Full bellies from the Rooted Landscaping home garden

Here's a sample of what's cooking in the Rooted Landscaping home garden.  In the photo below you see blueberry hill extending along the length of the fence.  In the foreground, against the fence, we've planted two rhubarbs.  Apparently they like buddies.  We planted bare root bulbs where they'll get plenty of sun & have enough room to expand and grow.  We probably won't get much of a harvest for two years.

I'm not a big rhubarb eater, but I do have substantial rhubarb aesthetic appreciation.  These are big focal points in a garden.  They have beautiful color & become fairly low-maintenance once established.  I like to integrate rhubarb into landscape designs for the sheer color and shape.  Edible plants are often lovely.  

Outside of the photo but around where the photographer stood is the little baby persimmon tree.  Given the orientation of the yard, as the tree goes its shade should fall downhill, where we plan a little yoga space (!) & leave the adjacent plants in full sun.

The trench slightly down hill from the rhubarb is now housing asparagus roots.  As the spears begin to poke up we'll slowly add more soil until the bed is level with the grade of the hill.  This plant is also fairly low maintenance.  Most asparagus patches have a life-span of 10-12 years.  We'd like to extend the patch in 5 years to create a nice on-going cycle of asparagus.

Oh, glowing corn.  In the foreground is a raised bed reserved for our friend, Sonora.  We've lured her with land so we get the added benefit of her insight into our growing garden.  See that goofy business with old fence doors & posts behind?  A jerry-rigged cucumber trellis to shade some lettuces.  Give it time.  I have faith.

The rows of logs & soil beyond now house corn seeds & soaker hoses.  There are four rows so that we could interplant corn & sunflowers in diamond patterns.  This is reccommended for corn growth.  They like small hills for water drainage. Given our surplus of logs we decided to hold in the arable soil for the corn with these logs.  It helps direct the water down hill and away from the base of the stalks.  So far so good.

Once we have about three inches of corn stalks we plan to plant the three sisters: squash to crawl over the ground & create a weed barrier, and beans to climb the corn stalks & fix the soil nitrogen.

This little raised bed is showing some life.  We planted the sweet peas & chard early.  They're said to be nice companion plants & provide an early harvest.  There's a big ole chard leaf coming in against the warmth of the log border.  There are more peas planted in other parts of the yard with natural trellising.

Early yields of onions and red cabbage.  We're waiting for the onion leaves to fall over to begin harvesting, drying, & curing the crop.

More food & fun to come!  Yum!

Prepping the veggie garden

On Easter Sunday Kevin & I laid out the seed packets we'd acquired & began plotting.

We haven't done starts during the winter because we usually travel.  Also, our house gets very little sunlight so if we ever do start from seed during the winter, we'll need grow lamps.  Instead, we usually direct sow, get cuttings & starts from friends, & buy a few starts.

Consulting some books & online, we figured out the best companion plantings.  We're doing interplanting of several plants in the same bed to save space.  We're also doing this to get sequential harvests from the same beds.  Last year we planted strawberries, which were harvested in June.  In August we planted spinach in the same bed to get a fall yield.  Due to the mild winter this bed is giving us another round of spinach & we're finding fresh strawberry leaves!  Perfect.  We can keep successive plantings of both crops in the bed.  The strawberries may prove to be too invasive for the spinach, but then again, maybe not!

So delicious!  I was a nerd who loved getting the course catalogue before each college semester.  I imagined each class & was sure that it would be my most stimulating, thought-provoking learning experience.  Planning my veggie beds feels somewhat similar.  All of the sudden I'm sure this will be the year when I'll have bountiful harvests of healthy plants.  Probably, I'll continue to better plan & care for the plants in my midst.  And as I do, weather permitting, I'll gradually receive greater yields.  And I'll learn as I watch, observe, & stay consistent.  But I probably can't plan the miraculous.