Alexander Garden 2011

It's May and the garden is well under way! ...or something like that I guess. Anyway, last year Suzanne and I, with an emphasis on the I, got way into the garden. We spent the fall before Garden 2010 removing a truckload of gravel from the area and trying to enhance the soil to help all our plants to grow well in our clay soil. After finally removing most of the gravel and letting the garden sit over the winter, we finally tried our gardening skills in 2010. We had a pretty dang successful crop if I do say so myself. So with greater confidence and more knowledge from some good friends, (shout out to my boys John and Claron) we have begun our Garden 2011. We actually started with some cold weather stuff at the beginning of April so some of our stuff has already been in the ground for almost two months. I am convinced that they would be even farther along if not for this cold wet weather we've been having. But, we've been lucky so far to have so much water and that our plants have done so well with the cold. So without further ado here are some visuals. All of these pictures were taken the morning of Friday the 13th, of May. I will post some more later to make sure everyone can see the growth and all the new stuff we have planted.

Here we have our Peas. They have grown a great deal since i took this picture and for some reason I feel like they are the biggest indicator of success for my Garden this year. I have never been able to grow them successfully and this is the best I have ever done so we'll see how they turn out.

These are my potato plants. They are doing quite well. I planted 8 sq ft of potato's which is a great deal more than last year when I crammed one whole potato in the ground at the last second as an experiment.

This is another shot of the potato's which includes the onions. Suzanne and I read the directions incorrectly when we planted them and we didn't wanna go through and thin them out so we have way too many crammed into one area but we'll see how they turn out later in the season when we pull them to re-plant them.

This is my little lettuce patch. I planted them in an area where they would get plenty of light but also some afternoon shade from a plum tree we have in the backyard. I don't want them to bolt so I am trying to keep them cool so we can keep harvesting as long as possible.

Here we have a Zeus plant. Oh wait, those don't grow in Gardens.... You can see how much help the dogs were in the whole Garden planning and planting. I'm sure they would have loved to help me dig the holes to plant the seeds in but their holes aren't much my style.

One of the major differences in this year from last year was the amount of effort that has gone into just planning Garden 2011. Here is a screen shot from my planting plan. You can see some of the plants are according to sq ft gardening and some are not. I kinda selectively choose which plants to use it with and which ones to not. You can see the layout of my garden in the backyard and the utilization of space. John Jacobs still maintains that I have way too much lawn and not enough garden but I may build up to more garden space in the future. This is the main area of the garden here, it's on the North side of the backyard. I left a little space open for Claron by the corn since he doesn't have any space at his house.

This is the South end of the garden, where we have all our tomatoes planted in containers this year.
This is all in stark contrast to about 10 years ago when gardening was the last thing in the world that I wanted to be involved in. I absolutely loathed gardening when my parents made me do it but now that I have my own space and some appreciation for getting my hands in the soil I love it. Yes, that is a compost if you happened to notice it there... and yes I am religious about making sure all the organic scraps make it out there to properly compost so I can till it all in in the spring.
Now I know some of you are thinking that the Alexander's garden looks so good that you wanna come sneak into my backyard to snatch up some free produce. I am warning you, I do have two German Shepherds that love a good meaty snack once in a while and I might fail to notice that there are a few extra bones floating around the backyard when it comes to defending my garden..... just sayin...
Updates coming soon!