Progress of the gardens; 6 December, 2007

This is Annie’s flower and fruit garden. Part of it is being used to demonstrate techniques I recommend in my book “Gardening When It Counts.” The land on this side of our driveway is fill. About mm down are stormwater drain pipes running the length of the plot (parallel to the driveway) and above the pipes was placed assorted kinds of clay, some pretty nasty, with about mm of (mostly) decent (mostly) clay-loam topsoil spread over that. During construction of my house it was used as parking and heavy equipment went over it repeatedly. The garden was started in mid- spring and the food crops had to go in hurriedly, so only the minimum amount of soil was dug up and fertilized prior to planting. There is a row of spuds about 20 metres long, two yellow crookneck hills, two pumpkin (winter squash) hills and two tomato plants. I should mention that the entire plot was covered with a layer of spent poppy trash (marc), an organic waste material inexpensively available on Tasmania because we grow much of the entire planet’s supply of medicinal (legal) opiates. And complete organic fertilizer is being used liberally on the food crops.

The row was first covered liberally with Complete Organic Fertilizer and then dug twice, one shovel’s blade wide and one deep. After the seed was planted another blade’s width was dug on each side with more COF blended in during the digging. Compare these spuds with some in the front garden (Steve’s garden) where the soil is not fill, but natural Class I volcanic loam which was dug the first time in June and into which about 100 mm of poppy marc was dug initially. I am just beginning to hill up soil along this row, accomplished by scraping up a bit of earth with a hoe and pulling it against the vines.

These pumpkins were sown in small pockets of hand- crafted soil, a little hole containing about one bucketful of potting mix based upon the native soil. Then the land around this was dug up and fertilized (heavily with COF), to a distance of about 1.5 metres in all directions. Shortly these “hills” will be thinly mulched. If time and energy and interest allow I will dig up and fertilize even more land in concentric circles around these vines (just ahead of their growth).

Now back to the “front” garden...

Fertigation buckets are permanently set inside the runnerbean trellis; these three plants should entirely fill the three-metre-long structure to a height of 2.1 metres or so. The sugarsnap peas have reached the top of the “x” frame.