vegangirl.com

Check out Veggie Trader! A new website that allows you to search for fruits and veggies grown by your neighbors in local back yard gardens. Sign up and you can trade your excess garden vegetables with your neighbors. Yet another way of building a strong local community!

It doesn’t seem like there’s much going on for Asheville yet, but I did my part to help change that by signing up for a Veggie Trader account. If my garden ever manages to produce excess I will be sure to list what I’ve got and hopefully trade with a neighbor for some good stuff that I’m lacking.

Sign up! Eat well! Get to know your neighbors!

When I started my garden (much too) late last year and then again this spring, I said I’d leave updates on how things were going.

Long story short, they went not very well. I only managed to scratch out a few young chard leaves and gave up on the rest. But luckily, I also came into a job around the same time as my garden was dying and so was able to get some professional help.

I’ve got some beautiful raised beds now growing greens, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and okra. And much more on the way.

However, I’m posting all my gardening updates at foodscout.org rather than here on vegangirl, so if you’re interested, you can check it out. I’ll be posting again pretty soon since my squash is starting to come in. I’m also going to be adding another raised bed and some rain barrels for watering in the next few weeks.

Plum Tree

When I moved into my house 2 years ago, I was told that the pretty little tree in the front yard was a “decorative cherry tree”. What a waste to grow inedible fruit, I thought to myself.

I never noticed any fruit at all on it last year. But this year, sure enough, little hard “cherries” started appearing. But then they kept on growing, and getting lighter in color. And then the squirrels started eating them.

Well if the squirrels are eating them, what are the chances that I can’t also eat them?

Plum

By coincidence, I had to have a tree guy come by due to some other overgrown trees in the yard. And he said “oh cool, a plum tree!”

Wow. I have an actual fruit tree in my yard! And the few plums I was able to eat before the squirrels stole every last one of them, were absolutely delicious.

Bowl of Plums

I went out onto my back porch today to take in a little vitamin D, and happened to notice that my blueberry bush – the one that I had written off for dead not a few weeks before – blossoming with new leaves. It reminded me of the ill-fated “winter greens” that I planted in October around the same time.

Spring is here. Time for new beginnings. I figure this time, my leafy greens have a couple of things going for them that they didn’t have last time around:

1. No more sub-freezing temperatures
2. No more cats using the garden as a litterbox

I used a metal rake to break the dirt up a bit and smooth things over, then sprinkled some all-purpose organic fertilizer, that I had bought for some good reason I’m sure, around the planting area. Then I buried little rows of left-over seeds from last fall.

If this goes well, maybe I’ll venture into planting some root vegetables or vine plants.

I realized that I promised garden updates after planting various things last fall and I never filled you in on the results. Well, they are not good.

The mint plant was doing quite well for a while but then it died after a big rain storm. I can’t be sure but I think it was from getting dumped on by a rooftop waterfall resulting from a clogged gutter.

My winter greens didn’t last long. I was very good, at first, about covering them with the frost cover when it was going to get cold at night. But we had many cold nights and that frost cover was a big big pain. I got lazy. The chard died first. Then the kale and winter lettuce. But the garden is all prepared now for spring so I may plant something soon now that the weather is nice.

I thought the blueberry bush was completely dead as well but upon closer inspection, there are a few new buds on its branches! So there is still hope for that one. That’s the blueberry bush pictured above.

Like a kid asking if it’s Christmas yet over and over again, I’ve been running out to my garden every day for the last week, hoping to see a few plants sprouting up. I planted dino kale, winter lettuce, and rainbow chard 11 days ago and was starting to worry that my haphazard gardening system (if you can call it a system) was going to fail straight from the get-go.

You cannot imagine my joy at seeing little greens shooting up from all 3 rows. The dino kale has quite a few plants growing – a couple look like they are already an inch tall. The lettuce has about half a dozen sprouts, and I found just one chard sprout starting to grow.

After planting the seeds, as discussed in my last post, all I had to do to get the plants to this point was (1) water the garden regularly and evenly and (2) chase my cat out of the garden so he wouldn’t use it as a litter box. Most times, both (1) and (2) happened simoultaniously.

My camera doesn’t take very good closeups so there is a somewhat blurry picture of a few of the kale sprouts.

