An Overview of the Garden

This picture is a few years old, but it gives an idea of the layout of our raised beds. That's sue-donym's house behind the fence, by the way. We have their lilacs coming up on our side, they have our grapes coming over on theirs. Win-win!

Our food part of the garden consists of the following:
3 grape vines
4 currant bushes
thornless blackberry bushes
peach tree
pear tree
and then six 5'x10' raised beds which contain the following:
1-raspberries
2-strawberries
3-peas
4,5,6-some combo of corn, beans, pumpkins/squash, lettuce/spinach/broccoli, tomatoes/basil/peppers, onions/potatoes, etc.

So far this year I only have the peas in. We have had some very erratic weather here and I think I'll wait until this weekend to plant the lettuce/spinach bed. We moved them to the bed in the bottom left corner of the picture this year. We rotate our "crops" every year, except for the berries which are kind of permanent at this point.

Travis threw a big bag of sand on everything and we tilled it all in with shovels. That helps break up our clay soil. Even though our beds go down about 2 feet beneath the surface and we hauled in load after load of compost (before we started making our own), the soil still clumps up to an extent. We've tried acidifying the soil so we can grow blueberries, but the water is alkaline and it just doesn't work. I'll have to wait until I go back to St. Louis for my azaleas and dogwoods, I guess. We really need to add two more beds this year. Our raspberries need to be thinned and moved into a second bed, and the blackberries just aren't doing well and could benefit from a new home.

Back to the peas. We usually plant the Early Frosty variety, and I got four rows in on March 19 and another five on March 28. I'll finish up with two rows of snow peas next week. That will stagger the harvest dates a bit so everything doesn't come in at the same time. Once the peas are good and up, I'll put the metal fence sections around to add support. The peas get pretty tangled and heavy, so that helps a bit. I'll post more pictures as they get going.