The Gardening Saga Goes High
(No, not that kind of high…although marijuana is now legal in Canada.) In this year’s edition of the battle with the bindweed, spouse and I decided to put in raised beds for our vegetable patch. There is now landscape fabric underneath the beds (with a hole so the worms could get through and work their magic on the soil), and fabric and mulch on the paths between the beds, and new, uncontaminated soil IN the beds to give us a head start. And all the digging and weeding will be an awful lot easier on our backs. Having the beds built in the spring meant that we got a slow start on the planting. It was too late for most things that go directly in the ground as seeds, so we only put in a few–beets, carrots, and bush beans (unlike most beans, these don’t need to grow up a pole, so they won’t shade our neighbours’ vegetable patch that is directly to the north and now two feet lower than ours). I keep meaning to try a fall crop of seeds, too, if we can get anything harvested soon enough so there’s space. (Our first frost date is somewhere around the end of October or beginning of November.) New this year, we’re trying potatoes, which are growing like mad, so that’s exciting. I’m hilling up the soil around them so they’ll be easier to harvest later, but they’re growing so fast I can barely keep up. We’ve also got…