Garden- last year

So, here is what I manged to do last winter- i got a little garden started between the sheep/orchard area and and where the greenhouse will be.

The goal is to make it a permaculture type ecosystem. I put in a lot of dwarf/semi-dwarf fruit tress and am planting a lot of berries bushes and various perennial vegetables and medicinals (like artichoke, goldenseal, alpine strawberries, wild yam, herbs and such). I want to make this area one that I can eventually just leave alone and let naturalize for the most part.

Last season, I planted what I could and filled it the gaps with tomatoes, kale, leeks, potatoes, broccoli, greens and flowers... It is amazing how much it has grown in a year, I will get up more pictures showing where it is now... It has filled in a lot but there is room for more berries (isn't there always?) and some more perennial eatables, like Jerusalem Artichoke, pea shrubs, maybe a bench by the cherry tree.

From here I am going to fill in from this garden to the house (it gets more sun too) and make it a kitchen garden. I'll put some things here that are fun to grow and nice to have close, like certain herbs, salad greens, tomatoes and things that need to be rotated.

So, if anyone wants to know how I have tackled such large swaths of earth to transform wild grass field into a tamed vegetable garden, here goes: Well, G.E.P 1.7 (garden expansion project) had the help of a Bobcat (and Aaron) to move dirt for about half of it, but overall the procedure was the same. First I laid down a thick layer of well overlapped newspaper, then over this we laid lots of sticks if we had them, then six inches of fill dirt, then about three inches of composted sawdust and manure.

There was only enough sticks to do about half of it, then the Bobcat went wrong, so the rest was just newspaper with six inches of the compost over it. This was more likley to rip, and thus needed to be weeded again to get out the grass that snuck through (and the dandylions! ahhh!) but was still a lot better than trying to dig up all that grass and go from there.

Now when ever I plant something, I dig down past the newspaper layer and mix in the clay soil with the compost on top. It has worked famously and this is the method I am using for this year: G.E.P 2.8. The grass was sufficiently smothered last growing season so I can dig down past it now and not worry about it coming up.

There you have it! I'll take some pictures later this week of how it looks now, it is amazing how much the artichokes have grown in a year, they're huge!