club The Great Gardening Thread of 2023

[Ranger Hal]

On 4/27/2023 at 11:08 AM, KB Girl said:

Some tulips saying hello next to the blackberry we planted last fall

It made me smile to think of someone planting blackberries on purpose! The ones at my house are currently trying to (and partially succeeding) take over one corner of the house. I need to get out there and do battle with them! I hope that you get a wonderful harvest and that your blackberry stays where you put it!

[Elastigirl]

19 hours ago, Ranger Hal said:

It made me smile to think of someone planting blackberries on purpose! The ones at my house are currently trying to (and partially succeeding) take over one corner of the house. I need to get out there and do battle with them! I hope that you get a

Yep. Funny we are always doing bettle with them, while the rest of the world is trying to get them to grow.?

[Sepherina]

On 4/28/2023 at 10:40 AM, Salinger said:

Hopefully these images upload 

 

as you can see it’s very concrete city!!! 
 

with a bad wall of soil and weeds (very hard to dig in due to millions of thick roots and stones

It looks rough, but has promise!  With some love and care it could be a beautiful space. I would personally pick one small space (maybe a 2 foot section of the raised bed area) and clear it out.  It will take some manual labor but if you can get a 2 to 4 foot section cleared of the roots and rocks, you can put new good soil in and some plants.  Small steps are best (and helps to avoid feeling overwhelmed by a very large project).

[KB Girl]

On 4/28/2023 at 4:40 PM, Salinger said:

with a bad wall of soil and weeds (very hard to dig in due to millions of thick roots and stones)

You don't have to dig, perhaps you can just cover it with some compost and plant new things  

[KB Girl]

On 4/28/2023 at 10:52 PM, Ranger Hal said:

It made me smile to think of someone planting blackberries on purpose! The ones at my house are currently trying to (and partially succeeding) take over one corner of the house. I need to get out there and do battle with them! I hope that you get a wonderful harvest and that your blackberry stays where you put it!

 thank you! I love the taste of blackberries- and this one is a variation with larger fruit and less needles, pretty much perfect. Though it probably will try to take over the entire garden eventually.. but that's what swords are for!

[sarakingdom]

On 4/28/2023 at 10:40 AM, Salinger said:

Hopefully these images upload 

 

as you can see it’s very concrete city!!! 
 

with a bad wall of soil and weeds (very hard to dig in due to millions of thick roots and stones)

 

x

 

Here's what I'd do with yours, if it were my place:

 

• In the bed, chop the stem of anything tall you didn't want as close to the ground as possible.
• Cover the whole bed with cardboard.
• Cover as much of the cardboard as you can afford with compost. Plant it.
• If that's not all of it, reserve a section away from the house for composting all your garden waste and vegetable kitchen scraps, to make you more compost.
• Pull what's between the stones as carefully as possible.
• Sprinkle the cracks with seeds for creeping thyme and  very short flowers, and water them in. (Icelandic poppies, that sort of thing.) It'll soften the look of the pavers, and make it harder for the weeds to come back. Plus the thyme is edible for cooking.

[Sovalis]

Hi Everyone! I get to play too!

 

Things are finally warming up enough here to start getting into the yard. Yesterday I bought a bunch of herbs and celery plants and brought them home. I'm still bringing them in at night because it's not warm enough to leave them out yet, but I'm excited to have green things again! 

 

 

 

Hope you're all having success with your growing! 

[Sepherina]

Probably should post the finished bed we did two weekends ago.  It has been super rainy here so it’s been hard to get out and take pictures.   The door needs some adjustment and I am still waiting for some plants but all in all we are ready for growing season!

 

[MaeradCase]

My flower seeds have started sprouting! I also pulled grass before the seeds they were showing could fall.

[spezzy]

 

I come seeking advice!

 

With all of the stuff with going all in with the goats, the puppy, and rurik's health being up and down, we haven't been able to build the garden like we wanted to yet, and it's crunch time.

 

My property is half in 5b and half in 6a, so I'm thinking go with 6a numbers across the board.  (And yes, I have the maps that show this, and yes, sometimes it snows on half my property and not on the other half. It's WILD.) Our last frost date is listed anywhere from May 8-31st. 

