Prepping for spring

This weekend I tore out my garden. Sad.

I am turning my current bed, see last post, into another raspberry bed. The kids keep eating them so why not. I might throw some blackberries in there too. Depends what is on sale. Anyway, I tried something called raspberry tipping. I have no clue if it is going to work and only saw one place on the internet that mentioned it. You take a primocane and cut it off at the top. Working in two inch segments you snip them and plant them in the ground. I put about two in each hole about an inch down. Supposedly some of these may actually start growing that is how invasive raspberries can be.

In sad news, the bush cherry I just purchased appears to be gone. :( Maybe a deer ate it. No idea. Good thing is they are having 50% off trees at home depot. I am going to see what they have...maybe. I keep telling myself not to plant more but then I find something I can't pass up.

Lately I have been getting a ton of emails from Gurneys, Spring Hill and a few other suppliers for sales. Too bad they aren't selling what I am looking for.

Current years little garden

I just started gardening and I know that I made several mistakes this year. Hopefully I do better next year. The plan is to do raised beds along the fence line and turn this into another...wait for it...berry patch. I already have one Caroline raspberry in there so I am going to try tipping it to see if it will work.

This year I had squash but the borers killed most of it. The borers got all of my zucchini. I managed to harvest one tiny guy before the plant died on me. My bush beans did a pretty good job. I needed to space them better. Worst of all was my tomatoes. We had a very very wet beginning of the summer and all my friends and neighbors complained about their tomato harvest.

The funniest plant award belongs to my cucumber. This plant has a really odd relationship with my other ones. It manages to get a stranglehold on my tomatoes and killed one (I had mono this summer and wasn't as vigilant about toxic relationships as I should have been). It also managed to climb up through my lilac bush and produce cucumbers in the crooks of the branches.

Here is the cucumber growing up out of my lilac. Next year I will trellis these.

I think I learned a lot this year but can't wait to see what I can come up with next year.