A Fresh New Garden

Gardening season is upon us in the North East.

Well, almost.

Ok, it’s still just a tad early except for peas & spinach. For everything else you need to watch the weather forecast like a hawk and hope that there isn’t any frost predicted until after Memorial Day. But still-it FEELS like gardening weather.

Even though we were in this house last summer, I didn’t plant a traditional garden. There were a lot of reasons-we had to wait until we had some trees removed in that area, I wasn’t sure how the sunlight would be, it was a wet spring, we got a late start. . . just stuff. So last year I tried a sort of “out of the box” gardening method called “Hay Bale Gardening”. It worked pretty well for my circumstances, but I wouldn’t want to make it my primary gardening style. there are some articles on that technique in Hay Bale Gardening Becomes Popular Pastime, Straw Bale Gardens and Straw Bale Culture Techniques .

Finally, on Sunday, Yankee Bill spent a solid 4 hours tilling up my garden plot with a borrowed rototiller.

He tilled in the rotted hay bales as well as a bale of peat moss we had hanging around. It looks beautiful!

That big stone you see in the center of the garden is an honest to goodness carriage step. The thing goes at least a foot down into the dirt and weighs a ton-therefore it has become a garden feature 🙂 The soil actually looks much smoother than this picture-here the hay has not been completely tilled in yet.

It isn’t a huge garden, but it is a good start. We will probably expand it several feet to the right next year until it butts up against where I planted my row of Raspberries last spring.

Now comes the fun part. What do I plant!

I know I’d like an entire row of greenbeans, because we love them fresh and Princess tells me that even froze or canned mine are “better than the ones from the store”. I’m going to plant an entire row of tomatoes, because I’d like to be able to eat & can enough to last us through the winter.

There will be a smattering of various greens-lettuce, chard (which is heat tolerant), collards/kale (which can be a fall planting). I’d like to try some root crops that I couldn’t grow in the hay bales-carrots & beets. Of course there are peppers, and some herbs like basil (must. have. pesto.) dill, parsley etc. . . I’d plant onion sets, but I’m not sure if they’d be mature for this year. I guess it can’t hurt and I’d at least have small onions. Garlic will have to wait until fall I believe.

I don’t have room for anything sprawling like squash-so I think I am going to plant a couple of squash seedlings straight into my compost pile.

It’s rather unsightly and not ready to use, so a squash plant will cover it up, help break it down and provide me with yummy squash!

Since gardening is “in the air” I want to remind you all that this week’s episode of Frugal Coast2Coast was about frugal gardening. We had 2 fantastic guests, Kathy from Cold Climate Gardening and Donalyn from DLYN shared their extensive gardening knowledge. If you missed it, don’t worry, it is still available to download as a podcast or via this player:

Also gardening related is my current giveaway: the GroGood Garden Starter Kit

If you still don’t have enough gardeny goodness here is a little more reading for you:

Quick Tip-Garden Markers
Save Money Filling Your Planters
Lovage & Chives
Homemade Peony Supports

So who else has started their gardens already? I know some of you folks farther south must already be seeing great results-I’d love to hear about.