 

So anyway,  I have nothing built except for a single raised bed, that is currently full of construction trash and not dirt.  I have a lot of plans for long term that I can be working on throughout the year for next year (including a greenhouse!) or for the fall planting, but I need to get the garden in quickly and efficiently, and I'm a bit overwhelmed with ALL of the information out there. 

 

So - if y'all were me, what would you do for a basic set up? I was originally thinking the straw bale method but I'm thinking I might be a little late now?  We're on wetlands and some of the property floods - the bottom part of the area we can use for the garden floods a tiny bit, but my Mom had raised beds in that spot in the past and they worked well (they're just destroyed from not being used/kept up).  I'd like it to be something I can do by myself if I have to - or do with the help of my Mom who is in her 70's - Rurik hurt his back and is fine, but I want to be able to allow him to properly rest it so it actually heals. 

 

Budget wise I'm willing to spend for convenience, but I'd like to still be as thrifty as I can (like I've been planning on buying starters all along, for example, or reusing as much materials we have around the property as we can). 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[sarakingdom]

54 minutes ago, spezzy said:

I come seeking advice!

 

I have questions!

 

What are you hoping to get put of the garden this season, as a sense of scale?

 

Your mom's old beds, what are the ruins like - mounds of dirt with no sides, just leftover dirt, a weedy jungle of unimaginable proportions? (If just just sides are dead, the mound is reusable. Otherwise, the dirt way well be reusable. But a weedy jungle is labor.)

 

The absolute speediest option, and the one that forces the least labor on infrastructure before you're ready for it, is containers. Pretty much anything can be grown in a 5 gallon bucket or an IKEA bag - tomatoes, zucchini, whatever. They can be moved to track or find the sun conditions they like while you're figuring out the land, or moved around construction work. The container investment is minimal. The dirt investment is not, but it can be reused in raised beds when you build them. They get heavy to move, but manageable by you and possibly also your mother. Looks terrible, but very functional. It's sort of a stopgap solution, no real investment in infrastructure, but that seems like what you need right now - no time for infrastructure week, you just need the plants to get going. They will need a little more watering attention in containers, but that is tomorrow's problem, and also might be something Rurik could do in July without aggravating his back, so may not be a bad division of labor now.

 

Oh! Also, actual grow bags exist and aren't that expensive. Huge ones, even. Big bed-sized ones, if you want, though mostly in round shapes, and a few rectangular. Some people like the root air pruning they do. I remembered these when thinking what people did for potatoes; they make ones specially for potatoes, but also tons of others. They come not just in 5 and 10 gallon sizes, but also 50 and 100 gallon sizes. They're pretty cheap,  certainly no more than 5 gallon buckets, which would need drainage poked in them to be usable. And the bigger you go, the cheaper per square foot. On Amazon I'm seeing a set of two 100 gallon ones for under 20 bucks and a 2'x2' square for $15. So you could have instant raised beds, if you can get the dirt to fill them. Not infinitely reusable, but would see you through this season and be good for a few more, certainly. They'd kill the grass under them, but if you're planning to put in permanent beds in those locations, that's a good thing. You might even be able to build the bed around them later, if you didn't want to reuse them as floating beds. I think they're basically just shaped landscaping fabric, which a lot of people line beds with anyway. I don't know if you can get an 8'x4' standard bed, but a 2'x2' is a decent permanent herb or salad garden near the house, and a decent temporary veg bed. The tradeoff of these is portability, if you go with the big ones, and they may take more labor to get dirt into than you have available. No tradeoff if you stick to the 5 gallon ones, and I'd bet they're much speedier to fill and deploy, but they aren't quite as versatile, are a bit more temporary, and are a bit more expensive per square foot. But the bags are a better investment in real gardening equipment than other cheap container options, probably. (And, again, ones that are custom for certain crops, like potatoes!)

 

I don't know enough about  straw bale growing to give advice on that either way. I wouldn't rule it out, but I'm not aware of the timing constraints.

 

I think if it were me, I'd do some combination of bed sized and container sized grow bags, for things where I knew I wanted beds and things I was moving around temporary locations. I don't know any way around the expense of purchasing dirt that doesn't involve loads of time to build up a compost pile, though a lot of other yard waste can go in the bottom of those to bulk it out before the soil goes on - sticks, leaves, plain cardboard. It'll hold water and compost down.

