After my success at gardening last year, Marie suggested that I plan on taking some produce to a Farmers Market to sell this year. A handful of peppers and a couple bags of lettuce per week would not be worth the trouble, so I decided to expand the garden and produce things that would be profitable sellers at a farmer’s market.
This is The View From the Top (our house) of the expanded garden. Because of the slope I have to do almost all of the gardening in these boxes. I just finished building all these boxes and most of them still need to be dug-in to level them up.Â
The three boxes at the bottom, next to the barn, are last year’s garden (along with 3 more behind the barn). The empty space in the elbow of that garden was a potato patch last year and will be filled with a wide variety of sweet pepper plants this year: 60 some odd plants, producing sweet red, yellow, orange and purple bell peppers as well as sweet banana peppers and lipstick peppers.
The large box next to the bird feeder post and behind the crepe myrtle tree is our blueberry patch. It is dug-in, filled with soil, planted with 8, three year old blueberry bushes, and mulched with pine straw. That one is ready to go.
The small box next to it is for strawberries. The three sticks just uphill from these mark the locations of posts that will support a grape trellis. I grouped these so I could build a PVC framework over all of them and cover it with bird netting to help insure that we actually get to enjoy some of these crops.
Last years boxes are planted with lettuce, chard, onions, carrots, spinach and herbs and have been producing for me all winter long – under the shelter of PVC & plastic hoop houses. I’ve removed those now so the plants don’t bake in the warmer weather: it stays in the mid 60’s to mid 70’s most of the time with a couple of 80 degree days already. I hope this early warmth doesn’t signal a scorcher of a summer.
The other boxes will bet planted, using the square foot gardening method, with asparagus, corn, a variety of beans, squash, eggplant, turnips, beets, onions, potatoes (I’ll have to add depth to those boxes), melons, and tomatoes. It is a long and varied list and I probably missed something, but you get the idea.
Some of these plants have already been started from seed indoors and have not only sprouted but gained enough growth to need potting to wait until their boxes are done. So much to do – so little time to do it. So, I’d better quit typing and get digging!
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