Monthly Avatar Theme March 2013: Your Garden In March! part 1

Yesterday was 60 and the snow started to melt. Today another story

We have three varieties of onions, garlic and tons of volunteer cilatro growing. There are rananculas, tulips and hyacinth growing along the outside edges. If you look closely, you can see a tulip or two growing and a hyacinth that smells sooo nice!!

Well, here is my garden. You can see in my avatar me dreaming of our 2013 gardens. I live in Sharpsburg, Md. and we only got about 4 inches of snow from "Saturn". Half of it has melted already as the temps have been warming since 11 am this morning.

Funny, two years ago today, me and the grandkids were building my salad beds!

Here in Central NJ are my SFG gardens:

My original 3 4x4 boxes covered.



The 2 longer boxes have garlic with leaves covering them. The garlic has been peeking above the leaves. I am growing Chinese Pink and Late Italian Garlic.

Oops!

Below should be the 2 garlic boxes.

And Now.....finally the final new 4x8 box with a new trellis for the "three sisters" of corn, pole beans and butternut squash &/or zucchini. Hubby also made the Top Hat Box for my carrots which will be moved to one of the 4x4 boxes.

Here's my garden!!


There should be a drastic change in a couple weeks

Don't forget to change your avatars. We'll be back in a few months to see the change

Finally had time to join in on the fun. I have been busy all this and most of last month. The pics posted here were taken last Saturday BEFORE that day's work was done so represents the condition at the begining of the month. This pic shows all my beds altough the new one is hiding behind the carrots. The second bed in the fore ground is not yet complete. I am screening all my old beds which were the store bought "natures mix" pine bark infested crap. I got about 1/3 bark when screened. I went up into Alabama and got a trailer load of rabbit poo to replace the bark and amend all beds.

Here is the reverse angle with the tulle removed. The second bed on the right has taters planted , half the MM has been removed to be added back as the first "hilling".

Later in the morning the misses harvested everything but the lettuce.
Here are:the cabbage and kohlrabi(neither really ever did what it should; hence the problem with NON MM). note the brick is app 3&1/2 x 8

the onion/shallots

multi colored carrots

and the fennel

I am still screening and amending the beds hope to plant this week end, so the last half will be VERY different.

Mike

Hi Mike, that is a great looking harvest of fennel you have. Your gardens look fantastic as well!

I agree with bnoles, nice harvest, and the colors of the carrots look nice as well!

Look at those awesome carrots!!!

our SFG area



another view





the childrens self watering container filled with MM

sons



daughters



happy gardening
rose

Lovely gardening area. Those are some very interesting self watering containers, perhaps later on this year (after I move), I'll focus on finding a way to recover rainwater by hooking up a rain barrel to the rain gutters, and if I ever do, I'll try to remember to purchase a metal trashcan (in effort to avoid any harmful chemicals from plastic containers). The weed seeds in the hose water is a problem during the summer.

Bob ,
The gert big 40 gallon food grade blue or white barrels are OK for water barrels .
If you use the search engine on site and or the main index you'll see quite a few useful ways of collecting and storing your rain water
I just put water barrels in the site search and came up with this :-

https://squarefoot.forumotion.com/t5785-rain-barrels?highlight=water+barrels

Hooray, mid march in New England. My updated avatar.

Mel's Mix is as hard as a rock, frozen solid. Clearly I won't be planting peas next week.

Tris wrote:Here's my garden!!


There should be a drastic change in a couple weeks

Haha, nice garden. Looks just like mine.

I guess I could take a pic of where my beds are going. Its pretty scary looking. Full of 8ft dead weeds.

I love seeing everyone's pictures. Its helping me decide how I want to lay out my beds.

Okay, here it is. Disregard the date/time stamp - the batteries went dead and it reset!

It will not be an early spring in my garden! Since this pic we have had one more ice storm and one more blizzard.

Spring, yeah right! We had snow yesterday and this morning. The black bags toward the back are leaves (North). My four compost piles are inside the cattle panel fence, in the bottom left corner and along that front part, before you get to the gate. You can barely make out the fence, which is behind the aluminum trash can. It's hard to tell where they are. Some of the compost piles are covered with black plastic bags, some blew off. My chicken run is outside the garden to the left of the garden area. I went out just a bit ago and a lot of the snow has melted out of the beds. The bed frame that is sitting on end at the left is one I pulled out and will be redoing. That will total nine 4' x 6' beds. The right three beds get some morning shade (East) so I have my cool weather crops there and can grow into early Summer sometimes.

Well the good thing about the snow is it is hiding a pile of decaying newspaper, some cardboard, some tools and a partial bag of dog hair (my daughter is a dog groomer), a partial bag of coffee grounds and some empty black bags from leaves I used for my compost pile. They are barely in the picture, but in front of the chicken run I have five partially filled black bags of rabbit poo I got about a month ago from a rabbit breeder I found online. They actually live only three blocks from me. I am able to go back and get more anytime the breeder said.

These avatars sure show the major differences in all of our gardens of weather, temperature and what we can grow and when! My garden seems so simple compared to some of your gardens. But something I noticed is I love to look at every single garden, what each of you have planted and what you anticipate. I love to look at all the pictures and get good ideas for what I want to do. I look at some and think, hey that is what I am doing! More than anything else, it is enjoyable to see all the differences!

I checked the soil temp. of the beds this afternoon and they are about 42-44 degrees, one inch down and below. It looks like I can get some cool weather crops growing. I have always done my peas along the 6 ft. side of my beds but I want to grow at least 2-4 times as much as I usually do. I just don't seem to get much more than an amount to nibble on. Then I thought that I should plant peas on the 4 ft. sides of my beds. That way I can have them growing on both ends of my beds, plant spinach, lettuce, etc. in the middle and still be able to reach into the beds easily. I am starting to get Spring fever!

Even though it's near month's end; here's a pic of another part of my garden.

Here's to another successful season.

I wasn't able to get any pictures of my garden during its recent transformation. DH started working on new beds and a drip irrigation system the first of February and everything is now done except for finishing the irrigation for one of our 4'x12' beds.

Here's the before taken in September with DH and my son's lab puppy, Belle...




And here's the after (sorry they post sideways for some reason)....

In the foreground are the two 4'x16' beds which contain swiss chard, carrots, spinach, lettuce, onions, cabbages & collards. In the far three beds are, from left to right, crookneck and straight neck squash with zucchini, peppers, eggplant and heirloom tomatoes and in the bed furthest to the right are hybrid tomatoes bell peppers & a lemon cucumber.




In the middle of this photo, along the fenceline, you can see our 2' beds. Two of them contain both Yukon Gold and red potatoes, 1 has cucumbers and the other has cantaloupe.



There are still two 2'x6' beds you can't see in these photos, which are actually too close to me to be seen. They contain sugar baby watermelon in one bed and strawberries in the other.

Very nice beds Windsor.Parker and Judi!

My garden squares still have 8 inches (or more) of snow on them. I dream of taking part in "Carrot Week" but it just may not happen... I do have some pepper and cilantro growing under lights in the basement already though so I consider the 2013 gardening season officially started!!