Moving the Garden

    I've spent a fair amount of time over the past few days doing a salvage operation on our vegetable garden.  I had planted a bed of red onions (my sweetie's favorite onion) in garden space on the water right of way.  They were doing nicely, but were right in the path of the new access road.  They seem to have transplanted ok. I guess I will know better in a two months.  I have one more bed of onions that are partially transplanted.  The second bed is a yellow storage variety named Copra.  We're dong very well for alliums as I also planted shallots, garlic, and chives.  I planted the chives in one of our old cedar stumps and you can see they seem to be doing well.

    I'm very grateful that Linda is letting me move the garden to a portion of our front yard.  I think I also owe a debt of gratitude to someone who lives on Madison Street in Monroe near Beth and James.  They had a nice big vegetable garden in their front yard and Linda thought it looked really cute.  Never underestimate the power of the cute factor where women are concerned.  That part of the front yard also happens to be the sunniest spot on our property thanks to the absence of the very large cedar tree that has been cut into boards and is drying in our garage.  I'm laying down cardboard again, covering it with about six to eight inches of compost moved from my erstwhile corn patch, and covering that with several inches of good soil moved from the site of the erstwhile onion beds.  I'm hoping that it will be deep enough that I can get away with planting dry beans. As I have been removing the dirt from the former corn patch I have been pretty impressed with how well the cardboard worked.   It did a very good job in killing off the weeds. There were just a few places where I had some grass or horsetail that had made it through the cardboard.  I think it is a great way to prepare a bed in the fall for the following spring.  The photo below shows the new garden bed as a work in progress.  There is still a lot of dirt and compost to be moved in order to get the beds deep enough to plant.

 

     Sadly, I've given up on indian corn this year. I did transplant a dozen little corn plants to another part of the garden just to see how well the new variety works  I've got two varieties of dry beans I want to try out in the front yard.  Terry Johnson gave me some black and white  bean seeds named yin and yang.  They look very much like the oriental symbol, although bean shaped rather than round.  He has grown them for a number of years and has had good results.  The other dry bean I want to try is a heirloom variety from western Washington named Rockwell.  I purchased the Rockwell seeds from Uprising Seeds in Bellingham. I also will plant some more pole beans in the front garden as one of Linda's demands for the front garden are some bean towers. I'm also committed to a cute fence, design yet to be determined by Linda, and brick edging of some sort.  There are also a number of stumps impeding the size of the new garden.  That will require the rental of a stump grinder later in the summer.

Rockwell Beans

Yin Yang Beans