Another dream come true! This piece of level, well drained land behind the house is becoming a garden!
I put a word out on the local facebook page to see if anyone knew of a person who might come and help us break ground for our new garden, since we had left our tractor and rototiller behind in CT.
Very quickly I received a private message from someone kindly directing me to the help we needed, and we were quickly in touch with a very nice “neighbor” (he lives over 5 miles away!) who told us he would be happy to help! We’ve been waiting a couple of months since that time for the weather to cooperate, and finally we got things dry enough around here for him to come and break ground!
When he started down his first pass, I looked at Roy and smiled. “Hear that?” as I cupped my ear. “What?” he said. “That’s just it! No sound of rocks clunking in the tiller!” We and our neighbor were pleasantly surprised by the lack of rocks. We knew it would be far different that North STONington, but this was beyond our expectations!
Below is the finished project! We are quite pleased.
It’s not as large as our previous garden, but we will downsize a bit (though I’m not sure how, because I’m the kind of person who wants to plant every last seed in the pouch.)
We did have him till a separate area for winter squash. It will be nice to have that all contained to it’s own area this time.
As for the soil quality, we have not had it tested, but it definitely has a higher clay content than our soil in CT. That will be rectified over the years as we continue to add organic material to it. In the winter we will bring the chicken tractor up from the lower field in front and let them scratch their way across, fertilizing as they go, adding nitrogen as they clean up bugs, weeds, and dormant larvae.
Another neighbor (this time one within a 1/2 mile!) needed a plot of asparagus removed from her garden, and we happily complied and brought it here! It is now transplated at the far left part of the garden. With the asparagus were some strawberry plants that we divided out and put in the next section of the garden along with some strawberry plants that we bought.
And below, in the foreground, you can see a bunch of blueberry bushes that we were able to plant yesterday.
We will have to wait patiently for a year to harvest from these plantings to give the berries and asparagus a year to get more established, but we know good things come to those who wait!
We then prepped another area for rhubarb transplants, another gift from an avid local gardener. We added some composted cow manure to prep this soil.
Here’s our future rhubarb patch, planted! It’s now been mulched over and for the next couple of days we sit back and let God water everything in – and maybe snow a bit on it all, too!
Rest we will for the next few days, as the soil warms to be ready to receive lots of seeds! In the meantime we will get out and purchase what we need to build our 7 foot deer fence for the garden. Next up for planting will be peas, potatoes, chard, kale and lettuce! In the wake of yet another recall of lettuce at the supermarket, we just can’t wait to have our own safe and healthy food.
Morning Star Meadows Farm 