The New, Improved Veggie Garden

The seeds have been arriving in the mail and this has made my thoughts turn to the new, improved veggie garden.  Our old garden was about 125 feet by 50 feet or 6250 sq ft.  The new garden is about 100 feet by 40 feet AND another 100 feet by 40 feet or about 8,000 sq ft.

The old veggie garden was one big block of dirt.  The new veggie garden has a silver buffalo berry hedge around it.  I have allowed five feet on each side of the hedge to allow for growth.  Then, there is a 10 foot wide pathway, all the way around the garden and a 10 foot wide pathway up the middle.  That means I can use a wagon or a wheel barrow with ease!

The old veggie garden had left over bits of wire fence keeping the dogs out.  The new veggie garden has a nice looking 5 foot 2"x4"welded wire fence planned for across the front with a gate planned for entering the garden from the front.  Completing the make over will be a fourteen foot gate and a four foot man gate from the garden to the greenhouse to allow for easy access with a truck or even a truck with a trailer [filled with horse manure, one supposes].  We have gotten a start on that project by getting two posts into the ground.  We got sidetracked by spending an entire day off buying my new, used truck so - I am hoping - we will be working on this project again this week.  We bought a roll of wire, so we are well on our way to getting this job done.

It is a big garden but corn takes up a fair amount of room.  We do three sections of corn every year, planting them about two weeks apart so that we can have fresh corn for a couple of months.  Naturally, we freeze quite a bit of it as well.  We also give some away since you can't beat fresh corn and you can't buy it fresh picked around here.

Hubby also likes to grow a ton of melons.  We will have Lilly crenshaw, Swan lake, cantaloupes, Desert King and New Queen watermelons, French cantaloupes and a few more I can think of right now.  They grow in rows about 6 feet apart and they take up a lot of room.

That leaves plenty of room left over for the far too many beans we will plant again this year, carrots, rads, lettuce, peas.  I love garden peas but I sometimes wonder why I bother.  You can buy a bag of frozen  peas for almost nothing and they taste pretty good.  Garden peas take a fair amount of time to pick and then you have to sit and shell them for a fair amount of time.  Sometimes I sit on the couch with three bowls [one for unshelled peas, one for the shells and one for the plump green peas] and watch TV while I shell the darn things.

Looks like today will be another permissible burn day.  Every morning that you want to burn you have to check the weather and then call the burn line.  The county tells you "Today is a a permissible burn day.  You may burn daily from sunrise until 2pm.  You must have a burn permit to burn.  For information on obtaining a burn permit ...."