I made a commitment at the beginning of the year that I would plant a garden before the year ended. Here it is October and all I had was a big sheet of black plastic covering a big chunk of my back yard. I put it down in January to kill the weeds, thinking I’d have a thriving garden a few months later, but never got farther than pick axing some of the area to break up the dirt.

Yesterday, I called over to my favorite local gardening supply store and asked if there was anything at all I could still plant this late in the year here in Asheville. Lucky for me, they listed off a few of my favorite leafy green vegetables! They sent me away with 3 packets of seeds, a small box of fertilize, and some frost cover for the nights when it may drop below freezing.

To get the soil ready, I broke it up just a little more with a pick ax, mixed in a cup of the fertilizer and just over half a bag of “Nature’s Helper” (soil conditioner) I still had left over, and then mixed it all around and smoothed it out with a metal rake. I planted one row of seeds each of dino kale, winter lettuce, and rainbow chard.

To prevent my dog from turning into a nice cool, messy dog bed (and hopefully discouraging the cats from turning into a litter box), I picked up 30 ft. of garden fencing to protect it.

And so there you have it – I now officially have a garden. Smaller than I had envisioned but it’s a start! We’ll see in a few weeks how well it works out.

Outside the grocery store this weekend, a man was selling pints of blueberries, picked fresh on his farm that very morning. He had a couple of blueberry bushes for sale as well for $24.95 each. Always looking to be more self-sufficient, I couldn’t resist taking my own blueberry bush home with me.

The farmer was happy to give me some advice about how best to plant it, and I got some further instruction from the guy at the local garden supply store.

Blueberry bushes can tolerate some shade, but the more sun they get the better they grow. Also, because my yard has a lot of clay, I need to take extra care to add some things to the soil so that the roots don’t get soaked with water.

The farmer suggested that after digging a hole for the bush, that I put some mulch at the bottom to lift the roots up away from the clay. The bush should then sit a few inches higher than the level of the yard around it. That way, if it rains, the water will have somewhere to go, away from the roots, until it is able to absorb fully into the ground.

The man at the garden supply store recommended adding something called “Nature’s Helper” which is a soil conditioner. It costs less than $3 for a 20 pound bag. He suggested that I mix in some of the yard dirt in with the Nature’s Helper to “get the plant used to the yard.”

They are the experts so I followed these instructions as best I could.

When I decided to start gardening (see earlier posts in this category) I really thought that by now I would have a lovely backyard garden, springing forth a bounty of fruits and vegetables. It’s taking a long time to get that going. I need to bring in some decent dirt and finish loosening up what’s there with a pickax. I’ve been dragging my feet on it quite a bit due to the expense and the effort involved.

But that’s no reason not to get some other gardening projects done. I always thought that planting herbs around my front yard would be a practical and beautiful addition to the decorative plants that are already there. There is probably a “right” way to do that. Waiting until I found the motivation to look into all of that was just holding me back from actually doing it.

I’ve had a potted mint plant in my kitchen for months, doing quite well. I recently saw a cilantro plant for sale at the grocery store and just had to bring it home. My kitchen counter was getting too crowded so I figured it was time to plant the herbs.

So, what was the complex process for starting my “herb garden”? I dug a hole, planted the herbs, and gave them a little water. After 2 days, they look quite well. I’ll post another picture after they’ve either flourished or died.

It’s been almost 3 months since I covered up my new garden area with black plastic in order to kill the weeds and lawn underneath. Amazingly, some of the plants are still alive under there, so I’ve decided to move the process along by breaking up the dirt with a pickax and pulling out the weeds. In retrospect, maybe I should have hacked up the yard first to cut the plants from their roots.

Pickaxing the ground is a lot of hard work, so I will be doing a small area at a time over the next couple of weeks. Once an area of dirt is broken up, it’s very easy to pull the weeds out from the roots. You can also run your hands or a rake through the dirt and find a lot of stray roots that way. When I’m done for the day, I am going to cover the dirt back up to keep killing off any plants that may still have roots down there.

I want to reiterate that I am not an experienced gardener. I am figuring things out as I go based on what I remember from years ago, what I learn from friends, and what I find on the internet. Any advice is welcomed.