March 25th

Well, projects have been moving along relatively smoothly.  

The raised beds are just about finished. I dug them out, put in the boards, and laid down landscape fabric to try to keep the weeds at bay.  After that I added a few inches of gravel to keep the roots from matting on the fabric. Last of all I added the topsoil mix in.  I still have to put in the irrigation and then they will be ready to go.  I have a variety of cucumber that will produce fruit as low as 50 degrees (typically cukes want it around 70) so those will go in mid-April, with the rest going in a few weeks later.

The potato towers have also come a long way.  I have built 20 of them to go down into the main garden. Inside I will plant red thumb, rose fin apple and Swedish peanut potatoes. These are all different types of fingerlings. Fingerlings work best for the towers because they produce tubers over a longer period of time as opposed to an early season variety like Yukon which only produces fruit once. Now that the boxes are done I have to work out the irrigation.

Other than that I’m doing a lot of greenhouse work. Eggplants and peppers went in this week.  We are doing several interesting varieties of each. For eggplant we have one called chu chu - an Indian baby eggplant that is said to produce copious amounts of bite size teardrop shaped fruits. We are also putting in a long Japanese type. These are nice because the skin is thin and therefore more edible and the flesh is non-bitter. For peppers we have the aji dulce, a sweet habanero, coming back.  These were used to make an amazing peach jam last year. You get the smoky flavor without any of the heat.  Shishito peppers are also coming back.  We have another small light green pepper to go with them called oriental wonder.  And last but not least, a cubanelle pepper also renowned for its smoky flavor.

I’ve included some pictures of the construction of both the raised beds and the towers, if anyone is interested in doing something similar.  Coming up in the next few weeks, we have the first of the spring planting.  I’ll keep you posted.

Beginning the raised beds

Getting ready for planting