Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Creating a Garden

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Compost Bin

Our first step to creating our new garden has been to build a compost bin.  We were able to do this quite inexpensively by shopping around for our materials.  We found cedar fence boards at one lumber yard for 99 cents each and the 4X4 posts at another at a good price.  We drew it out and planned on paper for weeks during all the rainy days.  The first sunny day we had we got to work on the project and built it in a few hours.  Good planning really paid off here.  We will be able to make a lot of compost in this big bin.  We do have a lot of trees on our property to keep it full and soon there will be grass clippings to add to it.  The grass is greening up and starting to grow so it is time to shop for a lawn mower.  We spent one rainy day shopping for a tractor to disk under the star thistle that grows rampant here.  We are researching this a little bit further, but will need to put it to use soon.IMG_1792

In Bloom 

I brought in some branches from a pruning job I was working on.  I wasn’t  quite sure what they were at first, but they opened up and bloomed within a few days and now we see that we have a few very large forsythia bushes.  Can’t wait for the shrubs to be full of these blooms.  Not much is blooming yet in the yard, but the daffodils are about to pop IMG_1773and the wild violas are creating little carpets of bright blue flowers so I am guessing it will be spring soon!  The manzanitas are IMG_1725in full bloom here right now and they are gorgeous.  The flowers are as beautiful as the wood and right now they are loaded with bright pink little bell shaped flowers.

Gopher Quest

In my quest to find out what gophers will not eat I can add daffodil, violas or cyclamen to the list.  Hopefully this list will grow as we discover what they will and won’t eat a little at a time.  We have  invested in some good cages and gopher traps in hopes that we can keep them out of the vegetable gardens.  We just received the gopher wire that we will line our veggie beds with when we build them soon.  We found it 5 feet wide at one site so it should be easy to roll out and line our 4 foot wide beds.

Keep planning for Spring!

2 comments:

Joe said...

What an awesome compost bin! Your garden will definitely benefit. Here in San Luis Obispo the daffodils are in bloom and the manzanitas are covered in millions of flowers.

Ferne's Mom said...

I sure am looking forward to a visit to your place some day.