Garden 2007

Here are a few pictures of my garden for 2007. Because of a bad back I can't do gardening the way most people do - using a tiller. My garden consists of a series of 4x8 ft raised beds, so it is like planting a garden in large flower pots. I use Preen to keep the weeds out so I don't have to do any weed pulling.

Because of the limited space I am a firm believer in vertical gardening. If it will climb a trellis that is how I grow it. The Christmas Lima is a runner so it gets to climb up a trellis made of chicken wire and supported by a couple 2x2's. There is one trellis on each side of the raised bed and the beans have grown each trellis and grown together between the two. The cucumbers are also grown on a trellis, just one for the cucumbers but it is 16 ft long. There is a cucumber plant on each end and they are growing toward the middle.

The tomatoes are grown inside tomato cages. I like that better than using stakes and having to tie the plants to the stakes. The downside is the tomato plants always grow way too heavy for the cages and I have to drive a stake down through them to keep them from falling over. It's still less hassle than tying to stakes.

The potatoes are grown using straw for hilling instead of dirt. All you have to do is use the straw the same way you normally used dirt to hill the plants up so they could make potatoes. There are several advantages to using straw. For one thing it holds moisture in and keeps the heat out. For me the biggest advantage is at harvest time. With straw it is very easy to pull the plants up, occasionally with a potato attached. After you have all the plants up all you have to do is gently rake the straw off the bed and the potatoes are lying right on top of the dirt, or just slightly beneath the surface. There is no hard digging in the dirt to get the potatoes out, you can use your hands to get them out.

This year I tried something I read in a gardening article. In one bed I planted corn and squash at the same time. The theory is that the corn grow tall so it gets all the sun it needs and the squash acts as a living mulch at the base of the corn stalks. After the corn had a good start I planted some runner beans at the base of the stalks. The beans are supposed to run up the stalks, but this was a hot and dry year so the corn is stunted. I don't know how it all is going to work out, but so far the squash is doing a fine job. I'm afraid the corn isn't going to do so good.

The pictures below are of the garden. Just click on the pictures below to be taken to a larger version where you can see the detail better.

This is the north end of the garden. The white trellis is for a Clematis that isn't doing very well because of the hot and dry spring and summer we have had. The green lump in the middle of the picture is asparagus and the green wall on the far right is Christmas Lima's growing on a trellis.

The row of flowers alternates between groups of Marigolds and groups of Salvia. The Salvia is for the hummingbirds and the Marigolds are for pest repellant.

Here the Christmas Lima's are in the middle of the picture and to the right of them are 3 tomato plants in a row, you are looking at the end of the row. Behind the tomatoes and to the right are raspberries running left to right inside a trellis. Behind the tomatoes is a grape vine that will run across the top of the raspberry trellis. On the other side of the raspberries are cucumbers growing on another trellis.

The bed in the front is the potato bed after I had pulled the plants up. The bed in the back is the corn/squash/bean bed. You can see how stunted the corn is and it has tassled. Oh well, at least the squash is doing fine.

This is a closer shot of the corn/squash/bean bed. You can see all the blooms on the squash easily in this picture.

Here you can see how poor the potato harvest turned out. It was just a bad year for gardens and this shows it. I will admit the second half of the bed had more potatoes than what you see in this section, but it still was a poor harvest. Oh well, that's how it goes with gardens.

These are the three tomato plants across the end of the lima bean bed. You can see two of the stakes that are holding the cages up, they are easier to see in the larger picture. On the far right is the end post for the grape vine/raspberry trellis. You can see that this is a young grape vine, it is hardly taller than the tomato plants. Hopefully in a year or two it will start making grapes.

This is one end of the cucumber trellis and the cucumber plant climbing it. You can make out more detail in the larger picture. In the larger picture you can see the individual vine segments taking off across the trellis. In a week or two the two vines will meet in the middle. By the end of the growing season they will likely have grown from one end to the other of the 16 ft long trellis, they have done it in the past.

In the larger picture you can see some of the cucumbers hanging from this vine. This is the vine nearest the rest of the garden and you can see the tomato plants and the Christmas Lima's in the background.

Aside from requiring less ground space when grown on a trellis, the cucumbers themselves stay cleaner and straighter when hanging from a trellis than they do when lying on the ground.