And the reality of gardening sets in

The Reality of Gardening

There is no doubt that gardening can be a ton of fun!  After the Christmas crush has passed is usually when gardening dreams start to grow.  How to fix last year's problems, planning crop rotation for this year, companion planting, fancy shaped beds, plant stakes, compost pile amendments, oh the list goes on.  Each and every piece contributes to your plan to end world hunger, look good doing it and will bring you the fame and notoriety which you so richly deserve.

Oh yes, tables and charts, spreadsheets and dense documents all have their place.

Eventually though, you will have to go outside and some point, get cold, get dirty, and have joints and muscles who are trying to hire a lawyer to end your abuse of them. And you will feel the despair of "How will I get it all done".

That is where I am now.

As of retirement I vowed my next plot would be 2 to 3 times larger.  I am planning to eventually produce as much if not all of the vegetables my table requires.  It's a big piece to bite off but I believe after the initial toil of creating a garden bed, the rest is comparatively easy.

So like I said, 2 to 3 times bigger and yesterday this happened:

World Famous Nonagenarian farmer David Lister is my across the road neighbour and frankly, one of the best humans I've met.  He kindly dragged his magical soil busting farmer thingy across my garden making it possibly 4 times the size it used be which was a roughly 5x10 foot plot that looked something like this:

The dark patch you see here is a tractor bucket load of finely rotted bovine manure.  To this will be added 5-6 wheel barrow loads of compost from the pile and one bag of peat moss.  The combo will add nutrients as well as fine and coarse material to "fluff up" the soil.  PEI soil is very clay-like but does a very good job of incorporating whatever vegetable matter you want to add.  In turn, these amendments will absorb and hold some water, rather than the clay letting it pool and runaway.  Better for the pants and less work for the human.

So I am knocking off the old compost pile because it's been run over at least twice by two different tractors and may not be in the best place.  It presented a problem though.  My barn is literally within ten feet of the house and the current decade old compost pile has lived up against the side of the barn.  Easy proximity during the winter but in the summer I am forced to wheel barrow my compost about 100-150 feet across the backyard.  So this year I will make summer and winter piles.  They will individually be smaller and therefore each spring when I empty the winter pile into the summer pile there will be less material to move to the summer pile and therefore less work.

Here is the current ten year old pile:

And here is the new temporary summer pile:

The new pile truly is temporary.  After I get through the panic of getting the garden setup and planted
I'll be into the barn and the saws to cut some lumber to build a proper compost bin.  For now I am using rosebush canes I harvested from the Island Primroses along the driveway, which had grow stupidly wild!

I don't have a pic from before the Great Slash, but you can see how far back I had to prune them in this next pic:

You can also tell how far overgrown they were. Basically that big dirt patch in from of the actual flower bed and rose bush stumps is dirt because the roses were so thick, the grass was shaded right out!

So I used the trimmed and de-thorned canes, pushed into the ground for upright stakes with longer bits woven between the uprights.  It would almost be worth cutting the canes longer as they make a pretty good compost bin.  The weaving of the canes leaves lots of holes for the pile to breath and shed any excess rain.  Otherwise, they are destined for the fire pit.

Yes, the whole darned operation out here looks like a disaster zone right now.  So many changes underway and coming later this summer.  Needless to say, I'm really enjoying retirement and being In the Garden.