After freezing over 25 lbs of squash and making every kind of zucchini baked good known to man, I finally cried "uncle" and pulled out the zucchini and yellow squash plants from the left raised bed. All that was left were my two basil plants, which I transplanted to the right side. Now the left bed was empty and ready to "double dig." When we planted this garden in April of last year, we covered the grass with newspaper and cardboard, wet it down, stabbed some holes with a pitchfork and filled it with dirt and alpaca poop. That was a quick and easy way to start a raised bed. Now that it's had 18 months or so to settle in, we decided to really do the hard work and make sure there is good, loosened soil to a depth of at least 12-15 inches.
To double dig, you first remove about 10 inches of soil from the first end of your garden, creating a trench. Toss the soil into a wheelbarrow for later.
Next, take a pitchfork or similar garden tool, and drive it into the ground at the bottom of the trench, wiggle it back and forth to agitate the soil and repeat down the length of the trench. Next, dig a trench in the next row, filling the first trench with the dirt from the second. You repeat this process to the end of the garden, at which point you fill that last trench with the dirt from the wheelbarrow from the initial trench.
Luckily we picked a time to do this after some significant rains, so the soil was not too hard. However, Doug did manage to break our pitchfork in the process!
If you can see, the level of the soil is only to the first row of pavers. We'd like to fill this bed to the very top.
You may also notice, we put down some black landscaping fabric in our walkways. We should have done this from the beginning, as weeds in the paths has been a big issue the past two years. Hopefully we can buy some gravel in the spring to fill in the gaps around the paving stones.
Sept 10th: "Little Al" had a growth spurt and is now bigger than Big Al!
Big Al still going strong:
Blueberry update: still standing!
Only one of the 2 original blueberry plantings has leaves:
My fall lettuce seeds are doing well! It's fun to harvest fresh salad greens. One of the transplanted basil plants is in the middle. It didn't really like the move too well:
My bush beans are also doing great! I plan to plant a lot more of these in the spring and fall next year.
Peppers: finally developing some fruit. All green though. I read that all peppers start green and then turn red or yellow as they ripen. So far there is no sign of that.
Sept: 22 Big Al is turning orange! We may have a ripe pumpkin after all!
We had our first frost warning (Sept 22) and picked everything we could. I am hoping to ripen the tomatoes and peppers indoors in a brown paper bag. We harvested 1/2 lb of bush beans and they were delicious!
