More Landscaping, Winter - Spring 2009
Through the spring, we worked hard to get our garden areas ready for summer's plantings. We wanted at least a modest food crop this year, but the landscape was quite inhospitable to plants: the soils destroyed by construction, the south side of our house windy and exposed, the rabbits, etc. Slowly, our south side garden began to take shape, as did our walkways, fences, compost, and terrace structure.
Looking down the path to the compost bin, orchard, and the future shed (it hadn't been built at this time).
The wintry orchard.
Aaron laid the foundation for the first small segment of a brick garden wall that we'll be building around the south side to house some of our garden.
Spring came.
We built a few planters to get our garden going quickly. They were made from redwood recycled from Lenny's deck.
Aaron and the cat checking out the finished planters. Rustic, but functional.
Aaron cutting lettuce inside the house with the finished, filled planter outside.
A few weeks or maybe months later, the planter with our tomatoes.
We built a second planter on the east side of the house for more tomatoes.
They grew!
The land slopes down from the south side of our house, so we wanted at least one flat terrace within the garden wall. After much debate, we decided to make the terrace retaining wall out of gabions, which are wire baskets filled with rocks. Here Aaron is digging out the pad for the gabion.
We had a lot of fencing material from a roll that Aaron found at the dump. We fashioned the gabion cage out of it.
Aaron working on the cage structure.
A rare picture of me working.
The gabion would be filled with rocks from a pile we had delivered to our house. Unfortunately, the 8 tons of rocks were delivered quite a ways downhill from the site of the gabions, so we had to move them by wheelbarrow. The loads of rocks were quite heavy. We hauled rock all day.
The rocks.
Filling the gabion.
Closing the wire cage.
Aaron.
We worked late that evening. When the gabion was finished, we backfilled up to it with our best dirt mixed with manure to make a planting bed.
Soon after, we built a wire fence lined with chicken wire (to keep the bunnies out). This fence will go away once we have the main bunny-proof garden wall in place.
The fenced enclosure has a primitive door made with a ski pole.
Aaron watering the bed with rainwater from our large cistern. At this point in the spring, our 2600 gallon cistern was full and overflowing, and our 1600 gal cistern had about 700 gallons. As it turned out, we had a very rainy spring AFTER that and our large cistern remained full to overflowing (as of June 14) and the small cistern nearly filled up as well.
We planted eggplant, peppers, and rosemary in these beds.
A few weeks later, the plants were still doing fine but not really taking off. It's a pretty harsh and windy spot. We'll see if they take....we planted 11 eggplants, so maybe it will be a good thing if they don't ALL do really well...or we'll have eggplants out our ears...
In an after-work session, we built the small section of brick wall that we'd laid the foundation for. It is a joy to work with the bricks and mud slip!
We planted strawberries from our old house in a bed by the wall. They get afternoon shade and seem to like it there.
We built another enclosed, wire-fenced garden area, this one down by our compost/orchard/shed. It is watered from the small cistern way uphill by the house---the water comes out with great pressure down here. We planted squash, cucumber, watermelon, and corn. So far, the corn has not been successful, but everything else came up.
Lots of little squash plants, before thinning.
The cat by the compost pit.
This is the inside of our small cistern, 1600 gallons and nearly full. It drains a smaller roof area than the large one.
The front porch of our house was crudely terraced with cinder blocks for the time being.
Until we had collected a sizeable number of cool rocks, at which point Aaron did the cool stonework here. He had to stop for a few weeks in the middle of this because birds had made nests and laid eggs in the cinder blocks.
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