Getting into the Garden

It’s finally time to put all of our greenhouse starts into the ground and start direct sowing! We’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for the weather to cooperate with us, but now that we finally have the garden tilled and the beds made, we’re ready to get into the garden.

This year we’re stepping up our game and incorporating weed cloth and a drip irrigation system. Last year we jerry rigged a sprinkler system with stuff we had laying around the farm. It worked very well but it wasn’t ideal. We also had a crazy amount of weeds. But then, what do you expect when you turn a hay field into a garden. But now we’re one season smarter and our garden will be much more efficient and nice looking.

First things first, we had to install the drip system. The wonderful people over at the Drip Store helped us with the design of our drip system not once, not twice but three times. One of their associates, Cameron helped us out a lot… he is the man! The drip system is set up into four zones via a manifold coming off of the spigot. It’s basically like a giant Super Soaker Thunderblaster 3000. It has the option to be set up to a timer which is great. And since the water drips right into the soil, we can continue to work in other parts of the garden without getting hit with a sprinkler.

This is a huge milestone for the farm, and a great investment into the garden. Now our leaves and fruit won’t get sun scorched by water droplets via overhead watering. And the soil will stay moist and saturated underneath the weed cloth. Our drip system is currently running off of our well pump but it has the option to be hooked into our gravity fed spring water system. But more on that in another post.

Now that the drip irrigation system is laid out, we can place the weed cloth and get to planting! (Ok, admittedly, we did some of these steps backwards but ideally, this is how it’s done) All of the starts we had in the greenhouse have been hardened off and thinned.  They’re just begging to be planted into the garden. It’ll take some time for them to get their bearings and start producing new growth. But once they get their feet wet and get a good top dressing of compost, they’ll go to town.

We have just about everything planted now with the exception of corn, ground cherries and a handful of herbs:

We’ll give you more updates as the garden progresses but to see what we’re up to (almost) daily, check out our facebook page!