Know Your Mulch

It has been an unusually busy spring, with multiple last minute trips to Seattle, above average rain fall, and above average weeds.

We mulched our garlic with oat straw to keep the weeds down, and it worked really well.  We hardly have any weeds growing in our garlic field.  We do however have tons of oats growing in our garlic field.  In some places the oats are so thick you can hardly see the garlic.  It's sickening to look at.  Lesson learned, buy cleaner straw mulch.  Actually, I'm thinking we may go with leaf mulch next time or if we continue growing garlic and get a new bedder, getting a plastic mulch attachment.  I know I've been against laying down plastic to keep weeds out, but this season might just put me over the edge.

We got our new garden beds built and planted.  It took 51 landscaping ties per bed.  The long sides are easy, three 8 footers with every other row starting with 4 footers to offset the seams.  The short sides however took pieces that were 52 inches long in order to get the 4 feet of space in the middle.  The corners overlap and I drilled through with a 2 foot long 1/2 inch arbor bit, then drove a 2 foot piece of rebar through the corner to hold them together.

There are 3 cross pieces you can see in the picture below to hold the sides from bowing out.  I also drilled through this part and drove a piece of rebar to hold them together.  With 192 cubic feet of soil inside these beds, the cross members are necessary to keep them from falling over with the pressure.

The spacing between the boxes is 5 feet, enough to fit our lawn mower.  The beds are 2 feet high and weeding is SO much easier now.  I think we actually weed more because we don't have to kneel and bend over to do it.

We wound up with extra space this year because of the lack of hot peppers that sprouted, not planting onions, and not planting corn.  So we decided to put in 2x the number of carrots, 32 sq ft or 512 plants.  And we decided to try something new, growing watermelon.  I'm excited to eat our own watermelon, and judging by how well our past crops have all done, we will likely have enough to make some watermelon wine.

We didn't plant the 1/2 acre of corn like we talked about and we didn't put in a pumpkin patch.  We really just ran out of time.  Between me traveling, remodeling our house, and raining 4 out of 5 days, we barely got our garden in.  But therein lies the beauty of doing things yourself, no corn but we have a new bathroom; no pumpkin patch, but we have new raised beds.  And those ideas of corn, corn mazes, pumpkins, fall pig roasts, etc. can all be put up for the next season.

Evening looking across our field