 

The dirt is the big expense and the big labor issue - a 5 gallon chunk of dirt that can be filled wherever the dirt is dumped and carried or wheeled away by even a 70 year old gardener and planted immediately, versus needing to cart and shovel wheelbarrow loads to a bed before any planting. And you could put 32 small containers where you want your 32 square foot bed, too, so you can get the instant raised bed effect either way; more expensive on containers than using the larger containers and bigger watering issue, but the smaller ones might be more reusable in future, depending on your plans, so they might be your preferred investment. It sort of comes down to how much modularity you need for your current time and labor constraints, and future reuse.

[MaeradCase]

2 hours ago, spezzy said:

My property is half in 5b and half in 6a, so I'm thinking go with 6a numbers across the board.  (And yes, I have the maps that show this, and yes, sometimes it snows on half my property and not on the other half. It's WILD.) Our last frost date is listed anywhere from May 8-31st. 

? that's so bizarre!

[Artemis Prime]

2 hours ago, spezzy said:

So - if y'all were me, what would you do for a basic set up?

I would call around to various farms to see if anyone had well aged manure they wanted rid of. Riding stables are great for this as they often don't have much room to spread it on fields, so they need alternative ways of disposing of it. It's by far the cheapest way to get dirt, some of them are so happy to see it go they don't charge anything. The key though is making sure it's already rotted down since you'll be planting in it almost right away. You would then also need a truck or trailer to haul it in. If I had to, I'd use my pickup and shovel it out at home, but if possible I'd find a dump truck to borrow. I would probably just dump it in a giant pile where I want to plant, but something like the gardening bags that sarakingdom mentioned (which I hadn't heard of until just now) would probably make an easier transition to raised beds once you have a chance to get them built. 

 

I've never done any straw bale gardening, but I do know other people who have had success with it, and I'm pretty sure you only need to prep the bales for 7 to 10 days, so if you get it going now you should be in fine shape. I am also teetering between zones 5 and 6, and I rarely plant things out before Memorial Day, so you've got time.

[sarakingdom]

1 hour ago, sarakingdom said:

I think if it were me, I'd do some combination of bed sized and container sized grow bags, for things where I knew I wanted beds and things I was moving around temporary locations.

 

Okay, I've done window shopping. My preference is the 5-10 gallon bags. The larger grow bags are... fine, but seem less manageable, and a bit less structurally stable. And in large lots of 20+, both 5 and 10 gallon grow bag are about $1 or $1.50, which is about the same per square foot as the larger ones. Plus all that portability and low labor cost per container and speed of deployment. They can each be treated like one square foot of a square foot garden for planting density. (The 10 gallon, maybe like 2 square feet.) The rule of thumb seems to be 13 cubic feet of dirt per 100 gallons, minus whatever dry yard waste or compostable paper and cardboard you can stuff in there. Your town may also offer free compost from garden waste that'd take up some of that space.

 

The tradeoff is watering. They'll need more watering in summer than a larger or in ground bed. But, well, again, tomorrow's problem. Maybe you can even run a dripper hose at some point, if they're grouped together.

 

But I'd say your fastest, cheapest, lowest labor cost startup is to get 40 of those, and a few potato bags if that's your thing, get 50-80 cubic feet of soil dumped somewhere on your property, and fill and deploy one by one as needed, which might be doable by anyone in the household, regardless of age or back status (maybe with wheelbarrows). Not the tidiest, but with long term gardening construction projects going on, eh, what's a pile of dirt. That's like $50 plus soil cost. Forty 5 gallon bags would be about 1.25 times a standard 8x4 bed, forty 10 gallons would be... I'm not doing the surface area calculation, so I can't swear it'd be 3x of surface area, but, like, ballpark 2.5-3x. Plenty for a first season. Reusable in future for starting plants, isolating invasives, or moving them around. They should last several years of reuse. Soil cost is... annoying, but I think it's basically a fixed cost here. It's possible this is a Lowe's delivery rather than a truck. I think something like this might be under $150 of bagged soil. They might deliver it for free.

 

Making the planting units smaller and as-needed keeps it all from being an exercise in how fast Spezzy personally can work with tons on her plate. You can get individual starts in fast without waiting on a whole space to be done, and filling them might even be doable seated with a trowel for folks who can't shovel. You can group them as a bed or move them to better spots individually. You can radically scale down and call it quits if ten hours of work is all you have time for, and still have something to show for it, and lose nothing. Just a lot more adaptable. And for no real cost or space tradeoff, beyond the watering issue.

