel garden is being planted for fall, in our zone 8 this is the time to plant some vegtables, like broccoli, carrots, bush beans, for harvest in the fall and beyond.