Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Update on spiral garden

I was just on Gardener's Anonymous' Blog and saw the update of her spiral garden which inspired me to update you on my spiral garden. It's exploded into life this year and as of yet has not heard of my plots to rearrange and expand it.

Welcome to the main path:

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Street side:

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House side:

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Sorry, I don't have any pictures of the centre of the spiral but I've changed it around, moving my delphiniums to the front and replacing them with an dark leafed, hardy abelia. Anyhow, it's in for more changing in the coming months and years. The spiral itself is most visible in the spring and fall when most of the herbaceous material has died down. My intention was to have ungulating layers of vegetation so that you play peek-a-boo as you are walking through it until you get to the centre where there is a stone bench for sitting.

Links:

Small spiral garden
Scroll down for a spiral rowed veggie patch

Sunday, June 22, 2008

It's been awhile and garlic harvest

While I was gone, several people had kindly volunteered to take care of my garden. Happily for the weeds, one of them was unable to fulfill his obligation. My veggie patch was a verdant field of green crabgrass, lamb's quarters (though I would have liked more of those tasty wild greens), and so on. I weeded until my hands were sore and then I weeded some more. Before I go on the second half of our summer journey, I will mulch heavily!

As we are about to head off again, I harvested the garlic.

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This year I tried to plant enough to have extras for replanting in the fall. Tempting as it is to keep the biggest bulbs for eating, I must replant those best ones to help my crop improve year after year. Of course, some of the bulb size variability has to do with luck, like being planted on top of slightly richer earth or with slightly more space, but there was definitely some difference in the variety of garlic. Don't ask me which ones I planted, sometimes I am a bad record keeper but those more successful garlic will be replanted in the fall. Of course, I will also include some of the other varieties in case the weather next year is vastly different and by chance they will be more successful.

I also was surprised to see that I had missed harvesting some garlic last year. Here is what it looks like in its second year. You can see they grew into bunches of 'pearl' garlic without any cloves. I will replant these in the fall too and see what happens.

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See you in August!