 

(If you can get one of those free wood chip dumps without making tons of work for yourself, do it. You can use them to partly fill the grow bags, and the rest will slowly compost down for a future season, or be mulch today and also compost down.)

[sarakingdom]

30 minutes ago, Artemis Prime said:

I've never done any straw bale gardening, but I do know other people who have had success with it, and I'm pretty sure you only need to prep the bales for 7 to 10 days, so if you get it going now you should be in fine shape. I am also teetering between zones 5 and 6, and I rarely plant things out before Memorial Day, so you've got time.

 

This also seems very doable! If it's only like two weeks lead time, absolutely.

[KB Girl]

3 hours ago, spezzy said:

So - if y'all were me, what would you do for a basic set up?

For the sake of frugality I wouldn't want to spend any money on stuff that wouldn't be somewhat permanent. So I think I'd look into setting up some raised beds. We've done raised beds with pallet edges (not sure what they're called in English), they look like this; 

 

They're a cheap option, especially if you can buy them second hand. BUT since you said it floods a bit you could go for metal raised beds instead like these - then they'd last you a lot longer. 

 

You can fill them with garden waste (I think you have branches lying around?) and your chicken/rabbit manure most of the way and then top it off with compost. Not sure how large of a garden you're wanting right now, but buying compost in bulk is pretty cheap over here- it's mostly the transport you're paying for. 

 

If you've got the materials and can deal with the work then something like this could also be an option; 

 

 

In that case, since they're not as high, you could cover the ground with cardboard and then put compost on top. That means no carrots, but an easy weeding situation. And next year the cardboard will be gone and longer root veggies will also be an option. 

 

Maybe it's different where you are, but buying a large quantity of compost was cheaper for us than buying straw bales. Those aren't cheap (over here). 

[sarakingdom]

3 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

under $150 of bagged soil

 

Looks like in modern prices, it's about $160 of bagged Lowes garden soil for forty 5 gallon bags. 2 cubic foot bags for $8 apiece, roughly 20 of them. (You could probably trim a few off, but that seems safe.) Not the cheapest way to get soil, you might be able to do better, but it's not wild for the ranges I've seen, and free delivery might make up for it - larger bulk orders probably involve an actual haulage fee, not big box free shipping. If you could reuse the soil from your mom's old bed, maybe cut that in half, or if you have some yard waste and town compost.

 

So about $200 ballpark for everything except plant starts, a hair more if you pick up some 10 gallons or potato bags. Not the cheapest, but not the worst way to handle the "cheap fast easy, pick two" tradeoffs. It can be amortized over several seasons while you own compost pile picks up speed, and it's probably a good deal versus the cost of your own time and labor, with so much going on.

 

Straw bales are probably a fair amount cheaper in your area, though may need some fraction of that amount of soil, if this article is correct, maybe a bag per bale? It all turns into good reusable soil in the end, though maybe hard to scoop up. Oh, you know what you could do? Use a couple of straw bales as the bulk yard waste in containers, and cut that soil cost in half by splitting the difference between container gardening and straw bale gardening. I don't think you'd need to bother with the bale prep if it were, say, the bottom 50% of a container... it'd be decomposing by the time the plants got down there, and there'd be a fair amount of soil. It is essentially brown yard waste, so I don't really see the difference. Then it all just dumps right into a raised bed next season/year.

 

Worst case, that's $200 for everything delivered to your door within days, ready to go, plus plants. I think slicing off $50 is easy, but a bit more work on your shoulders. Maybe it's possible to slice off another $100 with work and tight time cutoffs, but I wouldn't swear to it,  and your time is probably stretched too thin right now.  I'd probably get free shipping (or pickup, whatever) on containers plus half the soil, and see how far it stretches with yard waste and Amazon boxes and any easily accessible straw, and get the other half delivered later if you need it, or want to stop messing around with twigs and boxes in favor of goats or repairs. The benefit of smaller containers is you don't need to go all in at the start, so you can commit in stages.

[Elastigirl]

Today in my garden,I could see the first green shoots of my Dahlias! And my Peony looks like it's almost ready to bloom.

[spezzy]

23 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

 

I have questions!

