For me the joy of gardening and growing things is the connectivity to nature. There is something about having my hands in the earth, the warmth of the sun on my person and hearing nature around me that brings me joy. No more do I hear the bustle of city traffic, it is replaced by bird songs, the call of our neighbor’s rooster or the bray of another neighbor’s donkey. As I plant in our market garden, I am surrounded by views of the Grand Mesa, Mount Garfield, and Mount Lincoln (both are also mesas just at a smaller scale).

The most joyful part of creating our market garden is the planting of the seeds, seedlings, and fruit trees, harkening back to an earlier post on the orchard. This however is the tail end of the overall planting process. What I’m discovering as we slowly turn our hayfield into a garden is that there is a lot of preparatory work you must do before you get to do the joyful bit. This work is less joyful.

To turn a hayfield into a market garden, our first instinct was to plow the whole field up. We were discouraged from doing this as it would leave much of the ground, aka soil exposed which would invite more weeds and soil erosion. Taking this advice, we opted instead to rototill our beds into the existing hayfield. The first thing we learned was that when hayfields are left unattended for a long period of time (several years) the ground is rock hard, and next to impossible to till! The furrows are also still present. Our solution to the hardness of the dirt, soak the area with water and then till. This also holds true for digging or drilling holes in the beds for planting. The furrows, I plan to address this fall by filling them in and then planting a cover crop of micro clovers over both sections (the orchard and the vegetable patch). This will even out the ground and replace the remaining hay over time. Covers are considered a legume and are very good at improving soil health.

Once our beds were tilled, we added compost, aka animal manure to further enhance the soil. We are fortunate to have a wealth of manure on the property from a previous owner and his farm animals. This I’ve come to believe is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because it saved us a ton of money and it is a curse because I had to rototill it because it too was rock hard, and then transport it to the beds one wheelbarrow at a time!

Once the soil was amended, we then put down weed barrier to stop the hay (and alfalfa) as well as weeds from growing. After that was completed, we installed the rest of the hardscape which included, steel poles and jute twine to support our future sweet and sugar snap peas, and rows of arches on which we will grow both gourmet squash and cucumbers. Then we had to finish laying the drip irrigation. This was also no easy feat as it took two people to lay the line, one to unroll the marathon long pipe making sure that it didn’t kink (kinks stop the flow of water), while the other secured it in place. I discovered later that this last step wasn’t necessary as I ended up having to adjust the lines once I started to plant.

With the irrigation finally done, we could start spacing out the plants and seeds. I had created a ‘living’ diagram of the vegetable garden early so I had a map of what vegetables and flowers were to go where. Once we started spacing out the individual plants, marking their location via spray paint, we made further adjustments. This translates to we moved the location of our vegetables and flowers within the seven beds, numerous times. This is why I refer to the diagram as ‘living’… things change daily.

With the locations marked, the next step was burning a hole in the weed barrier, did I mention it was a thick fabric? Luckily, I had seen an ingenious way of doing this from a DIY video on Instagram! Taking a medium to large size tin can and attaching it to a wooden stick, we used our weed burner to heat up the end of the can, this then allowed me to burn a perfect size circle in the weed barrier! After several hours, we fine-tuned the process and could burn four sometimes five holes before I had to reheat the can. This was a long process as some seeds are spaced four inches apart, others six, many are twelve inches (I like those seeds) and some eighteen inches apart such as asparagus. The burning of the weed barrier is a two-person task, Andy lights and holds the flame while I do the burning.

With the barrier burned we then had to dig holes for each plant/seed. Andy made a brilliant discovery in that you can buy an auger, that attaches to your handheld battery powered drill, and it makes the perfect size hole! We also discovered that said auger combined with the rock-hard dirt over heats the drill and you only get so many holes completed (between six and twelve) before the drill dies and you have to recharge it. To combat, this we remembered from our tilling phase that getting the soil wet makes the job a whole lot easier! That said, as of the writing of this post, we have a traditional hand auger on order from Amazon. It is not that we are impatient, but rather we are painfully aware that we are already two months behind on our planting, and every delay puts us further behind which means our growing season shrinks!

This is one reason why we decided that this year is our learning year, meaning that we are not focused on trying to sell our produce! Every year from this day forward will be a learning year. Truth be told. In any case, we are still under the gun to get things in the ground…

So, with the holes drilled, we are finally at the planting stage! All this to get to the fun stuff…. When it comes to planting, there are two different ways to approach it. If I am sowing seeds directly into the ground, I add amended soil, then place the seed on the top and using a chopstick that has a one inch and a half inch mark on it, I push the seed into the earth filled hole. The depth depends on the instructions of the seed packet. With the seed safely inserted I lightly press down on the earth and move onto the next hole and seed. One day last week I think I planted 150 poppy seeds, which didn’t even take up a quarter of the bed… so you can imagine just how many seeds can be directly sown into seven beds. Each bed is about 60 feet long and either five feet or ten feet wide!

The other approach to planting is via seedlings that we started (numerous times) in the green house. While planting seeds is joyful, there is something about inserting a living plant into the ground that brings even greater satisfaction. Instead of having a long black empty vegetable or flower bed with a million holes in it, you have baby plants in evenly spaced rows, leaves swaying in the wind, looking up to the sun!

Of course, the joy of the direct sowing comes when the little seed starts to sprout from the ground, I’m not there yet, but each day I walk the garden inspecting the rows, keeping a vigilant eye out for the first signs of life. It is a long process, and for those of us, i.e. me, a huge learning curve, no wait… opportunity, and once we’ve finished the process and most everything is in the ground, I’m going to sit down and take copious notes on what I’ve learned to do and perhaps even more importantly NOT to do next time!

Planting

Roots

Learning to be Patient