Much of this year has been trying to recover some of the land and building out spaces to do the things that we want to in the future. One of the projects was some raised beds down the hill from the house. Kate has taken a fancy to cinderblock construction so we started with 3 raised beds that were about 4ft x 8ft. She quickly realized she could fill that up without much trouble. So we built another set of three with another big island raised be in the middle. At the start we had a big pile of dirt delivered, the first ones beds were filled using a cart pulled by our ZTR mower. We either filled the cart or were putting the dirt in totes to move it. It was a pretty rough job. Things also didn’t grow as well as we expected, but one of the Youtube channels we watch (Living Traditions) had pretty much the same thing happen to them this year. Kate tried out their solution and it seemed to work for us. The net is that while there was some compost mixed into our soil, I don’t think that batch had significant time to age or break down the nutrients. Some foliar spray and extra nutrients fixed it up.
There are a few raised beds up by the house, but we used some screw together metal panel beds you can get off of Amazon for that. All in all while it’s not our first year gardening, it is our first year trying to establish and do it on this property and out harvest has come out pretty good. We aren’t overflowing in bounty, but we’ve had a few meals that are close to exclusively products from our property. Last night we had one of our watermelons, which is a first.
Likely that we’ll be looking at a greenhouse and establishing a well down by the area. We left space and marked out where we’d like a greenhouse to go, there are just so many thing that need to be taken care of currently and it hasn’t bubbled to the top. The same for a well down there as I don’t think it will be hard to find water. Our multi-acre lake is not that far away and we could pump directly from it. Going into the group I suspect will be easy to find water in most locations, just we have SO much rock here that getting a spot we can dig in becomes the challenge. Also trying to figure out if it is a good enough excuse to get an auger for the tractor.