The Great Adventure: Building the Garden

One of our many new adventures since moving out of Manhattan has been putting in our first New York garden. As you might imagine, growing things here is very different from growing things in Texas, which is my only previous gardening experience. In Texas, we planted in March and everything fried from the heat by mid-June; here there is still snow on the ground in March!!...but here we are in August and everything is still a lush green and our produce is just coming into full production.

The first thing we had to do was build a fence to keep out those pesky (and hungry!) deer. I was a wee bit ambitious and had Jeremy fence in an area roughly 50' by 100'. As you can see in this photo, I've only planted a tiny bit of it at the far left end. I'm calling this season an experiment, and hoping to get closer to my ambitious plans next year! The plan is to eventually have raised beds around the perimeter, and 24 4' by 20' raised beds in 2 rows down the length of the thing. My goal is to grow enough for us for the year, as well as extra to donate. And the older boys are hatching plans to sell some as well. We'll see how that goes...

Not the garden, but another recent fencing job--the chicken run. They were completely free-range, but we found that chickens are not respecters of porches, or sidewalks, or (ugh!) garages that have been left open by careless small male children. We were, quite frankly, tired of poop. So the chickens got a fence.

Our family project last weekend was putting boards on the fence--the wire keeps falling off the upright posts (lesson: use a better staple gun) and I think the boards will look better anyway.