Switched at Potagar

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon tilling, filling, and planting. 

My boyfriends dad helped be wheel the wheelbarrow around the other side of the house so that we didn't have to carry each of the four bags of soil individually through the house. His idea and a good one. Really good one! 

Once the soil was placed I started tilling the soil with a shovel. It made me really tired and got me way to close to the bugs. So I went looking for a hoe. Found one! That made it do much easier and made it possible for me to till the soil much better. 

Once that was handled I started out with planting the tomatoes. I miscalculated what space I needed. Since the tomatoes were our best crop I made sure to get all of those in before anything else. 

Then I worked on the cucumbers and strawberries. I had planned on using the recycled bed for the strawberries and planted 4 Ozark Beauties before I realized that I would either need to cover the soil with landscaping cloth so that the berries don't touch the soil and rot when they come in or plant them somewhere else. I stopped my planting right there because I wanted to come up with a solid plan. 

(R) Sungold Cherry Tomato. (L) Burpless cucumber plants and trellises to grow up. 

(Front Row from L to R) Bradley Tomato, French Radishes, Romaine Lettuce. (Mid L) Eversweet Strawberries. (Mid R) Lemon Boy. (Back L) Beefstake Tomato. (Back R) Lemon Boy. 

Container cucumber of the Burpless variety with trellis. 

Ozark Beauties in side garden. See how all the starter berries are touching the soil? That will rot them, 100%. 

Cleaning!

We had the guy building our deck bring a gardener to take care of sweeping, raking , and trimming. There was millions of leaves, twigs, and etc. that needed to be gathered and bagged. He did an amazing job. I feel like the garden will be more enjoyable this year because of the clean fresh start. It's never looked so good. 

After he had finished the days work, I went outside to plant the two spinach plants. They are cool weather plants and had started to shrivel a bit from lack of space. I planted them and enjoyed the new cleaned and organized backyard. I watered everything else and headed inside proud of Potogar Patch! 

The gardener clean the strawberry bed area as well. Trimmed all of the ivy back so that it wouldn't strangle the plants. Amazing. I couldn't have done it alone, but from hear on out I'll be keeping it up. Happy for it to be my job! 

Clean Potagar Patch.

Cleaned and trimmed strawberry patch. 

New implanted spinach plants. 

Potagar Patch 2014

I know it's been a long winter and everyone has been getting sick of waiting to put their gardens together but it looks like the wait is coming to an end, hopefully! 

This year we'll be combining Potagar Schoultz with Patch Market. The new garden name is going to be Potagar Market. Exciting! The reason I did it this way was because I decided it was best to only grow the things we truly ended up eating and the things, out of the ones we ate that, worked. 

That came down to strawberries (they didn't really work but most of that was due to the excessive rain), cucumbers, spinach, basil, lemon balm, tomatoes (many different varieties especially our beloved yellow), peppers, and lettuce. I'm forgetting a couple of things but that is the bulk of the garden. Patch Market has officially been turned into a strawberry patch. It seemed fitting and much more conducive to growing the berries than anywhere else. I was not about to make the same mistake and squash all of my beauties, Ozark and Loran, into that ridiculous Topsy Turvy. The Ozark variety does need more space but that did not come into account when making the decision. It came down to- we love strawberries and the darn TT didn't work- what works best. People have strawberry patches so using the recycled material bed as a strawberry patch just made sense. 

We will be growing in all 6 raised beds, the recycling bin, 2 large rounds, and the brick bed. Fruiting will happen a few weeks later because I've yet to plant a thing. This time last year I had everything planted, most of all, planned and organized. I planted the last few plants on my birthday last year, April 18, including the tomatoes. So even though the start is late we should get a good crop. The summer has promised to be long and I hope that promise is kept. 

Planning and buying have commenced. 

We have a great new deck so the garden is even more welcome (not that it wasn't last year) in the sense that we can sit on the deck take in the sun, relax, and not worrying that we made a mistake in taking up the entire backyard with a veggie garden.