The Kitchen Garden Project part 2

After the pre season orientation for the Kitchen Garden Project, we got into a pretty stormy patch of weather.  So I took the opportunity to go through my Growing Guide provided by GRuB to help get people started.

I made a list of all the vegetables I want to grow.  I made my planting schedule and then I made the garden map.

Today we had some really good weather, so I went outdoors and sort of prepped the area where the raised beds will be.

Because I want to put them on a spot that slopes, I wanted to make sure that the beds would be level.  I dug the grass out in some spots and filled it in at the bottom of the slope to make it level.

During this process, I got a call from the electrical inspector telling me he would be at my house in about 30 minutes, so I set the timer and kept working outside.  I was out back and listening for someone driving in, just in case he was early.

I didn't hear him drive in, but Rocky did.  The best watch dog in the world is my Rooster.  He always tells me when someone drives in.  He uses the same voice to alert me as he uses when a hawk flies through the neighborhood.  Fed Ex,, a contractor, or anyone else, if I'm out in the back yard, I can always tell that I need to go answer my door when he makes that sound.

After the electric inspector left, Mike came outside and took one look at the bed I had just prepped (a 4' x 8' patch of freshly dug earth), and wanted to know what the heck I was doing.  He was suspicious of the dimensions coupled with the fact that he's been kind of a pain lately.

By the end of the day, I had 2 spots ready for raised beds, and a third spot mostly ready.  I just need to transplant some irises and I'll be finished.  It's strange about the irises.  They've never bloomed here.  They used to bloom profusely before I moved them to this location.  This is one of the reasons why getting raised beds with good soil is so important to me.  Plants don't really thrive here.

I also pulled out all of the alkanet which grows like a noxious weed in my yard.  And here's the story about that.

I used to have tons of foxglove in my yard.  I also used to have lots of borage.  And I've grown comfrey in the distant past.  Alkanet fooled me into thinking it was one of these three plants, and so managed to get established on my land.

One year a plant came up in my yard under the birch tree, where the foxglove used to grow, and I was thrilled.  Hooray! I hadn't seen foxglove in my yard for a couple of years.  I was very careful not to mow it, and encouraged it when it began springing up in other places, including my herb bed.

Yikes! This plant was Alkanet.  (Not the purple dye Alkanet, but plain ol' Alkanet).  It gets gigantic, and spreads everywhere!  You should see the root on this thing.  And it choked out many of my smaller herbs.  I didn't think you could kill lemon balm or catnip, but this thing decimated those established herbs and put an end to my alpine strawberries too.  Only my violets moved out of the herb bed, and survived by finding new ground.  They even threatened to overwhelm the huge rosemary bush.

Last year I began removing the largest alkanet plants and it was no easy task, but I needed space for my potatoes, and since my herb bed was destroyed I decided to plant them there.  I have a feeling potatoes don't like ground where alkanet has grown, because they didn't do very well.

Another thing that fooled me, was that I let some small plants come up because I thought it was borage.  Yay! Borage!!  Well, alkanet is in the borage family, so it looks like borage seedlings when it first comes up.

It took me two years to figure out that this wasn't going to be foxglove, comfrey, or borage coming up in my yard, but by the time I identified this intruder, it was taking over.

Anyhoo, Now that I know it, I'll pull it as soon as I see it, while the tap root is still small.  I got most of it today, but I need to check the rest of the yard.  (I also need to check for scotch broom.  That stuff can really get out of hand!)

Back to the Garden Project though...I couldn't seem to stop.  After my weeding frenzy, I dug out a spot for the compost too.

The chickens loved the activity.  I threw the dandelion plants dug from the garden beds, over the fence to them.  And also large patches of quack grass that I didn't want in the compost.  Maybe when it gets hotter, but in its current state the rhizomes would probably grow in the compost pile.

Okay, I guess I have to stop writing because my computer is acting like it's possessed and doing all kinds of things I don't want it to, making it too distracting to enjoy writing.

Oh well.