Fall garden update

This is the beginning of the garden. We staked each row out to be 18 inches wide with a 3.5 foot walkway. We made each bed slightly raised with edges raised even higher to keep the water in. Each bed was also leveled to make water distribution as even as we could make it.

When the beds were done around the 7th of August, we started planting. Before any seeds were put in the ground, we dug in Mittleider pre-plant fertilizer. We ran two rows 10" apart down the center of the bed to for the seeds.

Here is the garden a few weeks later. We water daily to keep the moisture available for the plants. To get the seeds to germinate we made sure that the soil never dried out during the day which was sometimes a difficult task.

After an encounter between a rabbit and a row of beets, we put up a silt fence. This picture was taken mid-September.

This is the garden today, October 3, 2012.  We have been selling veggies at a farm stand for 3 weeks and business picks up more each week. It is going to frost here this weekend, so we are pounding rebar stakes into the ground on each side of the bed, bending pvc to go over the rebar which makes a hoop, then we are putting plastic over the beds for the night. Some of the beds like spinach, beets, kale, radishes and kohlrabi won't need the protection yet, so I will wait another month and only cover what is left to be harvested (probably the carrots but we'll see.)

 

 

 

I am very pleased with this fall garden. I will definitely be doing this again.