This year's garden is shaping up to be quite beautiful and enchanting, and my part in creating it (and the seasonal demands of my day job) has been keeping me from posting to this blog. So I went a little buck wild with the mail order plants and ended up with a yard full of sand cherries, chokeberries, raspberries, blueberries, and Juneberries. I fulfilled my plan to stock up on edible perennials, many of which arrived as bare root plants. The volume of plants that I had to put in the ground was a bit overwhelming, and some of them waited a few weeks for a home. Some of them haven't yet come out of "dormancy" (or is it death?) yet, but the majority seem to be doing well so far.
I experienced a heart-wrenching setback last month when my garden, which was full of garlic, onions, rhubarb, irises, and other perennials, was accidentally tilled. One of the reservation's garden programs tills community members' gardens for free and I had signed up to get a new area tilled, but due to miscommunication last year's garden was tilled instead. Some of the plants survived the tilling, and it's great seeing them pop up now. I'm hoping to harvest some garlic next month, and I bought some replacements for the perennials that didn't come back. The new garden I wanted to be tilled was meant to hold the annuals, and i had planned to fill last year's garden with perennials, but since I only have the one now, I decided to mix the annuals and perennials. I planted peas around the grapes, beans around the honeyberries, and gladiolas between the different varieties of strawberries.
After learning that the most successful Ojibwe farmers of the past, the northernmost farmers of corn, used agricultural methods like corn hills and mounded rows, I decided to implement those methods into my garden. That has already helped save the life of many of the plants in my care, as we just experienced a severe flood in this area. The fact that many of the plants were put in mounded rows kept them out of the water. Of course the sandy soil helps for drainage also. My mom is visiting currently, and she just helped me transplant the last of the garden plants to the garden this afternoon. Now it's time to focus on the weeds....
I experienced a heart-wrenching setback last month when my garden, which was full of garlic, onions, rhubarb, irises, and other perennials, was accidentally tilled. One of the reservation's garden programs tills community members' gardens for free and I had signed up to get a new area tilled, but due to miscommunication last year's garden was tilled instead. Some of the plants survived the tilling, and it's great seeing them pop up now. I'm hoping to harvest some garlic next month, and I bought some replacements for the perennials that didn't come back. The new garden I wanted to be tilled was meant to hold the annuals, and i had planned to fill last year's garden with perennials, but since I only have the one now, I decided to mix the annuals and perennials. I planted peas around the grapes, beans around the honeyberries, and gladiolas between the different varieties of strawberries.
After learning that the most successful Ojibwe farmers of the past, the northernmost farmers of corn, used agricultural methods like corn hills and mounded rows, I decided to implement those methods into my garden. That has already helped save the life of many of the plants in my care, as we just experienced a severe flood in this area. The fact that many of the plants were put in mounded rows kept them out of the water. Of course the sandy soil helps for drainage also. My mom is visiting currently, and she just helped me transplant the last of the garden plants to the garden this afternoon. Now it's time to focus on the weeds....
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