I jumped in between gushing downpours of rain and grabbed some photos of the first garden by Megan Gilger so I could catch you all up before I get into describing and going through the different plants and so on over the next few weeks.
So if you didn’t know when you are gone from your garden for a week it can quickly go out of control. This is hard to deal with as a designer who loves straight lines, equal spaces, and other designery sort of things. I hate when something isn’t clean and organized. It really gets me stressed out so you are probably wondering why in the world I did anything this natural and uncontrolled, huh? Well I figured it would be good for me mostly to learn I cannot control every thing, right?
Crazy amounts of weeds right? It hasn’t helped that it has rained so much for the past week. So trying to be natural I realized there were very limited options with the weed situation. 1. I do it the hard way and weed the 10x35ft plot by hand or 2. as my gardening friends suggested lay newspaper and mulch. The latter of the options sounded like a lot of money and I had flashbacks of my days as a kid working in the garden and yard mulching…but I also knew how deeply I hate weeding. So I have decided to mulch. I am beginning the process this week and hope to finish by the weekend. I am trying to get in 2 bags of mulch a day, which is more work than I thought it would be but my work is already coming along great. As a designer and my love of cleanliness this is meeting all my expectations.
On the other side from everything I read the wood chips do a great job keeping the moisture in and will help the ground if tilled before winter into the ground. The decomposition of the wood is great for fertilizing the soil, which I love the sound of that. So here we go it’s a test run on how this will work.
In other news all plants are doing well. We have strawberries growing (which I cannot wait to go over these little plants when I break out each plant on their own later on), the cucumbers and summer squash are blooming, and I have even seen the tops of radishes already! Pretty exciting to come home to.
In the next post, I plan to talk about some natural pest repellents that you can make right in your own kitchen! I have been noticing a stark difference between my basil plants that sit on the porch and the ones that are in the garden. They were both the same size at the beginning of the season but one keeps getting eaten.
Also, I am worried about my sweet little baby strawberries being eaten before they get to their full yummy potential. So I would love to hear your thoughts on what you know about natural pest repellents.
Tomorrow is my favorite posting day!!! Yeah for Fridays!!