It’s been a busy summer, but the main chunk of veggie production is dying down for the season, so now I’m shifting into spring prep before the ground starts to freeze. I’m building out raised garden beds that will meet my needs for the next 20+ years. I want these to be easy to maintain, easy to plant, and able to be switched into perennial production if I can’t stay on top of annuals.
I run a small permaculture nursery in Lancaster PA focused on growing perennial edible plants and trees. Check it out!
www.LancasterFoodForest.com
#garden #plants #treenursery #plantnursery #gardening #gardenbeds
Yo friends, happy Labor Day fall weekend. It’s uh been a while since I’ve done a video update. Essentially, summer’s been really busy and I haven’t had time to do anything video worthy, mostly just weeding and watering, but I have been doing some stuff this past week. I have some extra time on my hands and it’s not so brutally hot. I can get outside more. I’m going to show you what I’ve been doing here in the garden and and uh plant nursery area. So, I feel like I’m I’m still in a stage of life of just establishing. This past spring, I I spent most of my time installing this fence so that for the first time being on this property, I could actually grow vegetables in this space. I grew uh more tomatoes and uh beans than I knew what to do with. It was a lot of fun to actually grow stuff. But as the main summer veggies are dying down for the year, I wanted to take advantage of this cooler weather before the ground freezes to really start reshaping the garden and building it out the way I want it to be uh for the long haul. I know that my time is going to be limited, especially in the summers when I’ll be a pretty much full-time stay-at-home dad. We’ll go on summer vacation and stuff. So, I wanted to set everything up in a way that I think it’s going to be pretty easy to maintain and take care of. So, I started to really take a look at how professional market gardeners do things. These are people who take an area about what’s in my fence here and can just about make a uh a full-time living 30 40 grand off of growing in this space. So, what are they doing to maximize harvest and and maximize the use of their time? And and what I have found, you know, pretty much everyone is doing these long straight raised garden beds. The long straight beds are easier to work with um just because you can use a cedar to grow straight rows of crops. Um the raised beds are nice because they they heat up a little faster in the summer. You’ll have to water them maybe a little bit more. Um but you can also just apply long lines of drip tape to help keep watering, help stay on top of things like that. There doesn’t really seem to be any agreement on on width. I’ve chosen the widest possible bed that I that I have seen anyone work with and that’s four feet wide. You don’t really want to go any wider than that or else it becomes really difficult to to reach across to do weeding and also it can stop you from from hopping over the beds. I don’t think my wife or many other people could hop over these beds, but I have really long legs. So, a 4ft wide jump, no problem for me. So, what I’ve been doing to to get this started here is I I’ve been digging down into the pathway. Mainly just because a huge chunk of this pathway was garden bed space or, you know, 2 or threeyear-old decomposted wood chips from from old garden pads, and I didn’t want that to go to waste. So, I scooped up the healthy, fertile top soil layer of this pass, and I just dumped it on top of the beds. Here you can see that’s uh that’s the base of it down here. And then on top of the bed, I dumped a good couple inches of compost. This is fresh leaf compost from a local township’s leaf processing facility. Uh it’s fantastic, super weed-free, super great. I do all my growing in it. Um ideally, I mean, I’m running out. I’m pretty much out for the year, and I have more coming next month. Um, but ideally I would be doing like six, eight inches of this stuff down here. Um, I didn’t have as much path to scrape out and put on. So, this uh section here is just straight compost on top of on top of grass. I put a layer of cardboard down. And I think I even as I was doing some weeding and stuff, I was tossing weeds down on top of the grass. Layer of cardboard on top of that. And then a good couple inches of compost on top. You can see here the work I’ve been doing. So, this is a mix of like wood chips from the paths, some clay, some fertile soil mixed in here, just anything that was in the path that I’m building now um just dumped on top of the bed. And then as I get more compost, I’ll come through and add a good um 6 in of compost on top of that. As you’ll see, this is starting to make my four foot wide bed uh closer to like three, three and a half foot just because there’s a strong slope needed because it’s going all the way down. I’m going to come through here and put um a good couple inches of wood chips in this trench. Again, the wood chips are also something I’ve been waiting on. So, that will uh allow this slope to not be so steep and allow this bed to be a little bit wider. But, this was a lot of fun. I got to use an Earthway cedar for the first time. It’s something I got, I mean, super cheap off of Facebook Marketplace, and I sewed uh five or six rows of of carrots in here. I think I got them in just in time for a for a late late carrot harvest. And over here, what I’ve been doing, these are all perennial kale. I had them in a bed over here. Um, but this is going to be their permanent home. We use so much kale here, I just take leaves and throw them right in the freezer. Um, and we put it in our smoothies every morning. So, uh, 50 a 4 foot wide, 50 foot long bed of kale, uh, should be enough for our our yearly needs. Fingers crossed. Just knowing how limited my time is, I’ve been trying to work with as many perennials in the vegetable garden area as I can. I I really want to keep growing tomatoes and beans. I know we will eat all of those. Um, but where I can plant perennials, like these perennial kale, I will gladly do so knowing it it relieves a lot of my time. So, with these kale, other than harvesting, the only work I really should be doing here is um coming through every year and dumping a thick layer of of wood chips on top. Maybe even uh a few inches of compost and then some more wood chips on top of that just for fertilizing and for mulching and for keeping weeds down. I planted them pretty tight together. There’s a lot of light getting through right now because some of them are small and and I stripped a lot of leaves off to help with uh minimize transplant shock. Um but as these start to fill out, uh there’s really not much light that’s