Sunday, June 7, 2009

Still Planting In The Veggie Garden

I ran out of room in the garden. I think no matter how much room I will ever get, I will fill it up. This is not unlike the fact that as people make more money they will spend more money also. I even have a 'second addition' to the garden that I started last year behind my shed. That is where I grow my melons and such, the things that really spread out and take up room.

I had planted a row of 25 red raspberries on the edge of my property, close to my 2 lines of asparagus. I noticed that the one row of asparagus was way too close to the raspberries and decided to till that line of asparagus in and remove it. That left a wide (5 feet?) area in between the asparagus and raspberries. I was thinking that will be a waste of space, until the raspberries grow up in a year or two, so I decided to use it more effectively.

I made a long narrow hill of dirt about 20 feet long and planted the carrots on the top of the hill. I've done this before and the carrots grow easier in our clay soil this way, in fact they grow GREAT this way for this type of soil. I grow the Danvers Half Long variety which don't grow nearly as deep as other varieties. In the area next to the hill I broadcast the rest of the carrot seed over a wider area. I wanted to experiment and compare growing them in the hill, versus broadcasting them on a flat piece of ground.

That was about half of the open area I decided to use. In the other half, I planted 2 varieties of beets; Cylindra, and Detroit Dark Red. I would have planted all of it as Cylindra but decided to use the seed that I had on-hand. Cylindra makes a wonderful bet that is in more like the shape of a carrot than the typical round beet. This makes for very uniform slices and is nice to use in pickling.

So here it is June 7th and I am still planting away. I will post some recent pics of the garden process very soon.

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