Anyone Growing A Veggie Garden?
 

Just finished two days of work on my veggie garden. Each year it expands to take over more of my parents lawn...It is super fun. I have become obsessed with it, like saving gas. Right now my favorite is carrots. The way I see it, you can't have too many carrots. Hopefully this will save gas, because the family won't have to go to the store as often. hmmm. we will see.

I used to have a garden But
 

I used to have a garden But even with a fence around it the deer would get in and eat everything. I gave up and eventually built a deck over it. I like the deck better. :)

My friend spends his days
 

My friend spends his days out in the garden, it's great fun, sometime I must visit it when it's time for a harvest.

Do you compost? How are you fertilizing? Totally organic?

Re: I used to have a garden But
 

ever seen deer jump fences alongside the highway? they're good jumpers :D

I spend my weekend cutting
 

I spend my weekend cutting my lawn, my father-in law's lawn at his new house and my father-in law's lawn at his old house that hasn't sold because he is asking too much for it. I have been composting the clippings for the last three years however. I guess that counts for something. I'm considering ditching my gas mower for an electric model. Im just not sure if I believe the 60 minutes on a charge claim. I really only need 45 minutes on my lawn but the other ones are twice as big. But I digress.

Re: I used to have a garden But
 

Yes I have. But the deer around here are quite defiant also. They will stroll into the front yard an up to the front window and watch me watch TV. Drives the dog nuts.

Every fall, I drive about
 

Every fall, I drive about 400 miles to the wilds of Maine's pulp and paper lands to hunt deer. I'm successful one trip in 10. No a great average, but I love the wilderness.

The ironic part is that I have deer in my backyard and in the park next door that I can't hunt.

We had a garden last year.
 

We had a garden last year. It was our first summer in this house and we didn't expect the entire back yard to be so shaded. The only thing that grew really well were the tomatos and the sweat peas. Everything else (corn, carrots, etc.) were just minature versions due to little sunlight.

We're planning on turning the side of our house into a garden this summer. It will be rather large with lots of veggies. I'm REALLY looking forward to it.

Oh, and we compost too. We cleaned up a bunch of pine needles recently for the compost. Unfortunately this will add a lot of time to the compost process (pine needles take longer to break down).

Organic with compost
 

I am making compost from cow, goose, and duck manure from a local farm, mixed with weeds, straw, kitchen waste, sod (from where the garden expanded to), swamp muck, greensand, and bonemeal. I spent the last year working on an organic veggie farm, so this garden is just a minature version. Somehow the deer haven't found it yet. No pesticides or synthetic fertilizer yet. Sometimes things get munched, but I have way too many things started, so I just put a new one in if something goes wrong. My biggest mistake was that I did not add lots of dolomite lime when I first started. The pH was too low (acid) and the plants were stunted.

irrigation
 

I've got a little 10x15 chunk next to the house. The nice part is that I hooked up the sump output to a manifold that trickle irrigates each row. Now my garden is 'powered' by my air conditioner via the condensate!

I picked up a 10-year old Ryobi battery mower off Craigslist last fall for $70, bought some new 18AH SLA batteries for it ($65ish) and off I went! I held onto my gas mower for the spring to make sure the electric could handle May growth, but its fine so I ditched the gas.

I am mowing 1/3 acre of pretty thick Fescue/K31 weekly at a blade height of 3.5" with no problems at all. 45min, and still plenty left. I did a neighbor's yard on the same charge, about 1.5 hours total, and still was going fine. Not enough to get through what you have to handle on a single charge, though.

Overnight charging, but I am looking for a 24V/30W solar panel to get my yard 'off grid' Of course, about 1/3 of the charge is replaced in ~3 hours on most SLA chargers. SO you may be able to swing it?

Downside: not as much suction so it won't pull up leaves or little sticks so well. That's a good thing, too, for safety.

has anyone tried square foot gardening I did it and it works great. Garden spaces are split up into 4 foot by 4 foot squares. In each of the squares you have 16 one foot squares. in the one foot squares you plant what you want. Example= pepper might be one foot spacing, so you can have up to 16 peppers in one 4 by 4 area. The major advantage is you don't thin ever!! plant only what you need. I think that lettice there is 2000 seed or something like and people will dump 2 pack in on of there rows? that is two much thinning for me.

