Starting Over

We spent 4 gardening seasons building up our soil, adding compost and deep layers of mulch, removing rocks, building potato boxes, planting perennial herbs...and then we moved leaving all of it behind. Our old farmhouse now belongs to an Amish family who will turn my "natural" looking cottage garden into a more organized plot with straight rows and zero weeds.

Now, we are in a new place and must start over again. Our house has a few flowers planted in the front of the house, but other than that is void of any gardens. We will starting from scratch once again. This time, however, we do have much nicer soil to work with. We have separated our pasture and will use the front half for our gardens. Here we will be planting some micro plots of alfalfa, red clover, and oats along with some corn, melons, cucumbers, and heirloom tomatoes. On the oppostite side of the fence we have started building raised beds and potato boxes. I've already planted some asparagus and rhubarb and a few potatoes are buried under a layer of deep mulch inside a couple of our potato boxes. We brought a trailer load of our compost from the other house and will be getting another load of compost and soil in a couple of weeks to top off our raised beds. I personally like to garden using the "deep mulch" method, which is also called "lasagna gardening". This method really supports the soil and cuts down on weeding, which I don't enjoy doing. Good lasagna gardens can take a few years.

I have the large task at hand of starting new herb gardens too. I'll use raised beds for this. The soil in the pasture is quite nice thanks to the horses who spent years fertilizing it for me so I will likely move several plants out to the larger garden once they are off to a good start in the raised beds. We've been working hard to get things ready for the upcoming growing season! We'll see how the fruits of our labors are blessed in the coming months. Of course, after several weeks of lovely weather, we have had snow again this week. That's Michigan weather for you! The forecast looks pretty good for next week...