Elements of Garden Design

I'm a very visual kind of gal. I just love leafing through all the gardening books with beautiful pictures with tons of eye candy, and Pinterest as a means of collecting and organizing my ideas is just one of my favorite things EVER!

And yet, of all the books I read as I stumbled stepped into this massive gardening endeavor, my favorite has been one with only a handful of black and white sketches interspersed among a collection of engaging essays.

Elements of Garden Design is so very helpful, providing a structured way of pondering, planning, and implementing the ideas from those inspiring images.

Elements of Garden Design does what few gardening books do--it addresses the process of conceiving a whole garden, as opposed to a single element like color or a particular class of plant. Joe Eck explores the idea of a garden, and offers a practical approach to translating concepts such as "intention" and "harmony" into the solid forms of hedges and terraces, paths and rooms. Novice and experienced professional alike will find both food for thought and down-on-the-ground advice on such matters as creating child- and pet-friendly designs. 

Even though I didn't have this book from the outset of the planning process, I think the chapters in the first section of the book (Part I - Theory) will give me the necessary framework for organizing my thoughts as I attempt to record what happened in the months prior to this blog's inception (before it all escapes from my brain entirely).

They are as follows:

Intention
Site
Frame
Style
Structure
Rooms
Access
Harmony
Contrast
Scale
Symmetry
Shape
Repose
Time

Some of the elements further down on the list are still in the theoretical and experimental stages, but the first few are foundational and I believe will prove most helpful in beginning my history of the garden spaces. I hope, too, that sharing in this structured way will be helpful to others as they plan and ponder their own garden!

Snips, Snails, Slugs, and Snakes

Actually, what I want is TOADS. But I couldn't include that in the title because it doesn't begin with an "S."
Slugs are a menace. A yucky, yucky, yucky menace. There is some redeeming cuteness in that little shell house that snails carry about. But slugs? Zero cuteness, 100% trouble.

They have destroyed my spinach...

 ...devoured my parsley...

...dined on my cabbages and lettuces...

...dotted my potatoes...

and ravaged my radishes

And they are ugly, slimey, and give me the heebie-jeebies.

(no photo of slugs due to said heebie-jeebie-ness)

Now, my preferred solution would be a family of toads moving in. We even have a little (overgrown) pond like place that they might like to live. Not that they are like cutesy-wutsy little bunny-wunnies or anything, but relative to slugs, they could be called adorable. I can handle toads and frogs.

Trouble being, we have snakes. They eat toads and frogs.

This is from last year, pre-garden. Our first snake encounter in the new house, in the front flower bed of all places! But, they're still around. This is a garter, but just this week the 3.5 year old found a black one amongst the carrots he was examining!

Sigh.

How do I get rid of the snakes...so I can have toads...so they can help get rid of the slugs?

Mind boggling. Alas, for now, we're going to try cheap beer for baiting and drowning (the slugs). Didn't make it to the liquor store in time yesterday, but tonight's the night!
I'll keep you posted. Meanwhile, any advice or resources on manipulating the habitat in your garden to be pro-toad or in any other way anti-slug would be appreciated!

P.S. I apologize for the blurry photos. I think something was on the lense. However, done is better than perfect at this point in my life!

Many Hands...

Funny how Dad being home can make a day so very productive.

For one thing, he works hard and gets a lot done.

But on top of that, he has an uncanny ability to do it while keeping the baby occupied and happy.

Meanwhile, I was better able to manage my other little helpers.

This guy is planting nasturtium seeds (Dwarf Jewel Mix) in the border along the asparagus bed.

I'm not sure that the beds we got in will be quite enough for all we'd like to plant, and with all the capital we've thrown at this venture already, we can't really afford to spend extra money on containers. We have plenty of 5 gallon buckets, but I'm not a fan of the "look," so I tried to gussy them up a bit by adding some old burlap coffee sacks we have from a birthday party sack race a couple of years back. I just put them in and pulled them over the edge like an over-sized garbage bag. My not-quite-8-year-old drilled holes in the bottom for me, and here he is filling them (with quite the audience).

