Saturday progress

We had an absolutely beautiful weekend. It was in the 70s, with not much humidity. We were able to build four more beds. We plan on a total of 16 raised beds and now have eight finished but we still have to fill them!

We have more supplies for the soil, which is a mixture of mushroom compost, peat moss and vermiculite. I plan on getting several filled with some plants before we go to Utah for Todd, Amanda and Caprise's graduation. When we are done, we plan on mulching the walkways.

I guess our neighbors don't like our greenhouse and gardening expanse. Last year they put a 16' fence up to hide the back of our house (although we can still see them from the deck). While we were working, they were building another 16' of fencing to hide their view of our new garden. I'll admit it hasn't been pretty there but it soon will be! Oh, well they don't have a bit of garden and like a showy house so we are quite different.
I just had to add the lilac tree we have. We've debated about cutting it down because it's been a mess and mostly on the ground instead of a small tree but I did a lot of cutting it back so I'm hopeful we can have it look pretty and not be a hassle to mow around! It's pretty now and sure smells good!

Another walk through the garden!

I know this is turning into a garden tour but that has been our life this year in are "spare time" and something we really enjoy (except when it's in the 90s). We're about done with our strawberries but have some peaches about ripe. In fact, I took this picture and then picked them!

It seems like we can see our grapes get bigger every day.

One big job for Michael this week was making a bed for our blueberries. We still need to mulch them but hope they can grow like crazy for a lot more next year.

These beds are our green beans which are just about to bloom and our sweet potatoes. We also got the cane berry posts put in and wires strung. That was a hard job for Michael!

We're excited to have a fig tree that will produce this year.

Raised beds

Last year we were able to resurrect a grape vine we had planted the year before and got it healthy. We didn't get any grapes off it last year but look at the little clusters this year!
We have it training on a wire and even planted a couple of more to soon train into a grape arbor. This is exciting!

Our big project this year is to expand our gardening. Since we have a steep slope in the yard, we have become fans of raised beds and plan on planting most of our garden in them from here on out. Here are some new beds we just did last week and last night! We have sweet potatoes in one, tomatoes in one, and cucumbers and squash in one. So far so good! We are filling them half full of our garden soil and then adding composted cow manure and peat moss and mixing it all together.
Here are the berries and how beautiful they look. We have picked 7 gallons of berries of the strawberry plants in the past week and our raspberries, blackberries and boysenberries are blooming!

I guess we are green for the planet with our organic gardening of most of our fruits and vegetables.

Cleaning out the Strawberry raised beds

Boy, what a job I have ahead at the beginning of Spring! But, the lure of strawberries makes it worth it!



We actually added three more strawberry beds and three cane berry beds last fall. We heavily mulched things but I guess the winter was too much for it!



After working about an hour a day for five days, I think I beat the weeds!



See the blooms. . . I can already taste the strawberries! Now, we did have a full week of much needed rain so I'll have to be vigilent!