Port Potager

After it finally warmed up a bit yesterday afternoon, we got outside to do some soil prep. Many of our beds are filled with that 50-50 loam/compost mixture that we brought in last fall , so they won't need anything more than a top dressing of compost when things are planted.  The areas where things were planted last year , though, need to be replenished, so we added a few wheelbarrows of compost and turned it into those beds. This aerated the soil as well. It's been great so far this season to be able to use our own compost from the piles we started when we first moved in back in 2010: We started with the one closest to the garage, and there was a lot of good stuff at the bottom. We pretty much used most of that one — enough to be able to remove the wire from around the outside. We want to use these two piles up and replace them with sturdier pallet compost bins , so this was a good start on making space for those as well. It's not like the compost just sc...

This weekend was the first time in over a month that we've been able to get back to prepping the garden beds. August definitely got away from us, with going to Pennsylvania, hosting visitors, and getting our summer fun in before the start of school. Remember that crabgrass that got a foothold in July while we were at the beach? Here's what that looks like now: So we spent this weekend clearing the weeds out of two more quadrants of the garden. This went more easily than we expected because the weeds are starting to die back now that they've gone to seed. I'm sure all the seed that got dropped will plague us for seasons to come, but if we're lucky most of it will be buried too deep in the beds to ever germinate. After the weeding we covered one quadrant in black plastic. This will protect it from any more weeds taking root until we can get to it again. This quadrant is pretty empty of any soil at all, so we will need to order more loam at some point. W...

Preparing  From a gardening best-practices standpoint, we probably never should have gone on vacation two weeks ago. It was awesome, but you may recall that we came back to garden beds that looked like this: Well, they're even worse now—completely covered in crabgrass and other assorted weeds. If we had skipped vacation, we would have had the garden beds under control before this happened, but no. As it is, we have a completely irritating extra step as we prepare the planting beds. Step 1: Pull the weeds.  Last weekend we took the time to cover all the beds around the large patio area with the black plastic we had used in the side yard . This didn't work as brilliantly as it did on the lawn area, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because it wasn't as hot or sunny this week, or maybe crabgrass is just ridiculously well adapted to people trying to kill it. Some bits were dead, but most was just starting to yellow, which left us a lot to pull. We ended u...