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yard, part 5:
making a garden
old mcdonald had an urban-raised-bed-organic
garden, e-i-e-i-o
As most of you already
know, Sal's passionate about not just cooking and baking food, but also
about where it comes from. Since we moved to Oregon, we've become more
involved in organic, locally-grown food and when we finally had a home of
our own, one of our dreams was to be able to step outside our kitchen and
pick the food for the evening's meal right from our very own garden.
Along the south side of
our house is a side yard that would be the perfect spot for a couple of
raised garden beds. It was perfectly situated for sun a vegetable garden
would need and better still, it was only steps away from our kitchen. This
year, with our big push to get the yard organized and cleaned up, we were
determined to get those raised garden beds in place, too.
For the raised beds, we
used these great hinges we found in the
Lee
Valley Hardware catalog -- they're made for 1x8s and they're
stackable, so you can make the bed as high as you want. Plus, because
they're hinges, you can fasten them to whatever angle you want. We ordered
six sets, for two 4'x8' beds that would be three widths high apiece.
We surrounded the beds
with the chipped granite gravel we used throughout the rest of our outdoor
spaces, as well as resting the bottom level of each of the raised beds on
the gravel to make them last longer. We left pathways on all sides of each
bed wide enough to fit a wheelbarrow through. They're also within easy
reach of the outdoor spigot, which means we can use one of those short,
coil hoses to water them. Eventually, we may convert two wine barrels we
have to a rainwater collection system -- Lee Valley Hardware has an
awesome
rainwater drip irrigation kit -- but this works great, too.
We have a nice
Earth Machine we got during
Metro's annual special
promotion a few years ago and since we had to move it anyway as part of
our yard work extravaganza, emptied out all the composted soil into each
of the garden beds. Mmmm...compost....
We supplemented that with
topsoil and more compost so that we had a really nice foundation for our
garden. Since we don't believe in using chemicals for fertilizer, weed, or
pest control, it was really important to make sure the soil was prepared
well. Once we were satisfied, it was time to get to the good stuff:
planting!
As a reward to ourselves
once we finished landscaping the yard (and also because it was now the
first weekend of July and we were therefore getting a late start on our
garden), we treated ourselves to some organic starts from the
People's Co-Op down in Inner
Southeast. The goodies:
-
tomatoes ("Gold Medal",
"Sun Gold", and heirloom)
-
Peppers (Serrano, Biscayne
cubanelle, and habanero)
-
Japanese eggplant
-
Dill (cutting)
-
Cucumbers ("Alibi")
-
watermelon ("Sugarbaby
Icebox")
-
broccoli ("Southern Comet"
and "Umpqua")
-
lettuce: ("Lolla Rosa
Revolution" green leaf lettuce, "New Red Fire" red leaf lettuce, "Rhodes"
frisée)
We also bought some seeds,
thinking it couldn't hurt to give them a try even if it was late to be
planting:
That last picture? The
same garden THREE WEEKS LATER, Y'ALL. We got some mad garden skillz, yo.
(Although I suspect the bounty of Oregon's climate and soil probably had a
bit to do with that.) By the beginning of August, we were eating our first
cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, and lettuce out of our very own garden.
I wish we'd gotten more
pictures of the garden throughout the summer. Everything grew like weeds,
except without that annoying noxious invasive thing. In fact, we ended up
installing three wire trellises for the peas, cucumbers, and tomatoes. And
the tomatoes were so out of control that we were taking a pint of just the
small Sun Golds every day until mid-October. (It's nearly Halloween as I
write this and those darn things are still ripening out there!)
Even starting as late as
we did, and with a much smaller variety than what we'll plant this year,
we ate like royalty and other than spraying the beds down with the hose
every evening, we didn't have to do a darn thing. That's our kind of
gardening!
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