Garden experiment

Part of this blog will include my musings about garden plantings that have a whiff of the experimental about them. This year, more or less accidentally, we have three separate vegetable garden plots going. One is the conventional "raised bed",  which is located high up on our hill, in an area constructed into the hillside,.  The bedrock is a clayey-limey shale.  About three years ago I did some sheet composting, and gleaned about six inches of improved soil from that effort.  here's what that area looked like in May or thereabouts.

This upper garden is watered through a  drip system every day.  It gets a lot of direct sun, and we've had a hot summer, so these plants need every drop.  WE've had great success up here with onion family plantings, and have some success with strawberries and also some raspberries (pretty new planting). You can probably see the cold frame (there are two, both made by Juwel), and we have had lovely success with spring and winter gardening there, lots of nice lettuce, arugula, kale, and so on.

We also tried some straw bale gardening this year... a NYT article got me quite excited about this idea, especially since I just happened to have a couple of bales.  here's what that looked like in May:

It's planted with a couple of tomatoes in this picture, and also what I think is a cucumber (so I was told)

And, finally, we purchased a garden table last year, and planted it for the first time this spring.  It has only potting soil in it, which was lightly fertilized in the bag:

here it is in May.  The two things planted are a cucumber (towards the middle), and a basil plant (at the near end).

It wasn't my intention to compare each of these... I fully expected them all to be successful. But we do have a clear winner..... more to follow...

Catching up.....

First, some wildlife that has visited our yard recently..... we keep a large patch of milkweed around, only in the hopes of seeing the occasional monarch butterfly.  We've been rarely rewarded for this, but this summer has been different, and I managed to catch a  few photos....

 There's a monarch in each of these pictures, sometimes a little hard to see, but the orange will jump out at you eventually.  In the second picture, you can see her kind of edge-on; she is laying eggs in this photo.

and here we have a lovely Western Tanager visiting our "pond" (an inverted garbage can lid).  They like the water source being close to the ground... it's easy to see from our windows also.  Other creatures seen here include Sharp-shinned Hawks, quail, the list is endless....