Centered in the Saddle

When we were looking for a house, we knew we wanted something with a little land for a vegetable garden and a chicken coop. I’m so happy, because our garden finally came to life – get it? – this weekend!

We settled on doing two raised beds, each 8’x4′. That seemed like a good balance between having enough room for plenty of veggies, but not too big as to be unmanageable. My very smart and handy husband designed them to include deer fencing with four doors per box, so we could easily access the plants from any side.

The deer fencing is super necessary. There are four friendly neighborhood deer that hang in and around our yard/woods who would be thrilled to move on from eating my tulips to snacking on some nice tender vegetable plants. Seriously. They’re not even afraid of humans. Sometimes they startle me when I’m in the yard and don’t notice them just on the edge of the trees.

It took a few weekends of work to build and paint the boxes. Literal blood and sweat. No tears, but definitely some swears. The blood, courtesy of my head when I turned and smacked my forehead into the crossbeam support while laying out the garden mesh. Owie.

Many thanks to Nicole at Zen and the Art of Baby Horse Management for her wise words and advice! She casually commented about newbie gardeners on someone else’s blog and I was like HELP ME PLEASE. Her help with soil, drainage, companion plants, and some awesome tips to maximize space. I hope I do her proud.

Yesterday was a lovely, “warm” sunny day (I mean, it was 55 degrees which feels AMAZING right now), so with the deer fence complete, I went ahead and planted.

Since it’s still cool here and frost isn’t out of the question, I consulted the Old Farmer’s Almanac on what should be planted early. Thus:

• Sugar snap peas
• Romaine lettuce
• Red leaf lettuce
• Spinach
• Broccoli
• Brussels sprouts

Again, thanks to Nicole, I know that the spinach might take time to establish and may be sad in the heat of the summer, so I tentatively plan to plant new spinach once the broccoli comes out in a couple months. Then we can have fresh spinach long into the fall, hopefully.

I still have an empty bed to plant. That’ll wait until later in May when the frost danger has passed. We’ll get some warm-weather-loving stuff going then like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and herbs.

Is it weird that I just want to go tend my garden? There’s not a lot to do, especially since we got rain early this morning so I don’t even need to go water it. Maybe I’ll just go look lovingly at my plants…

Anyone else doing any gardening this year? “Pandemic planting” or otherwise?