A Vegetable Expansion

With my ever growing heirloom tomato obsession we were long overdue for an expansion of our kitchen garden. After growing all our herbs and vegetables for years in a relatively small raised bed along the South side of our house, a new patch of rich soil is poses exciting prospect!  Armed with my spring veggies, both from seed and from the garden center, Ive been spending the weekends planting tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, squash, peppers, dill, basil... and all my other favorites!

Last year, although our vegetable bed looked luscious and full in the spring, a nasty virus spread through the tomatoes, a chance I took by planting them in the same spot year after year. But with tomatoes taking up more than half of the bed, and a big hop vine in the way,  I really had no option. Luckily, we had a spot in the full sun that was free this year. After taking out a dead dogwood tree, we had converted this sloping spot into our little hop yard last winter.

Erecting the hop trellis system last winter.. look at that clay soil!

 With a little bit of convincing, Brian let go of a little hop space and knowing that he had to dig up all the hops, was willing to build us a new bed... a level one, with good soil fitting a production area. With a few 2 by 4s from a local lumber yard, a yard of garden soil plus a half a yard of home-grown compost, and a lot of hand-tilling with our two shovels, the spot transformed in an afternoon.

We decided to only build up one side to keep with the natural look of the beds in the back yard. Stacked rocks from the stream behind our property were added to the sides to prevent any erosion. The terracotta pot was my little addition... I cant wait for the Dahlia to pop up later this spring! And Brian's hops should enjoy the new soil and a little more attention this summer.

Preparing the Vegtable Bed

Today is the official last frost date for Raleigh! Ive been waiting for months, but its finally time to put in the warm weather vegetables. But first, some work had to be done...

 

Having our raised vegetable bed on a moderate slope, summer irrigation waters slowly wash down the organic matter, leaving the top layer of the soil with mostly sand. To remedy this, and add nutrients to the bed, each spring we prepare the vegetable bed by turning composted cow manure into the top 6-10 inches of soil. We also apply earthworm castings and TomatoTone to the top of the soil after planting.

However, this was not the first step in preparing the vegetable bed: it was harvest and clean up! The first thing to go were the Brussels Sprouts. Planted late in the fall, these guys shot up after overwintering, and although sprouts were beginning to form along the stem, the warm weather caused them to flower and the sprouts stopped developing when only the size of peas. We left them in for a few weeks to enjoy the flowers, but they ultimately ended up in the compost pile. The spinach and parsley fared better, although what looked like a bountiful harvest of spinach turned out to be infested with aphids. The parsley was really the standout, and the 10 plants I started from seed last spring yielded a huge bag of parsley. The individual plants were very impressive, the largest measuring over 1-inch in diameter at the base (pic below left). I was able to get 13 bunches of parsley out of this. Figuring out what to do with it has been the hardest part, and everyone Ive asked either has parsley or does not use it. Luckily an area garden center patricipates in Plant a Row for the Hungry, a great program that delivers fresh produce to those in need, and they will take my parsley! The 'Quinault' strawberries were left in place (below right), and are now covered in little white flowers, a promising sign of a big May harvest.

 I already put a few herbs and veggies in, but have plans for more. Ive learned over the last few seasons what I do and do not use from the garden, and have put together a good list of edibles for this year.... although I'm sure I will be forever adding to it!

Herbs in the garden:

• Sweet Basil
• Genovese Basil
• Flat-leaf Parsley
• Boquet Dill
• German Thyme
• Chives 
• Kentucky Colonel Mint
• Arp Rosemary

Veggies in the garden:

• 'Mountain Fresh' Tomatoes
• 'Green Zebra' Tomatoes
• 'Black Krim' Tomatoes
• 'Smarty' Grape Tomato
• 'Brandywine' Tomato
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Mixed Bell Peppers
• 'Black Beauty' Zucchini
• Straight-neck Summer Squash
• 'Homemade Pickles' Cucumbers
• 'Kitchen King' Garden Beans

"Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?  Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself."  ~Henry David Thoreau

Hop Projects

Hops (Hululus lupulus) hold a special place in our garden. Brian is a home brewer, and we both love our beer! Growing hops is one of the rare opportunities to combine two passions for us. We have grown them in our garden for 2 seasons now, and were needing to expand our trellis system, thus the hop project began with cedar timbers, some free ground, and a shovel.

Most of the hops grown in the US are from the Willamette Valley in Washington, with Oregon and Idaho being the other major producers. However, with the recent microbrewery craze people have started looking for local sources, and a few hop farms popped up in Western NC. There is little known about hop production in the state, and we are interested in trying out different varieties to see what does best. We use what we grow in our brews, but never get much of a harvest here in Eastern NC. Our summers are too wet for their liking, and the shorter daylight hours mean a late harvest. In the spring we dig and split the some of the rhizomes and pot them up in the greenhouse. Maybe one day we will have enough rhizomes to trade or sell.

We use a grape trellis for support for hops in our vegetable bed (see surviving vegetables post), but we wanted something more fit for the hops twining habit. This area used to have a mature dogwood and pink azaleas. The dogwood died last summer, our neighbor told us the older couple living in our house had left a whole bag of fertilizer to leak on the base. With the dogwood gone, the azaleas get too much sun so we took them out too, and have a big space for projects. For the arbor here we went with the traditional tee-pee style, it reminds me of a Maypole. Brian dug 2-foot deep holes to anchor in the 3- 10 foot cedar timbers. Its a easy design, upright posts with string strung from a stake in the ground to a screw in the top. I will note at this point that I mostly watched, or as I like to call it "supervised", and took pictures.

 The birdhouses give it a little interest... although they might be a little close together to get many birds nesting. The three poles each have a different cultivar. We have Humulus lupulus 'Mt. Hood', 'Chinook', and 'Willamette'. On the other trellis (in the veggie bed) we have 'Centennial'. 

Next update: Harvest Time!

 

"A mouth of a perfectly happy man is filled with beer." ~Ancient Egyptian Wisdom, 2200 B.C.