This is going to be lengthy cause I am also writing it for my personal record..
This was my first garden this past summer, 2010.. we are in zone 3 to 4
I decided since we have voll problems to do raised beds with 1/2 wire mesh on the bottom. My husband built them out of redwood that he found on a good sale... since this is a generally dry climate I expect the wood will last longer than in perhaps some other parts of the country.
I used the Lasagna gardening method that I learned mostly about on Youtube.. In this method you essentially build your own soil.. so in doing this you really don't need to have it tested..
After the bed was built I lined them with cardboard. This keeps weeds from the soil below from coming up. Then I made alternating layers of compost I had made on my own, staw, tree leaves, an inch of topsoil we had brought in for some lawn work, a layer of alfalfa hay, green grass clippings and I repeated this two times. The order this stuff goes in does not really matter, It came up to about 4 inches below the top of my 18 inch tall beds.
I also mixed in some paramagnetic minerals and some bioactive soil stumulator that stimulates the soil with micro-organisms.. Its about $20 a bag and I still have some left... I probably used more than I needed to. This stuff, though the microbes, pulls the minerals out of soil form and makes them bio-dynamically available to plant roots.
On top I mixed some of that top soil with a large bag of planting mix and coverd all the beds with about 2 inches.. This is what I put my seeds directly into. ( stocked up already in planting mix from fall sales for next year)
Over the summer the contents of the beds sunk down as they composted on their own with the plants growing on top. In the end I had about 5 inches of good soil.
This did not work out well for the carrots who all grew L shaped as they grew up against the wire mesh. Next year I will fill the beds all the way up to the top... so I think I will have about 7 inches or so of good soil at the end of the season and maybe my carrots will have more room... or I may put them in a different kind of bed
I planted things too close together and was afraid to thin.. next year I will be vicious!
All my plants were spectactular and only suffered from being crammed in.. but the suffering did not affect their abundance.
I had no pests except for a couple of cabbage worms.. or what ever those green things are that like cabbage.
I also made a ground level bed for potatoes. I did this by laying my 1/2 wire mesh on the gound and securing it with a rock at each corner. It was about 18 feet long by 2.5 feet wide and framed it in with 4 x4 square lumber my husband had, only one panel around so it was only 4 inches high. I did the lasagna layering again and shaped it in a mound for easy harvest of potatoes.. I did harvest some of my potatoes too early. They need to be hit by a good frost so the tops dye then you harvest the potatoes about 3 weeks later. They will then double or tripe in size in this time.
I also did a ground level bed for sunflowers and flowers, zinnias. Because of the volls I encircled the bed with icicle (sp?) radishes, the long white ones, which I was told would keep volls out of the beds... and they did. The birds never bothered my sunflowers either. I have them hanging in the garage now.. I was going to feed them to my neighbors chickens but they got rid of them all for the winter.
Into this sunflower bed soil I added the soil amendment micro-organisms and a few shovels of compost.. I also planted sunflowers on the edge of the pasture in the same type of soil with out ammendments and was surprised to see that they only grew half the size... I think this soil ammendment stuff is great.
Too cold here for zinnias.. won't plant them again.
We also planted a potato and corn bed about 20 feet by 30 feet without ammending the soil... the corn did not do well at all, the potatoes did OK, all kinds of reds and purple ones, but hey, Its Idaho... next year the soil ammendment stuff goes in. Our neighbors use it all the time with their corn, never add nitrogen or anything chemical and they get spectacular corn results on the same plot year after year.
I used seedlings started by a neighor in her green house for the broccoli and caulifower and they had difficulty transplanting but then they picked up and produced. I planted more of these directly in a little later and they did great. I also used seedlings for zuc and parsley. I dug the parsley up in the fall and will transplant it back in in the spring. I think I need 4 zuc bushes as they are very susceptible to the cold.. and although they sitll produced after a partial freeze they slowed down.. just gotta get out there and cover them at night. They also take up too much room in a raised bed.
Next year I will plant more beets as we found out that we love borstch. More cabbage too. I still have a couple of heads in the fridge. I want enough to last till spring next time.
I need to also remember that right after harvesting potatoes to get them fully covered out of light. Some turned green and the green parts are toxic.
Onions did well but I still don't understand how to get those greens to shrivil up and close down on the onion. Onions are so cheep here in the fall I may not bother next year. I was able to purchase them for 17 cents a pound.. but I like having fresh onion greens in summer.
Next year I will make my garden bigger planting directly on the ground and make a raised bed like I did with the potoatoes but with no metal mesh under. Will plant the iciscle radishes around it instead and get a couple of outside mouser cats to patroll and knock the volls down. People who have cats don't have volls.
Spinach did well and I should have planted more at the beginning of August instead of late August.
Endive is more durable in cold temps than lettuce. Black seed lettuce is too frail. Bib did ok. Red cabbage did poorly, don't know why. I should plant more varieties of endive.
Wont bother again with chives.. they don't have a very stong flavor and I found myself using onion greens instead.
Tomatoes was really the big problem. I got hold of a large tractor tire for fee and used that to form my bed. Did the lasagna layering thing but added bone meal also. It was our cold temps that kept hitting them back and bees did not come around early enough to pollenate. I did do some heirloom tomatoes but I don't think I will bother with them again.. they produced little, way less than the others.. As soon as I finally got a nice little crop fo green tomatoes a freeze came... what I found out is that a green tomatoe that has froze can still ripen. We ate a quite a few. I fretted over this bed more than any other. They really need a green house around here unless you luck out with the weather... volls did come up in this bed as I put no mesh down but they didn't kill the plants! guess they don't like tomaotes.... oh I also learned from a neighbor that you have to practically strip your tomato branches from most of their leaves, then they will start to put out...and they did after that.
My favorite plant of all this year was my borage.. although I didn't really know what to do with it it is so beautiful and it attracted lots of bees and it is fairly cold hearty so I may start some inside for early transplant to get bees coming earlier. Its just an exquisite plant that blooms and blooms! Next year we will eat some of the flowers and I will dry some of the leaf for medicianal herbal.
I started Bokoshi composting methods for kitchen waste and even some garden waste and weeds, as well as Star Bucks coffee grinds which they give freely away... and meat bones,, this stuff digests bones. Now after a full season of doing this I am very pleased with the method... especially that NO compost turning is required. Instead of burying the compost in the garden as directed for bokoshi, as all my garden space was occupied with plants, I put the innoculated and seasoned Bokoshi into a large black plastic trash pail with a lid. Each 5 gal bucket placed in there gets covered with a few shovels of dirt.. and there it cooks in its very own special bokoski way. In the fall after harvest I started lasagna layering for next year and dumped the full trash pail in amongst the layers of other stuff. Come next spring I will have another full trash pail of the stuff for the other beds.... my goal is to have no compost bins except for the bokoshi pails.
All my beds needed to be covered at night for the first 3 weeks or so in the season.. and what a muddy mess it was going out there in the rain or snow.. so this fall I placed gravel between the beds hemmed in with some boards... guess all the walk ways will get this eventually.
I used plastic sheeting tacked to long thin boards to cover the bed with but after about 4 weeks of UV exposure it started to tear big time... just when the weather got warmer thank god.. don't know what I may use next year insead. of cours the corrigated plastic works but its kinda expensive.
The sunroom on the house may be ready by next spring so I may do some of my own starts in there. I also want a raised bed to start asparagus... and a bed for perinneal root veggies like burdock and jeresulem artichoke
So thats It. I did learn a lot.. and its funny but it seems like I learned so much more than these words say... I think on an intuitional level from going out there every day, just sitting and watching and waiting and sensing the miracle of plants.
