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Friday, July 5, 2013

The Kitchen Gardens Take Off

On June 21 I carried a stepladder around with me to make this series of photographs. At this point I had just done the second succession planting of greens and roots, seen in the foreground in this first image. We were getting frequent heavy thunderstorms that kept me out of the gardens for days at a time. I harvested many wheelbarrow-loads of grass clippings as mulch to suppress the purslane. Where I first put down a layer of newspaper, or put down a really thick layer of clippings (3-4"), the mulch has been mostly successful.

Because the native soil and my compost is so full of seeds, for this planting I made a seed bed and covered the seeds with a commercial topsoil mix from a gardening supplies place. It's proving quite good at keeping the weeds a couple initial inches away from the seedlings, where they can be pulled out without danger of damaging them.


In the foreground below are rows of onions and carrots, nominally, but what you're seeing is almost all purslane. Now that I've got these rows weeded for the time-being, the vegetables are doing much better.

Also: chard, lettuce, mustard, turnip, beet, pepper, cabbage, strawberry, kale, dill, basil, sage, chives...


Looking back the other way: the machine shed and the garage.


Sweet corn of a couple varieties, bush beans of five varieties, tomatoes of five varieties, concord grapes...



This is the east garden, this year growing pickling cucumbers, two varieties of melon, pie squash, volunteer giant sunflowers, the asparagus patch, and sweet potato and russet potato behind.



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