::orchard garden 2013 - for real::

Original plan

Actual Plan

I had originally planned to put a hoop house in the OG this year.  It's still a good plan, but its not in the budget this year.  Some day.  You have to have something to dream about right?  I decided that the OG needed a "make do" kind of year.  Not a total remodel.  Josh added over 10 scoops of compost to the soil and tilled it all in early this spring.  Then the farm flooded and the OG got ignored.  But that turned out great.  

The grass near it grew to be about 9 inches tall while the flooded mower was getting fixed.  Once it finally got mowed three times in three days, and all the grass got scooped up by the leaf vacuum - I had a dream pile of grass clipping to garden with.  Laugh all you want but I have thought before about calling a landscape company and asking if they would like to dump their grass clippings out here.  It is free and works as a perfect garden mulch.

By this point, a month post first tilling, the OG was turning into a weed filled mess.  My Lily helped me get weed mat down on the front section of the garden.  We did a row of weed matted and grass mulched broccoli, which liked it so much that is growing so fast you can almost see it happening.  

 Then an aisle of weed mat followed by a row of tomatoes.  I have my favorite tomatoes up in my Cottage Garden but the work horses get put in the OG.  They got weed mat as well with a little grass mulch.  I want the black weed mat to help heat the soil up while it is still cool out.  Once the heat of summer is raging I will mulch the entire area to keep moisture in the soil.  Josh taught me how to put in T posts and I have them all ready to try staking them with the Florida Weave technique.  This will be my second try with this and I have some new ideas about how to improve it.  More to come on that as it happens.  

We put in another weed mat aisle and then a row of green beans.  Josh found an old piece of scrap fence and he tied it to T posts to make a green bean trellis.  Max made me a sign and we planted those beans together.  They are coming up like crazy.  Almost out to the frame already.  Tough little buggers.  

Baby melon

I put down about a two foot run of grass mulch and then took into account the rest of this massive garden.  I talked Josh into retilling the rest of it for me.  What a good sport.  Then I planted like a crazy woman.  I did several row of cantaloupes.  I decided not to do hills this year.  It has never worked that great for me and it takes too much work.  I went with the lazy mans rows and I hope I end up with too much.  I hope we are lousy with cantaloupe.  I hope I am giving it away because we can't eat nay more.   That would be ideal.  Then some large watermelons.  I find the large ones are hard to deal with.  They are too big to eat at one meal and they go bad fast, but they are fun to watch grow.  Then another couple rows of cantaloupes.  

Done and done

 I thought I had way too many melon seeds to use but I still had a great chunk of garden looking all blank at me.  I dug through my garden tote to see what seeds were left.  I ended up doing a row of peas and spinach.  Then a row of pickle cucumbers. Still lots of garden begging to be planted.  I had originally bought seeds to do a pumpkin patch but cut it from the list.  I put a few seeds from each gourd or pumpkin in one empty envelope, shook them up, and threw them in a few rows to finish the space off.  We will see how that all turn out.  I have heard you don't want other vines near your melons because they can cross pollinate.  I hope we gave them enough space apart.