 

What are you hoping to get put of the garden this season, as a sense of scale?

Your mom's old beds, what are the ruins like - mounds of dirt with no sides, just leftover dirt, a weedy jungle of unimaginable proportions? (If just just sides are dead, the mound is reusable. Otherwise, the dirt way well be reusable. But a weedy jungle is labor.)

 

 

Great questions. My goal is to be growing 25% of our own food by next year, so I'd like to get started enough that I'm not behind for that goal, if that makes sense. I don't need to be growing 25% of my own food now - this property is too much work for that to be realistic, and 25% is an arbitrary number I made up. 

 

The property here is a bit odd where we have the wetlands, but we also have a lot of land that was under water for a few years about 5 or 6 years ago - some beavers moved in, flooded the property, and then My Mom had to go through a whole bunch of hoops to get the conservation committee to approve of them being removed. Since then the water has retreated back down to original levels, but  we have a bunch of land that's kind of half land - it's either still a bit wet and soggy from its wetland days, or there are entire areas where the otters tried to pull up the grass to create a pond, so it's just a mess. 

 

I made a video that ended up way too long but I tried to fill it with pet tax ? 

 

There's a bit of the property that is always dry, but there's a lot of usable land in the "sometimes wet" or "used to be wet" sections. 

 

So because of this, In addition to growing our own food, our longterm goal is to build in hugelkultur along the wetlands as a dual garden and stormwater management and start to build the land back up - she had also started doing something similar and it's been discussed with the environment/stormwater people as the best idea, so we're going to continue. We have a ton of sticks between the storms and the beavers so that helps, but I definitely can't have those ready until fall or winter, because they are a lot of work. 

 

So I was thinking that for this season it would be starting to build up the garden in one little section that has always been dry.

 

So an overview pic - the pink squares used to be garden beds, surrounded by cinderblocks. The land between the green and the blue lines is sometimes good land, and sometimes mushy land, but never super wet. It does flood 2-3x a year, though. 

 

 

So I'm thinking put the garden on this silly steep hill this year:

 

pink arrow is the edge of the cinderblock beds from the last pic.

 

I realized I didn't include it in the video, but we also have a bed that's built up against the house that's full of construction trash and not dirt, so I can either empty that out and use it, move it, or whatever. 

 

I have a few areas of the yard that have some piles of rabbit manure that has had a few winters since it was created so should be some great stuff, but will definitely have to bring in some soil at some point

 

23 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

 

The absolute speediest option, and the one that forces the least labor on infrastructure before you're ready for it, is containers. Pretty much anything can be grown in a 5 gallon bucket or an IKEA bag - tomatoes, zucchini, whatever. They can be moved to track or find the sun conditions they like while you're figuring out the land, or moved around construction work.

23 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

I think if it were me, I'd do some combination of bed sized and container sized grow bags, for things where I knew I wanted beds and things I was moving around temporary locations. I don't know any way around the expense of purchasing dirt that doesn't involve loads of time to build up a compost pile, though a lot of other yard waste can go in the bottom of those to bulk it out before the soil goes on - sticks, leaves, plain cardboard. It'll hold water and compost down.

 

The dirt is the big expense and the big labor issue - a 5 gallon chunk of dirt that can be filled wherever the dirt is dumped and carried or wheeled away by even a 70 year old gardener and planted immediately, versus needing to cart and shovel wheelbarrow loads to a bed before any planting. And you could put 32 small containers where you want your 32 square foot bed, too, so you can get the instant raised bed effect either way; more expensive on containers than using the larger containers and bigger watering issue, but the smaller ones might be more reusable in future, depending on your plans, so they might be your preferred investment. It sort of comes down to how much modularity you need for your current time and labor constraints, and future reuse.

22 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

 

Okay, I've done window shopping. My preference is the 5-10 gallon bags. The larger grow bags are... fine, but seem less manageable, and a bit less structurally stable. And in large lots of 20+, both 5 and 10 gallon grow bag are about $1 or $1.50, which is about the same per square foot as the larger ones. Plus all that portability and low labor cost per container and speed of deployment. They can each be treated like one square foot of a square foot garden for planting density. (The 10 gallon, maybe like 2 square feet.) The rule of thumb seems to be 13 cubic feet of dirt per 100 gallons, minus whatever dry yard waste or compostable paper and cardboard you can stuff in there. Your town may also offer free compost from garden waste that'd take up some of that space.

