Edible garden in May 2016

permaculture garden in may

This is the point in the year when I feel like control is slipping away from me. There are parts of the garden that are perfectly tidy and well managed and some that are…not. Since I am a bit of a control freak (ask my husband), I can get a little stressed out. Even though we went into this new adventure knowing it would not be possible to do it all in one season and I promised myself I was ok with that. I try to deal with this by concentrating strictly on one job in one area of the garden at a time. It does not always work, though. Like last night when my one job was to clear an area between the ‘Glockenapfel’ apple tree and the Halesia, plant artichokes and mulch them with old hay. But then suddenly I was weeding around the tiny blueberry bushes in my cottage garden. Which was important, too! Only there are about 100 (maybe 1000?) important jobs I could be doing at any given moment. But somehow there is still progress and we get closer to our vision for the garden one day at a time.

This is where we at at the moment:

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The raised beds in the kitchen garden are mostly planted and mulched and that means very little work is needed to keep things on track. We had a pretty big storm two weeks ago and many plants were damaged by hail but they just bounced back and everything’s growing well. We have picked lots of leaf mustard and spinach in May. Radishes have mostly bolted when the weather got too warm too quickly. I used some of the leaves for cooking but we only harvested a handful of good sized roots. This is a pattern that has been repeating itself the past years and it means radishes are actually better grown in early fall than in spring.

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Next to the vegetable beds is my little cottage garden with a nanking cherry, a sweetcherry, berries, herbs, rhubarb, alpine strawberries and lots of cut flowers. I have managed to mulch most of it and it is doing well and should only get more colorful in the coming weeks. I planted the berries (gooseberries, blueberries & honeyberries) in such a way that they can be covered with a fruit cage. Otherwise we would probably harvest zero berries.

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The northern part of our plot was overgrown with couch grass, bind weed and other delightful plants. We’re mulching it with cardboard to hopefully kill the weeds so that we can plant under the young trees next spring. In the meantime I planted lots of winter&summer squashes through the cardboard. Also some new to me varieties that I am trialing for one of the magazines I write for. sized_IMG_8724 sized_IMG_8726

Our small edible forest garden at home is established and needs very little care but still gives a lot in return. sized_IMG_8670 salad from the permaculture garden

And of course there is the community garden too. I would be happy to spend most of my time gardening, but I also have 6 articles to write this month. Ah well, there’s always next year. In the meantime, I’m learning to let go 🙂

If you like, you can have a look at what our garden looked like in May 2015, 2014, 2013.

 

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