Port Potager

 We have a little war going on in one of our garden beds: This is the blueberry bed, but all those green, healthy-looking plants are not  blueberries. They are raspberries, and they are taking over: Here you can see a sad, yellowish blueberry that’s been completely overrun by vigorous green raspberry canes. These canes have jumped — or rather, burrowed — from their bed under the grass path and into the blueberry bed.  And they’ve already managed to kill one blueberry bush entirely: We’ve struggled with blueberries ever since we planted them, and last year we replaced several . That was the year of the drought , though, and they haven’t done well: Though this one managed to put on some decent growth, you can see from the color that it’s not doing well. I suspect that we’ve never been able to get the soil acidic enough for them to thrive, and the discolored leaves are a sign that they are not getting the nutrients they need because the...

Last weekend when we planted our potatoes , we decided that we would expand our potato plot into the strawberry bed, which we made room for by emptying a very sad cranberry bed of its pathetic plants: To make sure that we wouldn't just be killing strawberries in that bed the way we killed those cranberries, we grabbed a soil test kit at our local feed store (yes, that's a thing ): In all our years of gardening, we've never once bothered with a soil test. I guess we've just gotten lucky with good soil, and all our compost use paid off. So this was fun.  You fill up to the first line of the plastic test tube with soil from a depth of 4 inches. Then you empty that little capsule of powder into the tube. Add water, shake it up, and let it settle: Then you compare the color of the water to the chart on the package. This is very alkaline, which explains why the cranberries never thrived. They need really acidic soil, so they were never able t...

Although most of our garden is devoted to growing annual vegetables, we do have several beds set aside for some perennials that come back every year. It's nice to have some (mostly) worry-free crops that just do their thing without much attention: Just add a compost top-dressing in the spring and enjoy the bounty. Here's how our perennial fruits and veggies are faring this year.  Our strawberry patch is three quarters of the way planted. The Tribute strawberries in the foreground were our first plants, and they are now in their third season. The lush patch in the middle are last year's Honeoye planting, and the dark compost section in the background marks our newly planted Seascape strawberries.  I have to say, I'm not that impressed with the Tribute strawberries. Their flavor can be kind of tart for straight eating, and the plants have not bounced back from this winter very well. In another couple years it will be time to replace them, and we will probabl...

Summer raspberries are on their way out (although as half of ours are fall-bearing, we should have another round in September). But look what else we have:  Yup, it's a blueberry. It's one of only a handful we'll get this year. And here's where they came from: That tangled mess is on the side of our driveway that we ignore. Mixed up in a lot of weeds and property-line plantings are a scraggly blueberry and black raspberry . And it's bearing fruit, despite abject neglect: The cruel irony is that the blueberries that we spent money on and actually take care of in hopes of producing fruit look like this: What's that you say? You can't see any blueberry bushes? Well the two to the left of this bed are pretty much leafless, dead sticks. The one to the right has like ten leaves on two spindly branches. The other three are in slightly better shape. Here's the sturdiest of the bunch: It measures about 18 whole inches hi...

It started raining here Friday night, and it hasn't stopped yet. The weather radar shows the storm as already having moved out to sea, but it's still drizzling here in Newburyport. Back on Friday afternoon I quickly planted all the seeds on the schedule for this weekend to take advantage of the coming rain. In the ground and soaking are more corn and Brussels sprouts, plus new hills of cantaloupe and watermelon. I also had to replant almost all of our sunflowers and one of the borage plants — something pretty efficiently mowed the newly-emerged seedlings down. I didn't have time to cover them, but the first dry(ish) day we have, those things will get row covers to deter what I assume is the work of the chipmunks. I have to admit, getting to watch movies with the kids and take a four-hour nap instead of going like gangbusters outside all weekend has been a nice change of pace. My back is mostly better now, but this rain delay has probably been good for my aching body! A...

Yesterday we planned to plant our newly arrived blueberry bushes in the beds we had prepared for them last fall . To our surprise, when we opened the package it wasn't just blueberries, but all of the small fruits we had ordered from Miller Nurseries . This turned our relaxing, light day in the garden into a pretty busy one — and a windy one at that. The weather the past three nights has dipped to just above freezing (so we continue to water and cover plants each evening just in case — a total pain), and during the day it has been sunny but incredibly windy. Not that much fun to be out in, but we had a lot to get into the ground. Before the planting even happened, though, Kirk replaced our broken fence sections . Those had been down for a year and a half, and we finally have managed to be good neighbors and get them fixed. They look all nice and new now (which looks a little strange in comparison to the old sections surrounding it), but it should weather into the same sil...

Today, after a month or so hiatus from gardening, we broke out all of our graph paper, catalogues, and reference books to begin planning for the 2012 garden:  We already had four giant (1 square = 6 inches of planting area) graphs drawn out and ready to go from last summer — one graph for each quadrant of the garden. That was pretty overwhelming, so we started with the easiest thing: planning the berry beds that are off to the side. Back in October we built them, filled them with dirt, and added sulfur to acidify the beds that will be for blueberries and cranberries. This is what they look like today, in their finished state: To the left is the raspberry bed. Down the center of this 22-foot long bed will be 8 plantings of raspberries: three  Latham (a red, midsummer raspberry), three  Fall Red (an everbearer from UNH that will produce in summer and again throughout the fall), one  Allen (a black raspberry), and one  Bristol (another black r...