 

The tradeoff is watering. They'll need more watering in summer than a larger or in ground bed. But, well, again, tomorrow's problem. Maybe you can even run a dripper hose at some point, if they're grouped together.

 

But I'd say your fastest, cheapest, lowest labor cost startup is to get 40 of those, and a few potato bags if that's your thing, get 50-80 cubic feet of soil dumped somewhere on your property, and fill and deploy one by one as needed, which might be doable by anyone in the household, regardless of age or back status (maybe with wheelbarrows). Not the tidiest, but with long term gardening construction projects going on, eh, what's a pile of dirt. That's like $50 plus soil cost. Forty 5 gallon bags would be about 1.25 times a standard 8x4 bed, forty 10 gallons would be... I'm not doing the surface area calculation, so I can't swear it'd be 3x of surface area, but, like, ballpark 2.5-3x. Plenty for a first season. Reusable in future for starting plants, isolating invasives, or moving them around. They should last several years of reuse. Soil cost is... annoying, but I think it's basically a fixed cost here. It's possible this is a Lowe's delivery rather than a truck. I think something like this might be under $150 of bagged soil. They might deliver it for free.

 

Making the planting units smaller and as-needed keeps it all from being an exercise in how fast Spezzy personally can work with tons on her plate. You can get individual starts in fast without waiting on a whole space to be done, and filling them might even be doable seated with a trowel for folks who can't shovel. You can group them as a bed or move them to better spots individually. You can radically scale down and call it quits if ten hours of work is all you have time for, and still have something to show for it, and lose nothing. Just a lot more adaptable. And for no real cost or space tradeoff, beyond the watering issue.

 

17 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

 

Looks like in modern prices, it's about $160 of bagged Lowes garden soil for forty 5 gallon bags. 2 cubic foot bags for $8 apiece, roughly 20 of them. (You could probably trim a few off, but that seems safe.) Not the cheapest way to get soil, you might be able to do better, but it's not wild for the ranges I've seen, and free delivery might make up for it - larger bulk orders probably involve an actual haulage fee, not big box free shipping. If you could reuse the soil from your mom's old bed, maybe cut that in half, or if you have some yard waste and town compost.

 

So about $200 ballpark for everything except plant starts, a hair more if you pick up some 10 gallons or potato bags. Not the cheapest, but not the worst way to handle the "cheap fast easy, pick two" tradeoffs. It can be amortized over several seasons while you own compost pile picks up speed, and it's probably a good deal versus the cost of your own time and labor, with so much going on.

 

Straw bales are probably a fair amount cheaper in your area, though may need some fraction of that amount of soil, if this article is correct, maybe a bag per bale? It all turns into good reusable soil in the end, though maybe hard to scoop up. Oh, you know what you could do? Use a couple of straw bales as the bulk yard waste in containers, and cut that soil cost in half by splitting the difference between container gardening and straw bale gardening. I don't think you'd need to bother with the bale prep if it were, say, the bottom 50% of a container... it'd be decomposing by the time the plants got down there, and there'd be a fair amount of soil. It is essentially brown yard waste, so I don't really see the difference. Then it all just dumps right into a raised bed next season/year.

 

Worst case, that's $200 for everything delivered to your door within days, ready to go, plus plants. I think slicing off $50 is easy, but a bit more work on your shoulders. Maybe it's possible to slice off another $100 with work and tight time cutoffs, but I wouldn't swear to it,  and your time is probably stretched too thin right now.  I'd probably get free shipping (or pickup, whatever) on containers plus half the soil, and see how far it stretches with yard waste and Amazon boxes and any easily accessible straw, and get the other half delivered later if you need it, or want to stop messing around with twigs and boxes in favor of goats or repairs. The benefit of smaller containers is you don't need to go all in at the start, so you can commit in stages.

 

This is actually really intriguing and something I hadn't thought about. I like the idea of being able to move everything, especially this year where we haven't done a full season with the flooding ourselves, so we're going with some info from my Mom. And then we could empty them wherever we wanted at the end after we have a bit more info and were ready for something a bit more permanent.  I had thought of just getting some potted veggies and using the big pots she has and just doing bare minimum, but this seems like a much better idea. 

 

It looks like we could even use old grain bags or other things that we could either salvage or get for close to nothing. 

