08/18/13: Vertical Gardening

To save space in the garden, this year I've been experimenting with training flowers and some vegetables to grow up vertical structures. I took several ideas for trellising and tips on suitable plants from Derek Fell's useful book, Vertical Gardening. 

The laundry pole in the backyard supports vining black-eyed Susans:

Christmas lima beans, scarlet runner beans, and dwarf Italian shelling beans trail up a bamboo tripod in a large wooden pot on the front steps. They're still a little puny:

 

For the side of the front porch, we purchased six 6'x3' cedar trellises, attached them end to end, and anchored them to the top so they span the twelve feet from the porch's roof to the ground. Here's the area back in April, before the trellis was erected:

And here it is now, with a giant 12-foot high ornamental gourd and some morning glories and moonflower growing up it:

 

 

A gourd

A view of the trellis from inside the porch, looking out. I'm trying to direct the gourd back down the trellis, but it's stubborn and keeps attaching itself to the roof:

 

08/18/13: The August Garden

Here's the latest from the raised bed in the backyard. The nasturtiums have taken over the sides of the bed, and the tomatoes are losing their minds in the back:

 

 

 

These are Cherokee Purple heirloom tomatoes. The ones in the background are called 'Cosmonaut Volkov':

 

 

The cucumbers never did take off, probably because they had to grow in the shadow of the tomatoes:

 The recognizable bullseye pattern of Chioggia beets, from the garden, preparing to be someone's lunch:

And here's some dill growing in a pot on the patio. I've let it go to seed so I can have dill seeds for pickling:

06/13/13: A Raised Bed

The backyard needed a vegetable garden, but we weren't interested in cultivating our rock-hard clay soil. So on a warm day at the end of April, we bought lumber and supplies to build a 4'x6'x1'raised bed. We figured that buying the lumber and building the box ourselves would be cheaper than purchasing a kit (and we were right: total cost = ~$90). Plus, we could get the 12" depth necessary for tall veggies like carrots and helpful for avoiding growing into polluted Pittsburgh soil. With lumber from the Allegheny Millwork here in Pittsburgh and some galvanized deck screws, we constructed the bed in the backyard:

Next we spread newspaper on the bottom of the box to smother out grass and weeds:

All that was easy; the real challenge was the soil, all 22 cubit feet of it!

The bed was filled with a mixture of vermiculite, a little bit of high-quality top soil, and three kinds of compost (cow manure, leaf mold, and mushroom soil). Then it was all stirred up and raked smooth:

Little by little I've been planting spring seeds--French breakfast and Easter egg radishes; several kinds of lettuce; Japanese mustard greens; Chioggia beets; and basil and tomato transplants. Along the north end I constructed a 6' tall trellis out of electrical conduit pipes and rebar, following the directions from Square Foot Gardening. (It's quite easy if you have someone at the hardware store cut the pipes for you.) Screw the corners together with elbow joints, attach some nylon netting, and your vegetables are ready to climb. Later in the summer (hopefully!) the lemon and Japanese cucumbers will scale that thing.

And here we are today, in mid-June:

06/13/13: The Dirt Patch

Last fall I was hatching plans to create a shade garden out of a dirt patch in the backyard, the site of the previous owners' play set. The area is almost fully under the drip line of our medium-sized oak tree, and the clay soil was very compacted from heavy foot traffic. Last fall we planted three conical yew bushes along the west side of the would-be bed. Someday they will grow 8ft tall to hide the neighbor's garage behind them. Here's the dirt patch earlier this spring, with our little yews and the oak tree.

After aerating the soul with a hand trowel (so as not to disturb the tree roots too much), I planted a mix of hostas and ferns, some of which we purchased online. (This was, incidentally, our first experience buying plants from the Internet.) From the good people at New Hampshire Hostas (who also sell ferns), we bought five hosta plants-- two Maui Buttercup, two Touch of Class, and one Blue Hawaii--and two plants each of Christmas Fern and Branford Beauty Painted Fern. To this we added two Japanese Painted Ferns, two Tassel Ferns, one Bressingham Blue hosta, and one Frances William hosta, all from the fairly decent people at Lowe's. After charting the bed out on graph paper, everything went into the ground, and the bed was mulched with cocoa hulls, a byproduct of the chocolate industry. As an added bonus, the whole backyard was perfumed with the scent of chocolate!

Here's the finished product, about 6 weeks after everything was planted: