Planting Peas

It has been a busy day.  This morning I had my first green smoothie using our own swiss chard.  In addition to chard our smoothies usually have some fruit.  These have mellon, blue berries, and strawberries.  Debby found some chia seeds to add for additional fiber.  The color may look odd to some but the flavor is great.

My projects for today were to finish the center raised bed in the garden and plant the peas.  Debbie surprised me the other day with some pea plants from the nursery.  I had been really bummed that I hadn't been able to get the peas in early enough.  But the garden wasn't ready in time.  Now that these plants are in the ground it looks like I got my peas planted back in April.

The rest of the garden is growing well.  The radishes and carrots were planted May 1st.  Yesterday I started thinning the radishes (the sprouts will go well in a salad).  The carrots are out of the ground.  In this picture the carrots are those tiny things going crosswise in the background.

So far the deer and rabbits have stayed away from the garden.  We can probably attribute the success with rabbits to the additional chicken wire around the base of the fence.  I wouldn't be surprised if the deer are not interested because the plants aren't big enough.  Only time will tell.

A New Garden - In a Dog Pen

Well, it has been a long time since I added a post to this blog.  Last year we didn't even try to grow anything in containers.  The deer had been too effective in 2010, and all we harvested from four tomato plants were four cherry tomatoes.  No matter how many chairs and small fences I made to block the deer from the edge of our deck, they found their way through and had midnight snacks each night.

Now it is 2012 and we have a brand new idea on how to restart our garden.  In the garage we had the parts for a dog run.  Since we don't use the run, we decided to create the garden inside a fence.

The garden pen is 10' x 10'.  The beds are raised 10" above grade.  We know that rabbits can slip through chain link with ease.  We watched them get away from our Welsh Terrier that way many times.  And there were the few that didn't hit the chain link holes just right and Cassie got them instead of them getting away.  Fortunately, that didn't happen too often, but Debby will say it happened too many times while I was out of town.  Here is a close up of how we hope to avoid the rabbit problem.

What looks like double fence is just that.  I added a 2' high section of poultry wire around the inside base of the chain link.  The fence sections are resting on 4x4s.  The 2x10s that make up the bed are screwed to the 4x4s.  We'll see how well this all holds up.

Today I planted my first seeds and plants.  The plants are Swiss Chard.  Green smoothies are on their way.  I'm taking a bit of a chance, but went ahead and planted radishes and carrots.  I have divided the garden in to 1' squares (in my imagination, at least) and I am trying a modified version of square foot gardening.  So here is a long view of the first plantings.

And here I am, one happy gardener.  As any of you who try to grow a garden, you know that we could never do this unless we believed that hope springs eternal.

Mike