Spring Planting

Well the time has finally come for us to do our spring planting and it's not a moment too soon. I think we started our plants indoors a week or two earlier than we should have. They've gotten quite large in their little peat pellets. The picture I'm posting below is to show that our lasagna gardening that I had mentioned in a previous post doesn't appear to be working quite as planned. We've got weeds poking up in several places. I think that this is mostly due to us not doing it properly more than a problem with the basic premise of the idea. It appears that most of the weeds are simply poking up through gaps in the cardboard. We probably should have overlapped it a bit.


On a better note our peach tree appears to be poised to give us a quite a few peaches this years. Sadly our raspberry crop looks like it will be a bit smaller due to recent construction around the house. Here's a tip for expanding your yield of raspberries exponentially: If you've ever made raspberry jelly then you know that after you are done you have thousands of seeds leftover. Raspberries have a knack for growing pretty easily wherever birds normally deposit the seeds. You however can easily take your seeds and cast them wherever you please.

Preparing the Garden

Okay we are bad gardeners, I admit it. But we can change really we can. This year we are trying the concept of Lasagna Gardening. Wherein you lay wet cardboard down over the area you are planning to use for your garden and then you cover that in layers of organic material such as compost and other things. This in turn smothers all the grass and weeds underneath and leaves you with a rich medium to plant in on top. That's the idea anyway. We'll see how it works.

This year we are planting a lot more variety than previous years. All part of my pursuit of self-sufficiency.