That is how we did our garden this year more or less. We added two 5' x 12' raised beds this year and have veggies coming out our ears! (Or is that ears coming out our veggies?) Except for the zuchini and squash plants which get about 8 square feet each, we have more coming out of our garden than we can eat right now. One row each across of lettuce and spinach, basil, cilantro, and a several rows of sweat peas occupy one box with room to spare, and at least 24 stalks of corn with green beans planted to run up them, plus the zuchinin and squash in the other big box. All of this is in addition to the broccoli, peppers, and tomatoes growing in two smaller boxes with other small herbs planted in between.

It is simply amazing how productive the garden has been for us this year. We haven't bought any vegetables but carrots in the last 2 months.

We also have two cold weather canteloupes growing in the left over soil pile with at least 15 melons already bulking up for harvest with more buds on deck. I'm hoping they will have good flavor because we are going to have allot of them!

All of this, for the record, is in a space of 20' x 30' with a flower garden border, 5 productive blueberry plants, and plenty of walking room to navigate the beds. Why more people don't spend all of the time they would otherwise spend on maintaining a lawn, growing edible food instead, is beyond me.

I got my garden in late this year since I spent the spring working on the CRX.

I don't have any tomatoes ripe yet, but they're coming along. I have some beans that will be blooming in the next week or two. I just planted last weekend some more bush beans, some pole beans, cucumbers, collards, zuchinni, and turnip greens. The asparagus just started producing this year and we got two small pickings. The rhubarb is huge. The horseradish is getting too big. And the peach trees are stupid with peaches (since last year there were none due to the late frost). It's been a rainy year here, and all the trees are very happy about it.

I compost, but mostly leaves and out of necessity. All the garden and yard litter goes into a pile or two in the compost area. It just kind of accumulates. Each year I put up the tree leaves into 4x4ft wire bins. They work real well.

The three 4x4 piles I put in last year are about a foot tall now. I have to take off the wire form and stir them all up with the tiller. Once they're dry I'll run it through the shredder and put them on the garden. I try to get the garden cleared off in time to till all the leaves into it before frost, but didn't get to it last year. Oh well, there's always another crop of leaves this year to try for.

as far as the deer. you can invest in a .22 rifle and a hunting lisince and get meat out of your garden as well.lol.

there is a guy at our church that has actually shot a deer from his kitchen window. we still give him crap about that.

and yes I know that I could be a rednek

In many locales there is a minimum caliber that has to be met to shoot a deer. You'd have to be mighty close or be a mighty good shot to drop a deer with a .22. A .222/3 maybe...

Hunting rules aside, I would tend to agree: Unless you are some kind of superb marksmen, a .22 is not the right weapon for taking down a deer. Bambi, maybe, but not a full-grown animal. You'll need something that packs a bit more "oomph".

Hunting lic aside, I have a live trap that has had its share of rabbits in and out of it. Some of them were pretty tasty.

City rabbits taste the same as country rabbits.

I keep joking that if food prices keep going up, I'll have to try this. :p

There is a warren (or whatever you call a natural rabbit-home) under my shed. And they recently added a third entrance/exit hole. I fear that some day the shed will drop 2ft into the ground and smash a bunch of bunnies...

I haven't done anything about the bunnies yet a) because they are cute and b) because I have 3 kids 5 & under...

Just tell them it's dark meat from wild aboriginal chickens. You know, the kind with big teeth that hie away with kids 5 and under and have been scurrying off with the bunnies that used to live under the shed.

Our garden has been amazing this year. Not only did our corn actually produce a couple dozen good bug-free ears, but the solitary pie pumpkin plant has produced 30 lbs of pumpkins so far, with at least twice that much still ripening on the vine. Plus the canteloupe just produced it's first ripe melon today and they are terrific. My only fear is that we will get so many at once that we can't eat them all. Our brocolli also continues to produce along with more tomatoes than we need, and we just planted a new crop of peas with should be ready before the weather turns too cold.

So why did we install sod there 5 years ago??

My veggie garden is only 15' x 15' but it's way more than my family of 3 can keep up with. We have 3 tomato plants, asparagus, green beens, peppers, squash, spinach, carrots, radishes, sweet potatoes, eggplant and still only use about 75% of the space. Anyone interested in a small garden should research the "square foot" gardening method.