Garden and Berries

Good morning!

Here are a few recent photos from the farm.  TWS is putting in an incredible garden for us with high fences (to keep the deer out).  The fence should be about 6 foot high, but we have plans to make it higher if need be.  We have noticed that many of the gardens around here have extremely tall fences.

We also have to make the fence low.  We had bought some plants (more on that later) that were sitting in pots under a tree close to the garden.  We found little rabbit footprints in the dirt of the garden heading straight for our plants!  He did not seem to have nibbled much, but it was an obvious sign that we need to keep those critters out too.

Since the garden will have a tall fence, we can also keep birds out with netting.  We already have to net the strawberries.  They do not seem to mess with the blueberries (yet, anyway!).

I love how the garden fence is coming together.  TWS incorporated a grape trellis that was in that part of the yard into the fence itself.  The existing trellis was decayed and weak so TWS put in a new trellis for the grapes.  That looks so lovely, and we found grapes on sale, that he decided to integrate more grape trellises.  We plan to have two muscadines each on both sides of the end gate.  Then we will have three concords, two on one long side of the garden, and one with the existing grape.  I think it will look beautiful and be functional as well. We are planning to use the fence as much as possible for trellising plants that need it, such as growing beans along it.  The fence will be a "rabbit wire", and the climbing plants should make a lovely green living fence. :)

 He has been working incredibly hard!

Because we moved in late and are a bit behind, we are buying plants instead of starting from seed.  While this is not as price-effective as starting from seed, if the plants produce how they are supposed to, they will still be cheaper than buying from the store.  Since we got our plants late in the game (in fact, not two days after we bought some plants from Lowe's, they took all of their herbs and veggies away!), we do not have as many different fruit and vegetables as we would normally have.  We have several tomatoes, several sweet potatoes, lots of peppers, and lots of melons.  I have some herbs and okra as well.  We were exceedingly blessed when we went to the co-op and found that their vegetables and herbs were buy one, get one!  We were able to get much more than we would have normally.

We will also be able to start some lettuce and such from seed, as that has a short season.  We also are looking forward to starting cool weather crops such as cabbage, broc, cauliflower, etc.  We already have some seed potatoes, and we have many onions that we have had growing in little starter flats, just waiting to be put in the garden :)

Some of our plants we bought.

The beginning of the garden--land tilled and ready to be planted!