January 26, 2011 - I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

Above is the preliminary plan for the 2011 season.  It's similar to last year with the exception of the location of the plants.  I figured it was time to rotate some of the locations.  

I have received my 2011 Seed Saver's Exchange catalog and have gone through it a couple of times.  I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be ordering yet, but it looks like I'll be getting some funky watermelon, pea, sunflower, herbs, and perhaps a few more that catch my eye.  There are some real tempting varieties of tomatoes, but I'm still not ready to start tomato or peppers from seed. And as long as the West Chester Grower's Market keeps bringing in some fun varieties then I'm OK paying a little markup.

In addition to the garden plot I plan to do more container gardening this year.  The last two seasons I've grown a variety of herbs in pots and they have been very successful. In addition to the herbs I'm going to try some lettuce, spinach, and maybe a few other plants in pots.  In years past they've grown well initially but the cooler weather of the Spring doesn't seem to last long enough and they bolt in the heat.  My hope is that Keeping them mobile I can move them to a cooler shadier spot when the days start getting too warm to extend their life.

I may also try and really clear the annex from 2009 and try my luck with some watermelons again.  The plan is still in it's early stages and will surely be refined a couple of times before March!

January 26, 2011 - A Winter Update

 

It's snowing....again.  So I'm starting up the blog again in anticipation of warmer and brighter days.

It's been some time since I've last checked this site. The last blog post was nearly seven months ago at the end of June so I kind of feel the need to explain what happened at the end of the season.

Last year there were two major catastrophes that led to the death of the garden: deer and flooding.  The garden had become so bad and I became so discouraged that I gave up on trying to document it. I even stopped going down there except to try and salvage a few tomatoes and cucumbers here and there.

Not too long after the last blog post (the beginning of July) I started to notice that many of my plants were being eaten.  At first it was a missing leaf here and there, but a few times I went down to find every leaf and flower missing from my cucumbers, or a tomato plant was half gone.  There was no doubt that deer were to blame due to the foot prints brazenly left in dirt, but what I couldn't figure out was how they were getting past the electric fence.  Why was it all of a sudden completely ineffective?

About three weeks went by.  I tried moving the fence farther away, I tried moving it higher, doubling the wires, baiting the fence - all sorts of things.  Nothing would stop the deer.  That is until I tried something very simple: I grabbed the fence myself. I felt nothing.  It turns out that someone came to mow the grass near the main fence and completely disconnected the inverter from the fence.  So each time I plugged in the fence no actual juice was making it to the wires. As soon as I connected the inverter to the fence by attaching a little wire I had no more deer problems.  Dumb.

The second issue I had was equally dumb, and worse it was completely my fault.  I had turned the soaker hose on one morning with the intent of turning it off when I got back from work.  However I had forgot I had a doctor's appointment that afternoon.  Without going into the details, the doctor told me I was suppose to stay off my foot for a day or so and I never went down to turn off the hose... for three days.  By the time I remembered and hobbled down to the garden it was WAY too late.  The squash were drown and  the rest of the garden was in real bad shape.  While somethings did eventually rebound, the garden wasn't the same.

So that's where we ended the year.  On a positive note, we were able to harvest enough cucumbers and hot peppers to pickle. I opened up the last jar two days ago.  While a bit salty they were very flavorful and kept their crunch!