To Everything There is a Season

“To everything there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under heaven.

A time to be born, and a time to die.

A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.”

Ecclesiastes 3:1

My hillside garden is coming along after countless wheelbarrow loads of  yard clipping compost from the local landfill and countless more loads of wood chips, there is definitely a lot more green!

 I have added two tier beds shown on the top right of the picture and am adding a third along with deer fencing around it all. Being on the edge of the city limits with an empty field at my back just welcomes the deer to have salad for dinner! The fencing also has to keep out the turkeys that roam prolifically in this area, they would scratch up every seed planted with no guilt at all. Since turkeys can sorta fly I am trying to fence off each bed individually using 6 ft fiberglass poles and  4 ft medium gauge black plastic deer fencing making a  difficult to access confined space. So far so good.

The cedar planter boxes are doing well even though they are in the shade of our Sycamore tree. They do get a couple of hours of mostly sun in the evening so I planted somewhat shade tolerant plants like rainbow chard, lettuce, cabbage, herbs along with some Jerusalem artichokes along the back hoping they will grow tall and thick to make a yard screen. The little SIP box (Sub Irrigated Planter Box) in the foreground just has a salad mix and evidently they love it in there. The little green pot next to the lettuce has a few scarlet runner beans that came free with a seed order from Thyme Garden Herb Company in Alsea, Oregon  The chard was a lot fuller a couple of days ago until I burnt some of it with some compost tea...guess I mixed it a little too strong, lesson learned.

Around the pond green is just busting out in force with the potato grow bags and more SIP boxes and of course mister personality, a bust with a hollow head for planting in that my daughter Karina Dale made in high school. He looks like he is just floating in this picture but I just sat him in the water to give the plants a drink.

 

Harvest will be the final telling but it looks like my idea of setting the potato grow bags where they can draw from the bog water might have been a good idea. They are just growing like weeds! I made the bags by sewing up some heavy duty landscape fabric and  have already topped the bags with leaf mulch twice and rolled the bag up a little to promote more potatoes, hopefully. The bags were lined on the bottom with a couple of inches of coconut coir to draw up the water and then filled with a half and half mixture of  cheap organic potting soil from china mart and my homemade leaf, yard waste and kitchen scrap compost mix, topped off with straight leaf compost as the plants grow.  The idea  came from YouTube videos on grow bags and buckets from Larry Hall, he used rain gutters laid out on the ground with a frame or kiddie pools for his water source but I just use my fish pond water.

The SIP boxes are loving spring too with lettuce, kale, spinach and radishes in the front and a couple of tomatoes, one slicing cuke and a Bolivian cucumber to grow up the lattice. By next year this area will be under a green house.  Plans are to enclose the whole pond area in a screen/green house structure. The water should keep it warmer in the winter and in the summer the roof and fencing will keep unwanted debris and wildlife out of the pond. Thanks to help from a dad who likes to keep active by building things we plan to start on it in a couple of weeks.

Heading on up the hill the strawberry and pea tier could be better, I have to keep spraying with  a garlic/pepper spray to keep the sow bugs and slugs from having pea shoots for midnight snack. They have won a few battles but it looks like I may win the war!

So far no pests have bothered the strawberries. I think they are doing exceptional for what they were,  a couple of dried out bags of crowns from china mart planted Back to Eden garden style, guess a little tlc goes a long ways.

Happy kale : ) along with a couple of  radicchio are the biggest veggies on the hillside, planted from store bought starts and doing quite well. Most everything else up here in the cedar box tiers and other tiers were planted a seeds. I like to see all the little seeds just now starting to stick their heads out and shooting up a little green but sow bugs and slugs like to see them too, have to keep up on spraying around them with garlic/pepper spray so they have a fighting chance or they will end up looking like the poor little sunflower sprouts below.

 

Beans, corn and squash, three sisters sprouting up. For this year I planted these in between the Hardy Kiwi vines as they will take a few years to fill up the trellis. Might a well use all the space I have available.

 

The Hardy Kiwi is definitely taking off but I did discover that slugs like  the tender new leaves of this plant too. One of them was half eaten in one night, so they get a squirt of garlic/pepper spray around them too now plus I sprinkled a little sluggo, a natural slug deterrent around them and it seems to be working.

I hope to update a little more often throughout the summer... well that is the plan anyway. Somehow time just sneaks up on a person and weeks are gone and done before you know it!

Happy gardening and  Grow ON!


The verse I chose for the heading on this post, Ecclesiastes was written by a man who tried EVERYTHING available to him in his day and ultimately found that only one thing really mattered, God. I definitely won't get around to trying everything and I don't want to! I think I will try my hardest to learn what I can from other peoples failures and experiences. Not that I will succeed in always following that rule but I can live with a purpose to try.