Gardening Update

I confess that the garden was a mess last year. I never finished fencing it, had trouble keeping it weeded, and Lula got in and ate most of the acorn squash while we were away on a trip. That being said, the soil test I sent off in the spring was reassuring, I had some good harvests, and I planted some Austrian winter peas in the fall to enrich the soil. I've also added our homemade compost (which never fully composted, but that's another issue), finished the fence, and have Mindy's assurances that she will be lending a hand now that her flower gardens are mostly planted (though a woman's flower garden is never finished, right mom and Mindy?). So things are looking up! With her help, I may actually be able to keep the crabgrass from taking over. Here's a photo of how things stand at the moment:

March 18, 2019: Weeded, fenced, with walkways partially cardboarded. Almost ready for planting!

Another major improvement: the cold frame, which is a box in which you can start seedlings in the late winter and move plants into in the fall. I've found that Boone's 6-month growing season is just a little too short to get a good harvest for many crops, and the cold frame seems to be the best solution for that issue. Row covers would get blown away within weeks, and starting seeds indoors is way too painstaking. I built my cold frame out of plywood with a plexiglass top angled to catch the most sun. It looks right at home burrowed into the south-facing slope between the driveway and the garden: 

My homemade cold frame, ideally situated on a south-facing slope, protected from the wind, and dug into the earth.

I sowed seeds in the cold frame the last day of February, and they weathered the subsequent cold snap just fine. Proof of concept! Here they are today, growing like mad (most of them at least):

Less than 3 weeks after planting, my cold frame is popping.

 My next improvement will need to be rebuilding the raised beds. The big downside of building these puppies out of wood is that you shouldn't use pressure-treated wood for growing food, and non-pressure treated wood only lasts 4 or 5 years in the elements. I'm guessing our predecessors built these boxes 4 years ago, and they are literally falling apart. I'm leaning towards building the next generation out of cinder blocks, which would be easy and last forever. Mindy had a great idea of fencing in the whole area to keep the dogs out of it, which would probably up our yield by 100%... although we would no longer have the joy of watching Lula "The Carrot Picker" do her thing.

My 4 year old raised beds are starting to fall apart... with Lula terrorizing Pepper in the background, as always.

Mindy and I also had a nice time pruning some of the fruit trees together, and are looking forward to seeing a few apples, pears, apricots, and plums come in over the next year or two. Though things grow slower here in the high country, it's worth the wait! Thanks for reading-- I've got to go water my seedlings now!