The no-dig beds we constructed seem to have caused our tomato, basil, and pepper plants to take off running.  We’ve got a lot of tomatoes coming in and more flowers blooming every day.  We didn’t really follow a strict guideline when putting them together, just the general idea.  Started with a bunch of cardboard to cover the ground, then dryleaves, grass, compost, hay, loam or dirt, and finally more hay.  We used dry leaves from around our house which was a good mix of leaves and pine needles, and hay from the floor of the barn that had been rotting in large piles after this years barn cleaning a few months back.

We covered the ground between the beds with a heavy layer of cardboard and hay to keep the weeds down and mulched most of the beds with lots of hay to prevent weeds from growing between the plants and to retain moisture.

This is where we’re at now with everything:

Coming out of the bedroom and into the garden

Our no-dig beds, this years addition to the garden

Our tomato jungle, planted wide row style in our no-dig bed

Our cucumber mound. We started these plants from seed inside and transplanted them last month.

Cucumbers ready for harvest

Our kale and chard

Taryn N' Onions

Our onions are starting to die and put their energy into increasing the size of their bulb (the part we eat!). A few have shot up flowers like this one. Generally, if you allow the flowers to grow the bulb will be much smaller so it's advised that you pull your onions out of the ground when a flower develops. We're letting a couple send up flowers so we can try to harvest seeds. They should all be dead and harvested in a month or so I think.

This entry was posted on July 10th, 2010 and is filed under Gardening.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.