My Garden 2013

[matt walker]

Well gang, it's here, at least in the PNW. I haven't been online much as it was nearly 70°F here all weekend. I dug two long row beds using my sloped bed/tilled path method. I was able to get a few hundred onion sets in Saturday before company came over. Friday I sowed the other with all manner of early greens, brassicas, and peas. I did that one by filling a little cup with seeds from some 30 packets and broadcasting them all over the bed. I have done that a few times now, and am really pleased with how those beds grow. I still will have rows and hoes for some stuff, the critical staples that I need to can, but for the most part the "wild" garden seem to produce plenty of food with a minimum of effort for me.

The greenhouse is going strong, and I have greens up and almost ready to eat in there. There are tomatoes an peppers coming up, my goji berries are leafed out, and it looks great in there.

I was also able to transplant 6 blueberry bushes into the yard where I can manage them better. The garden itself is full of food, early volunteer mustards, tons of kale and brussel sprouts, chives, green onions, all the herbs. The miner's lettuce is coming back strong, as are the leeks from three years ago I let go to seed. I had read that they are perennial in my climate, but I doubted it. Well, I was wrong, they are all over the place. Garlic is up and looks great. I'm as excited as ever for this garden season, and eating the greens these last weeks has been fantastic.

[boo]

It sounds like it's all working out well Matt - I hope your growing season is a good one this year!

[matt walker]

Here's a little video of the current state of my garden from today....

[mannytheseacow]

Looks great, Matt! I like how you incorporate all the wild plants as well and allow them to grow. I think this is very important for locking up nutrients and providing valuable cover.

I attended a soil health session last week and have copies of the presentations. These were oriented at large-scale ag in the midwest but the concepts are applicable to any system on the planet. Pretty interesting stuff... anyone interested in pdf's message me and I'll send them to you.

[matt walker]

Thanks Manny. Yeah, I've been slowly converting from a bare earth garden to a wild one, and am continually impressed by how much food it produces with very little input. It's tough though, even by myself. The day before I shot the video most of the garden was head high kale/nettle/cabbage forest. It finally got to me such that I scythed it all down. I feel like it provided a ton of organic matter as mulch for the garden, but it's hard to know where to draw the line on letting stuff go. I've got so many kale seeds in that garden due to letting stuff go to seed that it's my number one weed, which is a good thing I think. Anyway, yeah, it's a balance between providing an environment in which some of the more delicate domesticated crops can thrive while still letting enough of the wild stuff go to provide cover and variety. I'm working towards a wild, self sustaining garden for some parts though, and it's going well.

I'm interested in your presentations. I have a small tractor and I've been kicking around the idea of getting a small cultivator set up and trying to do a small food patch in row crops, to try to produce a large amount of food for the pigs. I'm not sure I'm going to do it yet, but I'm curious about the techniques and how it would produce for me. I'd also like to compare for myself the two wildly divergent methods of my wild garden and a machine based row crop. Do you have a link or shall I PM you my email?

[Thundersnow]

Thanks for sharing this! Keep up the good and tasty work...

[matt walker]

Thanks Thunder! I need to get some photos up of my greenhouse, I've got green tomatoes already!

[pa_friendly_guy]

Green Tomatoes, Oh My Goodness, I am Jealous, I may have a bloom or 2 on one tomato but noting set yet. As a matter of fact it frosted here this weekend, much to my surprise. I was fortunate and the frost settled down in the valley and did not hurt my garden on top of the Hill , but it was a little bit scary. I really thought we were done with frost. Nature has a way of surprising us though, Farmers have been putting up with that uncertainty for years.

[Myrth]

Great garden!

Yes this spring has been a cool one here also. We got perilously close to a frost, and I feared that we would lose our cherries and apples again this year, but thankfully the thermometer stopped plunging and we didn't quite freeze!

[matt walker]

Here's a follow up to that last video. It's pretty crappy, I didn't really have much of a plan, other than I wanted to show you guys progress. This is almost exactly 2 months to the day from the last one, so that's sort of interesting, I guess. Also, I give you a little glimpse of a new polyculture woodchip planting area near the driveway, and a quick trip into the greenhouse....