 

We could also move them for a day or two if we wanted to put the goats in that area of the yard to "mow" without being worried the goats will eat them. 

 

So yeah, this could be a really great option!! I'm kind of leaning towards a combination - straw bales on the hill (because I can level them easily), and then containers down in the wetlands area. 

 

 

 

22 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

(If you can get one of those free wood chip dumps without making tons of work for yourself, do it. You can use them to partly fill the grow bags, and the rest will slowly compost down for a future season, or be mulch today and also compost down.)

 

Rurik actually got us 2 loads of free wood chips recently, and the company said they'd bring more over the next few weeks - we've asked them to just leave it when they have it so I'm hoping more comes soon! SO M UCH WORK to spread them, though. We're using them for our walkways and driveway, too, so that's gonna be an ongoing project for a long time. 

 

 

 

22 hours ago, Artemis Prime said:

I would call around to various farms to see if anyone had well aged manure they wanted rid of. Riding stables are great for this as they often don't have much room to spread it on fields, so they need alternative ways of disposing of it. It's by far the cheapest way to get dirt, some of them are so happy to see it go they don't charge anything. The key though is making sure it's already rotted down since you'll be planting in it almost right away. You would then also need a truck or trailer to haul it in. If I had to, I'd use my pickup and shovel it out at home, but if possible I'd find a dump truck to borrow. I would probably just dump it in a giant pile where I want to plant, but something like the gardening bags that sarakingdom mentioned (which I hadn't heard of until just now) would probably make an easier transition to raised beds once you have a chance to get them built. 

 

Interesting, I hadn't thought to call around to riding stables or anything like that. Almost all of the farms around here sell manure, [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[{{”Ú—‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚‚ (I'm not sure what that means but Jazz the cat thought it was very important to include it) - but maybe if we were willing to drive a bit we could get it for cheaper. 

 

22 hours ago, Artemis Prime said:

I've never done any straw bale gardening, but I do know other people who have had success with it, and I'm pretty sure you only need to prep the bales for 7 to 10 days, so if you get it going now you should be in fine shape. I am also teetering between zones 5 and 6, and I rarely plant things out before Memorial Day, so you've got time.

 

21 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

 

This also seems very doable! If it's only like two weeks lead time, absolutely.

 

This is what I've been going off of --> https://joegardener.com/podcast/gardening-in-straw-bales/

 

They recommend 18 days of lead time, which if I got them this weekend could potentially mean out by the 1st of June, so it may not be as far off as I thought. 

 

20 hours ago, KB Girl said:

For the sake of frugality I wouldn't want to spend any money on stuff that wouldn't be somewhat permanent. So I think I'd look into setting up some raised beds. We've done raised beds with pallet edges (not sure what they're called in English), they look like this; 

 

They're a cheap option, especially if you can buy them second hand. BUT since you said it floods a bit you could go for metal raised beds instead like these - then they'd last you a lot longer. 

 

We can get pallets for free fairly easily here, which is fantastic and where we're planning on sourcing a lot of materials for things from them for sure! Such a great way to get wood for free, and I've seen a bunch of tutorials on YT on how to make beds out of them. 

 

My biggest issue with raised beds right now is that in order to put them on the hill I want them to end up on, or down in the "wetlands" where my Mom's beds used to be, it's just gonna take a lot of work to do them right because everything is in such poor condition right now, so that's why I've been thinking something a little less permanent (or I could get up and running in a day or two). I have the materials and can build them on my own, it's just time restraints, and that most things are so overrun that it takes a few days of work just to get it to a point where you can start building things on it. 

 

I know the biggest issue is that I have other priorities that HAVE to come first (like the goats and chickens and puppy), but also want to prioritize this - so I know I'm going to have to scale way way back somehow. 

 

20 hours ago, KB Girl said:

 

You can fill them with garden waste (I think you have branches lying around?) and your chicken/rabbit manure most of the way and then top it off with compost. Not sure how large of a garden you're wanting right now, but buying compost in bulk is pretty cheap over here- it's mostly the transport you're paying for. 

 

If you've got the materials and can deal with the work then something like this could also be an option; 

 

 

In that case, since they're not as high, you could cover the ground with cardboard and then put compost on top. That means no carrots, but an easy weeding situation. And next year the cardboard will be gone and longer root veggies will also be an option. 

