Our backyard kitchen garden has been producing steadily since 2003. And so after nearly nine years of production, I thought it would be interesting to try and document a full garden season as blog posts. And so in the depths of winter, we launch the "The Food Patch". As a native Virginian, I've often tried to keep an extensive written journal for each garden year much like Jefferson did with his gardens; logging in varieties, plantings, yields, weather, etc. These attempts have started out well enough, but always tend to fall off dramatically once the busy season of spring planting sets in. Life is even more complicated with a very active set of kids and various other outdoor activities that compete with the green-thumb side of things once the weather turns warm.
We started out in late 2002 with classic Washington County bed-rock clay soil and limestone. A local farmer was kind enough to come by one evening with his tractor and plow and do the initial turn over for us. It was hit and run there for a while since we have quite a lot of subsurface lime stone outcrops and it took some doing to find a patch of yard that was big enough, relatively rock free, and out of the shadows of the house. Over the years we have maintained the plot with a tiller and steadily built the soil by picking out rocks, adding amendments, and planting lots of winter rye as a cover crop and green manure. We also have made due with literally tons of spent mushroom soil, a trick we learned while living for a short time near the mushroom barns in south-east Pennsylvania. Up there the stuff is nearly free if you have a truck. Down here it runs about $30 a yard. With hard clays, you can never have too much of this stuff. Mushroom soil and coarse builders sand have been the best improvements for our patch so far. This spring we will be making due with three truck loads of shredded oak leaves from my parents house in Richmond.
Over the years we have kept to the staples (peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers. lettuce, carrots and squash) in combination with more exotics (garlic, shallots, odd colored cole crops, etc.). We also have had very good luck with potatoes, corn, melons and winter squash. But these take up a lot of room and are still fairly cheap in the stores. We also have a lot of local farms that grow sweet corn. So this season, we intend to stick to the basics that will consistently produce and fill up the canner, freezer, and dryer while maximizing production. I also hope to tighten up my secession and rotation schedules to try and keep every square foot in production (with rye if nothing else!).
In 2009, we decided to give up about a third of the patch for our new strawberry planting. The previous patch was around one of the rock outcrops (now the camp fire pit) and the soil was of very poor quality. We also made the mistake of planting day-neutrals so the yields and size were highly variable. We harvested our first season in June of 2010 and the yields and quality were excellent. In 2008, we took our other unoccupied outcrop of limestone and put in a herb patch. A combination of medicinal and culinary varieties filled in with a butterfly bush for visible effect; not exactly Brother Cadfael's herb garden but it will do. Spring 2010 saw the addition of the raspberry bed, and anticipation is high for the first harvest of both red and black varieties this summer.
Stand by, it is just a few short weeks away before it will be time to haul up the plant lights from the basement and start some lettuce.
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