Building the Garden

     So, I spent March 16 in the back yard building the garden. Below is a photo of most of the yard. It's taken from the northwest corner, facing the southeast. This picture was taken earlier in the week--before the chicken coop was built. You'll see the coop in the other pictures. My thinking on the building of the coop will be explained in a later post. 

      Obviously, the compost heap is in the back. The circle around the birdbath was planted with strawberries that reproduced more than they produced in last summer's garden. I transplanted them here in the late fall. You can see that I have tilled a square ring around the birdbath circle. This is where I will plant about 200 tomato plants.

       
     The photo below was taken from the southwest corner of the garden facing the southeast. This is the site of the chicken coop before it was built.

     While talking with a local woman who expressed interest in my organic gardening, I was asked several questions about beginning the tomato seeds. We have a room in the southwest corner of the house that has a few large south-facing windows. Though the windows have big awnings that keep most direct sunlight out, they are big and bright enough to support seedlings during their first weeks after germination. Here's a shot of some seedlings at the window:

     Once they get their first true leaves, I pot them and put them outside to harden off every day that's not rainy or below 50 degrees. This year, I invested in some plastic pots I found on Amazon.com. I think I paid $30 for 180 of them and they are substantial enough that they should be reusable for several years. I also bought the pale green trays pictured below. I only bought four of them because they were a bit more expensive and I wanted to see if they were worth it. For next spring, I will definitely be investing in some more of these trays but I'll buy them in the winter when the prices are lower.

     This western side of the house is a good place to harden off the seedlings. It's the one spot on our property where the birds leave them alone.

      Once I've set up the scaffolding for the tomatoes, I can leave the hardened-off potted plants behind bird netting for several days at a time. Once a good number of the plants can be left out like this, I feel like the mother of many children whose oldest are finally spending the day at school--a few more hours in my day.

     So, the scaffolding. This is a way of staking my indeterminate tomato plants that I came up with after the season was well underway last year. Necessity was the mother of it--the plants were so tall and heavy, nothing I was trying was working well. What I ultimately came up with (and see myself using for the foreseeable future) is a trellis system in which each module is made of five pieces of 10-foot rebar. Four of the pieces are bent into an upside-down L shape with the top bend at 7 1/2 feet up. Two of the 2 1/2-foot parts of two pieces are zip-tied together. Then, the other two 2 1/2-foot sections of two other rebar pieces are zip-tied together and the fifth piece of unbent rebar is zip-tied on top holding the five pieces together in the shape of a children's swing-set. The rebar pieces are so thin and muted in color that they are difficult to see, but here they are:

      I have two twenty-foot lengths of this trellis on each of the sides of the square ring I had tilled out. I will plant the tomatoes one foot apart and prune them up tightly, wrapping each one around a piece of twine tied to the base of the tomato plant at the bottom and to the top rebar piece at the top. This structure is strong enough to support all these plants when they get to be ten feet tall and are covered in heavy fruit. They have the added advantage of being able to be taken down and easily stored during the winter. Next year I will configure them into a new arrangement. The photo below is the view from the street on the west side of the property. When it is warm enough to plant beans, this view will be on its way to disappearing thanks to a line of rebar trellises that will be covered with purple hyacinth vines. That will give the garden some privacy and protect it from the vicious late-day sun in August.

     Below is a view of the chicken coop at the far south end of the garden, framed by the freshly-built tomato trellises:

Above is a photo taken from the eastern side of the garden. The road and neighbor's grey house will be blocked from view when rebar scaffolding I will build at that end of the garden is covered in the hyacinth vines.

     And here is the chicken coop under construction:

      Here is the view from above. You can see that the square ring of tomato trellises are bisected on three sides by a narrow walkway of straw. (The side of the square closest to the camera has not had the trellises put up yet because I'm needing to get some more rebar.) The tomatoes will be under-planted with basil, lima beans, lettuce, and spinach. down the center of each side of the square I will plant zinnias, cosmos, and Queen Ann's lace. The spare space in the four corners will be planted with peppers, beans, and eggplant.