 

Maybe it's different where you are, but buying a large quantity of compost was cheaper for us than buying straw bales. Those aren't cheap (over here). 

 

Yeah, we have a few branches (this made me lol because we have SO MANY BRANCHES ? ),  and have an entire area of woods behind the house that we can start pulling from for more - I'd loooooove to build things like this using the materials we have long term, I've never made them but I've been trying to figure out how to do things like this because I think it looks so cool. 

 

 

 

 

MY HEAD IS SPINNING WITH IDEAS THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!!

 

 

[KB Girl]

2 hours ago, spezzy said:

We can get pallets for free fairly easily here, which is fantastic and where we're planning on sourcing a lot of materials for things from them for sure! Such a great way to get wood for free, and I've seen a bunch of tutorials on YT on how to make beds out of them. 

 

No actually, pallet edges already ARE beds, no need to do anything with them. They've got hinges on them. You just unfold them and put them where you want them. It's what we used in our garden (see photo). We got most of them for free.

Those DYI ones are much prettier though  and you could make them tall and more durable if you wanted to. 

 

But honestly after looking at your video and considering all the work you've already got cut out for you I'd probably just get my hands on 10 cubic yard of compost (not soil), add some to the existing beds and with the rest just make non-edged beds for this year on the for-sure dry parts. Maybe lie some branches around it if you feel like it. It doesn't matter if it's not flat, if stuff grows there it won't flow away with rain. This video is stupidly long and you can skip a lot of it, but it's an excellent guide on how to make garden beds the no-dig way. In short; put down cardboard, cover with thick layer of compost, put in plants, done. 

 

We did that at our friends garden this year, I think I posted some picture somewhere here, I'll find them in a sec. 

 

You'll probably need some fencing around them, but the same is true for raised beds. 

 

And then you can take more time to plan (and build) for next year. Moving the soil around next year is not ideal of course, but if that's what ends up being needed then you can. 

 

And considering the work load, put in a lot of potatoes, beets and squash and zucchini types because those are very low maintenance and take over well enough that you won't need to do any weeding. And use the first bed you showed that has a lot of shade for salads etc. 

 

And when you're making plans for the future don't forget the greenhouse

Love your hugenkultur plans! I think that'll be really great

[KB Girl]

On 4/24/2023 at 8:05 PM, KB Girl said:

My friend's garden; 

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We put down cardboard to kill the grass and covered with quite a bit of compost- the no dig method. It's going to be a large garden! 

My 3yo was very helpful, my 6yo was mostly busy petting the horse and dog and eating snacks xD 

 

 

On 4/27/2023 at 8:08 PM, KB Girl said:

Spend a couple of hours in my friends garden today!

 

Some pictures behind the spoiler. 

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We got the cardboard for free from local shops, got the wood chips for free and spend 150 euros on the compost. 

The pallets  in the background are our compost bins, also got those for free. 

But you don't need to do wood chips for paths, but we had to put cardboard there to kill the pasture grass, that stuff will take over in seconds if you leave it alive in-between beds. And just cardboard didn't seem like a great idea. 

[Elastigirl]

Went to the garden store yesterday and bought some veggies and herbs, zucchini, collard greens (I've never done this before) pickling cucumbers, strawberries, and oregano. Also bought some compost. Today I laid out the compost, along with a thin layer of grass clippings. I was going to plant stuff, but ran out of energy. I am  a heat wimp this time of year. I love the warm weather, but 70 degrees feels so hot when I'm working outside.? Tomorrow I will plant. I will also plant flowers, and flower seeds. 

[Everstorm]

On 5/8/2023 at 10:21 PM, Elastigirl said:

Today in my garden,I could see the first green shoots of my Dahlias! And my Peony looks like it's almost ready to bloom.

Which peonies do you have?

[Everstorm]

I was so excited to see my irises blooming today, only to realize the ones I bought were mislabeled (like not even close, except that they are both bearded iris.  Whomp, whomp.  Now I am waiting to see if the other two I bought at the same time are also wrong.

 

I would take them back, but who are we kidding?  They are still pretty and I am a plant dragon. They can't be in the spot they are in (too much blue/purple there already)  but I am sure they go somewhere.

 

[Sovalis]

Oh goodness, I love that periwinkle colour. *swoon*