entering the the the floor here. And so weed pressure is kept really low. A thick layer of compost and and mulch helps keep weed pressure low and helps minimizing the watering that I have to do. So the end goal vision here is going into spring I should have a one two three four foot wide about 50 foot long beds. I’ll have another bed here marked out 4T wide and slightly less than 50 ft. And then this bed here 4T wide and probably maybe 20 25 ft just because of the way the curve of the fences and everything. I I wish they were all the same length. it would make easier if I start using things like uh you know hoop hoop houses or low tunnels or fabric row covers. Um but whatever it’s it’s it’s fine. It’s it’s the space I have and I’m I’m making use of it. So talking about using perennials here, I’m also thinking about planting um asparagus in the shortest of these these rows, the 25 ft long row. That might be too much asparagus. So, I maybe I’m going to plant half of it with that and then I’ll have half of the row left to do things like lettucees and such. I I just know that asparagus I haven’t had to do anything with. Very little of my time has been put towards taking care of this this year. And I also uh know that I will eat a lot of asparagus in the spring. It’s so nice to have fresh greens from the garden early early spring. And so I always eat all of that. whereas this time of the year sometimes I’m just kind of overwhelmed with the garden and am happy to let some things kind of rot. So the asparagus I know I will eat all of and it’s an easy thing to take care of. This summer I was growing beans uh that were vining up this fence here and you know I realized I like just the bush beans I had in a small section you know not even close to the amount of space I would have in one of these beds were enough to to feed us for the year. So I think we’re really happy with that. I don’t need that extra space vining the fence. Plus, it started to hang on the fence and I feel like in a few years as the fence starts to wear, you know, degrade, it might start ripping holes or tearing down the fence. So, I think I’m going to avoid doing that here going forward. Instead, what I’m thinking about doing is taking this row of heritage everbearing raspberries and um digging these up and moving these along a huge chunk of the fence. Um so, they’ll make another nice visual barrier. um they’ll get higher than this and bush out more than this. And so I think you know over here I have a 100t row of blueberries lining the fence. And so here another 100 ft I’m thinking of having maybe a huge chunk of it raspberries and a huge chunk of it maybe some other berry crop or grapes or honey berries something like that. One other benefit of these kind of trenched paths that I’m I’m interested in checking out is that I get a lot of water pooling down this hill and it kind of just sits here in this area and it’ll sit I’ve seen it sit here too. So, I’m kind of wondering even if I put a couple inches of wood chips down here, there’ll still be space for water to come and sit in the pads and it usually dries up uh within 12 24 hours. So it wouldn’t really slow down my gardening when we get a heavy rain, but sitting in the path would allow it to soak in and even lighter rains it would kind of hold here, soak in and water the beds from underneath and also prevent um the water from pooling like where the garden beds themselves are. I also experimented the other day with watering purposely using this technique. quantity of water is no problem for me because I have this creek running and a a really cheap very little electricity use pump that I can use. So, I pumped uh and ran a hose up and just let water, you know, run out of the hose and sit in this trench um for a couple hours and that was cool. It seemed to work well. It seemed to slowly start to fill things up enough and then water the beds from underneath. Um, so that’ll be an a watering strategy I might use or toy around with some next year where I can just like drop the hose, plug the pump in, and walk away. And that’s my watering for the week. We’ll we’ll see. We’ll see if that works out. This is what everything was before. Just these like boxes um with with soil, raised boxes with soil in and and so I just waste a lot of space on pads. And so I think this is using and maximalizing the space as much as possible. and I have a lot of good soil to use as I’m take digging this up and putting it onto beds. So hopefully in a couple weeks I’ll finish setting up these beds and then that would lead me to um the plant propagation the the the tree nursery area here. These boxes are all pretty set. They’re not going to be moved until for another month or two until I can dig these trees out. Um but then I’m thinking about uh setting the boxes up having them go in this direction along with the bed. So there’ll probably be a space here for me to walk and then rows of of tree boxes here. Trying to set everything up so it’s wide enough for me to just run my push mower through. So a huge chunk of my like weeding will just be like running the push mower through the garden, running the weed whacker through to edge things in the garden. And then um that’ll take care of a lot of things in the garden. I think um I was doing some of that this year in the areas where it was set up that I could do that were just way more easy to manage and take care of than than other areas. So everything is built to size. As for the the tree nursery, things are really trucking along here. Huge pile of juneberries. Uh these are some really awesome select variety hazelnuts. Uh select variety northern hearty pecans. Hazelnuts. a whole bunch of paw paws. Still feel like I’m getting the hang of um some of these plants, learning what they need as they’re growing in these boxes. Um still testing around some new strategies for stratifying the seed and collecting and storing the seed over winter. Um but uh there’s a few really great successes and even the areas where there wasn’t great germination, uh the plants that did germinate look really good and I’m really happy to to sell and give a lot of these away. So, as you uh are interested in in getting things started in the fall, I have a bunch of these plants for sale on my website in the fall um once the leaves start to die off and I’m ready to pull them out of these boxes. Yeah. So, a lot of work I’ve been doing in here, trying to get everything set up. So, 2 3 years from now, lots of structures are in place and it’s just really easy for me to manage. Very minimal uh use of my time here. Thanks for following along, friends. I’ll keep you updated as I’m doing more stuff.
2 Comments
Looking good.
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