Planting Time!

The last two days have been rich with time spent planting and transplanting.  This time spent making the farm our own has a certain magic to it.  When I stepped out of the truck Tuesday afternoon, I took a deep breath and realized that our farm has its own smell.  I can’t put my finger on what it is, but it is richly sweet and heady.  It is a smell that makes me want to go slow and enjoy it – to feel the sun and the breeze and listen to the birds.  Immediately I feel like I’m home. 

Then there is the magic of figuring out where each plant fits into the small area we have carved out so far.  There are aesthetic concerns – height, spacing, etc.  There are also considerations of interrelationships between plants.  The whole process is immensely fun and involves my favorite activity – digging in the dirt.  The soil is loose and organic matter rich which makes it so easy to move and to pack around delicate root systems.  Transplanting has never been this easy. 

The main focus for the last 2 days has been planting strawberries and onions.  Getting the 15 trays of these 2 crops out of our greenhouse opens up a lot of space.  The strawberries also needed to get in the ground to get established before major summer heat hits.  In all, we’ve planted a little over 100 strawberry plants and between 300-400 onions.

The strawberries are planted on roughly a one foot grid (one foot apart from the other plants in all directions).  I deliberately used normal rows (where the plants make little squares) instead of the diagonal pattern (where the plants make triangles) that would have packed more into the space because I want them to have room to fill in.  I suspect that this bed will be a mass of strawberries by next spring.  Each plant was dug up from our patch in town and placed in a pot in the greenhouse where they’ve lived for the last month or so.  Then, we dug a spot, put the roots in such that the soil line was at the same level as it had been in the pot and gently pushed the dirt around the roots. 

Strawberries in their new home

Plants waiting to be planted Tuesday afternoon

Lavendar, gooseberries, Thyme, Irises, Comfrey and a sad apple tree

Potato onions planted around a keyhole path in the herb area

The dirt pile waiting to become more garden!

As we were putting the last strawberries in at dusk on Tuesday, Jeremy noted that it will be a pain to have to go around both sides of this raised bed next year to pick strawberries.  It’s also fairly wide in some places which will mean reaching to the center of the bed.  Unfortunately, we built the bed not really knowing how much space we needed for the berries or exactly where in the bed they would end up – we were more focused on getting dirt moved.  We will likely place stepping stones in the bed to make harvesting easier next spring as a way to save ourselves from our oversight.   In a perfect world, this bed would have been either narrower or a serpentine/keyhole bed to make harvesting easier.   

I am trying a new companion planting (combination of plants growing together over the season).  It is a simple one, but I’m hoping it will work out.  I’m planting our onions between the strawberry plants.  My hope is that the onion smell will deter rabbits and deer that would like to eat the strawberry plants while they’re getting established.  The onions will also come out about the same time that the strawberries are sending out masses of runners to fill in and hold the space.  I have to admit that the original idea behind this combination was really about space.  We had set out a certain amount of bed space and I didn’t have the materials to make more raised beds with me.  That meant that both onions and strawberries needed to fit in the same space.  I’ll let you know how the experiment goes.

The onions were planted Wednesday evening around and between the strawberries.  We have yellow, white and red onions (a little over 100 each) and I feel pretty good about how quickly they went in.  I did some math and I was averaging 3 onion plants a minute for the 2 hours I was planting.  Not bad!  As a bonus, I planted 2 tomato plants that we either started or found volunteering in our garden.  Hopefully we’ll have at least a few tomatoes to eat fresh this summer.

In the herb area, feverfew, lavender, currant, daisy, thyme, spearmint, comfrey, and a few others were planted Tuesday.  The herb area is much less structured than the strawberries/onions.  These plants will be here for a year or two at least so they have to have enough room to grow.  I also really like a densely planted area with all the different smells and textures that these herbs offer.  The plants are placed somewhat randomly.  I have tried to consider the final height and spread of the plant, its tolerance for sun/shade, and anything that it would benefit from being planted next to.  Unlike a bed that I took some serious time to design, I have grouped like plants together in most cases here.  Most of that is just to help me remember where the plants are for a time in the future when I want to move them again (most of these I would like to eventually have close to the house to enjoy). 

The existing bed is quickly filling up so we will also be expanding our little corner soon.  The established grapes and blackberries need a home on the farm as do many more herbs.  Final plans for how that will look are taking shape so hopefully by the time we are ready to move them we’ll know where they’re going! 

It is a wonderful feeling to be re-creating the garden again.  It holds the promise of a new beginning and the hope of growth to come.  Here’s to planting time!