I haven't yet decided what to plant in them, but it will likely be the space-hogging zucchini and crookneck squashes. I think I'll need to tidy them up a bit with some cinching of twine or burlap strips.

I also got some help feeding what we'd already planted with some organic plant food (We just happened to have Plant Tone in the shed already). We hope to eventually buy all the ingredients to make our own fertilizer as per this method (yes, we are a bit backwards and behind on this front!). We are most intrigued by its promise to ensure trace minerals are being added to the soil. My helper was a little messy and got some of the fertilizer on the leaves, so he also helped water to rinse them all well.

I planted pole beans around a lovely trellis my husband built last weekend (pictures forthcoming). The plan is for it to be painted red, but we'll see if it gets painted before it is needed! Same for the one for the peas. Our peas were in late, but we're hopeful we'll get at least one meal's worth before summer hits full force. The weather is so crazy this year, who knows?

I hemmed and hawed and read about direct seeding hot weather plants. My trusty soil thermometer read 68, and while Mel kept telling me 70-75, the editors at Taunton assured me 65 was okay. In the end, I went with it since next Saturday is Amtrack Train Day, and my helpers will be otherwise occupied.

Parisian Pickling, National Pickling Approved, and Spaghetti Squash

I planted 8 cucumber plants alongside 4 spaghetti squash. Then, in another bed, I planted four cantaloupe, not muskmellon, and 4 winter squash plants. I'm so excited about the French melons. They seem so romantic and make me feel like it is going to be a real potager!

True cantaloupes Charentais and Noir des Carmes in a row with winter squashes Delicata and Waltham Butternut.

I've been saving my egg shells for months now. A couple of years ago, my tomatoes got blossom end rot caused by calcium deficiency. It was so very, very sad, I determined to take precautions against it (though mindful watering is the best prevention), and I put a lot of crushed egg shells in as I planted my tomatoes. After reading today that squash and melons can suffer the same fate, I figured that if it works for tomatoes, why not squash? I've never actually looked it up or seen it done, but I couldn't see how it would hurt, and I had PLENTY of egg shells!

One of my favorite gardening discoveries this year has been "winter sowing." I hope to be better prepared this winter to do more of it. It certainly is not the most aesthetic method, but it is effective. I have a bunch of half cut milk jugs lying about now that I've either planted things or the weather is warm  enough to leave the tops open, so with my uncertainty about the soil temp, I opted to use the leftover halves of my mini-greenhouses as cloches to help with germination on my squashes and cantaloupe. Isn't cloche just so much more lovely than "milk jug?"

Though, I'm afraid a plastic jug by any other name is still a plastic jug to the eye if not the ear.

A Berry Good Start

For months now, I have wanted to chronicle our work building the kitchen garden for our new home, as well as our ups and downs navigating the extensive but long neglected landscaping we inherited, but we've been so busy doing, there never seemed time for writing. And the longer I waited, the harder it seemed to start. Rogers and Hammerstein told us that the beginning was a very good place to start. But the further out we've come from the beginning, the more overwhelmed I've been at the prospect of starting there.

Tristar on left, Jewel on right, both from Raintree

Then, yesterday, as I put in our strawberries, I decided that I should just start here. I couldn't remember what variety of strawberries I had planted from when I started to when I finished. My boys were also very excited about the seedlings coming up in the block border of our rhubarb bed--and I really don't know what I planted there. I think it is Night Phlox, but it might be Chinese Forget-Me-Nots. Either way, it is clear that my head is not a safe place for keeping this sort of information.

So here we are. It has been a whirlwind, and we have dived in head-first, learning a lot as we go. I am comforted that the art and science of gardening is learned mostly through the doing and experimenting, and if we do something wrong this year, we'll hopefully do it better next.

There is so much to record, so many pictures to take, so many stories to tell regarding this family adventure. We haven't done everything according to plan, but we did plant the strawberries before they died in the box, and that is a berry good thing.