Garden season is upon us and I am so excited! If you’ve been around this space for the past several years, you know that I love gardening and that I made the most of our little urban lot in Minneapolis, but this year is different. Our new garden space is 1,600 sqft!!! That’s larger than the finished square footage of our old house! Ha! This garden is large and I’ve filled it full - at least on my garden plan. This year I am planning to grow a lot of things I’ve grown in the past like tomatoes, peppers, herbs, peas, summer squash, green beans, lettuce, potatoes, beets, strawberries, and herbs. But I’m also trying my hand a quite a few new things like winter squash, cabbage, melons, kale, and spinach.
The garden area is next to the old goat barn that we are using as a chicken coop and garden shed. We had the chickens work the ground for us in a portion of the garden over the winter and recently we moved their fenced in yard to the other side of the barn and prepared the garden area for a bigger fence that will hopefully deter the deer. (We may need to add some electric fencing to keep them out, though.) When we bought the house last fall, there were remnants of a burn pile in the clearing next to the goat barn. It was quite the burn pile and the clean up was long and laborious. I think I filled 3 5-gallon buckets with nails, hinges, door handles, and other random metal remains. I’m a little concerned about the toxicity of what was burned on this soil, but as we live in a rather dense forest, this is the best location for the garden, so I’ll work to restore the soil over the next several years.
Speaking of the soil…there are several variations of clay throughout my garden plot and it has been interesting planning what to grow and where in relation to that. I could have brought in fresh top soil, compost, or more organic matter, but it wasn’t in the budget this year and so we are making due with the bit of compost our chickens turned for us this winter and some somewhat rotted goat manure from the neighbor. The ashes from the burn pile have helped make the soil in that section of the garden a bit more loamy, so that is one plus to the potentially toxic burn pile.
We were able to use two garden gates from the original homestead, which I love! Our house was built in the 1970’s and the original homestead was a total of 20 acres. After the owners past away, the land was subdivided into two 10 acre lots. Our neighbors who own the other 10 had two old metal gates on their property - one from the original owners’ garden and one from an old animal fence. We have this gate pictured below and will have the other one opening into the chicken yard by the chickens’ automatic coop door.
So far we have some cabbages planted, peas, beets, spinach, kale, and lettuce. The boys each got to plant their own row of peas, which they were very happy about. Next week we’ll hopefully get some onion sets in the ground, along with early potatoes and some calendula and zinnias. We’ll also be adding our wedding arbor next to the gate and hopefully cleaning up some of the burn pile remnants that are now just outside of the garden fence. This property has so much clean up to do, but little by little we will get there!
