You might recall in my last garden update (20 days ago exactly) that we had finished tilling our raised beds, had the majority of the weeds out of them and were basically just waiting for the last frost to pass by or to get our tunnels built before we put anything in the ground. Unfortunately, our plan for tunnel domination was foiled (and not in a good greenhouse foil way.) Apparently, they don’t sell 1 inch PVC pipe here like in America. I’m not sure how we failed to notice this before but apparently their plumbing lines are all laid in copper? So, that has taken us back to the drawing board. We could use aluminum but that is going to be a lot more costly and we have yet to find pipes long enough for the hoops. We want the tunnels to be about 3 feet high so we can have them set up on some of the beds during the regular growing season as well as during the winter but they will be over eggplants and bell peppers (which do much better in the warmth of a greenhouse.) Sure, we have to be difficult, right? Maybe some of you in the area have an answer? We were going to look online for the PVC piping also – but haven’t gotten that far yet.

Just as a little reminder to you (and us), here’s what our garden looked like at the beginning of February… (even scarier is what it looked like last summer when all this was growing!)

Definitely not a pretty picture. FORTUNATELY, we have been extremely motivated since then so now our garden looks like this:

Not bad progress for a couple weekends of work! I almost had forgotten just how bads things were looking out there. The majority of the credit goes to Stefan who spent hours building up muscles while turning these beds. But didn’t he do a rockin’ job?

This is the back of the garden, behind the greenhouse and the raised beds. We’ve got a line of roses planted along here but a lot of the plants are in pretty bad shape so we’ll probably be replacing them with small fruit trees and bushes.

For example, this josta berry bush that we got from friends at our housewarming party two years ago. They gave us two of them, in red and black, and they have been living in pots since then. Last July they were ravaged by caterpillars and I was pretty convinced we would lose them. There were no leaves left on the poor plants at all. But, once I finally got the bugs off, it was thriving again and they are looking healthy this year. Perhaps they will actually produce something this year – it would be the first time!

Here’s the other half of the tilled bed. It’s not as pretty cause I did it and I’m not an expert digger like Stefan. But you can also see our finished compost bin hiding in the corner there. We’re planning to grow pumpkins, watermelon, squash, cucumbers, loofa  and other climber/walker plants in this rear bed as well as on the side. But before that occurs we’re also putting in a divider so when lay gravel in our paths, it does run together with the mulch in the beds.

Here’s the side bed on the right of the garden when you stand in our barn. Those green tufts are irises and there were toms of wild strawberries here too. We decided to turn them under since we want to put down a thick layer of mulch here to keep the weeds out, but I have a few more growing under the ivy so I may move them over at some stage. One can never have too many strawberries, right? I’m even thinking about putting some in hanging pots inside our house 🙂

Speaking of the ivy, I took advantage of the trash container still being here and started the assault on it. Still an very long way to go but I got started on it at least. It was that or pulling more of those stupid clover plants out of the raised beds and I just couldn’t bare more of that insanity just yet.I can’t locate any before photos but the ivy in the photo below was growing over the top of the door and there was just a wall of green here. So I pulled a bunch of stuff down (and experienced some massive dust storms – it’s incredible how much dust builds up in there) and I cleaned up a bunch of stuff that was on the ground wher it’s all brown (in front of and beside the water barrel.) Not even half way finished with that thing but hopefully we will have some more good weather approaching.

Are you getting your garden ready? Started any seedlings?  Thinking you have no space for gardening? You’re going to love our container garden in the courtyard. 🙂 It’s still a way off though.