Gardening
| 2002 was our
first full gardening season in Carlisle. We constructed a garden
in the hillside in front of the house and it was spectacularly
successful! George took the standard "lazy gardener" approach; he fertilized and limed once at the beginning of the season and used black plastic on almost everything. We watered heavily 2x per week and had a lot of sun (and got lots of veggies..!) Check it out |
| This is one of the last harvests. We even got some carrots..! |  |
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The peppers were beautiful; we grew a "variety pack" with good success. |
| We even got a kohlrabi..! This is a lot like a radish on steroids. It's kind of hard to judge the scale, but this is bigger than a tennis ball and smaller than a baseball... |  |
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Our tomatoes were fantastic! It's so hard to eat hot house tomatoes when you've grown cluster tomatoes like these. And, you get to pick them and eat them when they're still warm from the sun..!! |
| Here's George with his helpers. The kids were fascinated with the market basket from the garden and always wanted to help. Today's haul included tomatoes, cukes, peppers and a couple of gourds. |  |
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Of course, every gardener plants too many zucchinis... here's the little ones checking out some of the first zukes from the garden. |
| Since we don't use pesticides, we always have a few pests. Here's a fine looking tomato hornworm that discovered our garden- he's been eating pretty well! |  |
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We did have a minor animal problem- the local rabbits decided our veggie plants tasted better than anything else around; so we had to fence the entire garden and provide a serious gate... |
| We even had room for corn! stay tuned, fans, there are very few foods that rival home grown corn...! |  |
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update...dateline 28-jul-02 (60 days later) The garden is exploding. The little tiny tomatoe plants from above are now 4-5' tall, filling the cages and producing heavily; we should have ripe tomatoes in 1-2 weeks... |
| 150 blocks and 7
yards of top soil later, we wound up with
6 rows 3' wide and 25' long!
We managed to get everything in the ground by 1-jun-2002... let's see how we do |
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Part of the
project plan for this house was to build a garden this year. We
weren't sure where to put it, so we ended up digging it into the
hillside in front and terracing the whole mess. The actual
blocks in the wall are 3" x 12" x 24" granite and they
weigh in at 80lbs each. |