Planting Bonanza

March 2nd, 2016

My dirt is spread, my fence is up, I tilled in one brief window of no rain, and now after even more rain, and some nice warm weather, I have started to plant.

This weekend I planted 5 apple trees in my “orchard,” and two mulberry trees in my chicken run. The mulberry trees are permanent residents, but I also planted some hostas, blackberries, kiwi, grapes, and ferns in the chicken run. I won’t be having chickens this year as I am not living up there yet and able to take care of them while our house is being built, so my chicken run is my holding area for plants I need to eventually plant elsewhere once all the construction is done. I will eventually be planting tons of daylilies and hostas and other perennials in there that I currently have in pots.

My Orchard
Part of my orchard, the red arrows indicate a newly planted fruit tree.

I planted a combination permanent bed of about 80 strawberries and 60 asparagus at one end of my vegetable garden. I planted 8 blueberries and about 20 more strawberries among them along another edge of my vegetable garden. Normally I do not like to mix permanent plantings with seasonal plantings, and my veggie garden will be mostly seasonal plantings. However, with the deer pressure, I really need to fence in my strawberries, asparagus, and blueberries, and I have this big fenced garden (5000 sq/ft) so I’m using it. I’m putting them by the edges though so they don’t interfere with future tillings.

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I’ve not done this yet, but I’m told strawberries make good companion plantings for asparagus, and decent for blueberries. Truthfully I was only going to be planting them with the asparagus but I had more strawberries than asparagus. Asparagus are of course tall and thin and willowy, they don’t case a lot of shade, and strawberries are short and spreading, able to fill in all the vacant spaces around the asparagus (which are planted fairly widely spaced). Blueberries are much the same except eventually the bushes will fill in more and the strawberries may diminish, as far as acidity goes strawberries like acid too, though not as much as blueberries, so they can both enjoy the same soil.

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Finally I planted my first annual vegetables in my garden, about 300 onion sets, which at the close spacing you give onions, actually took up very little space than you’d think with a number like 300. After my pittance of a vegetable garden I had before I’m starting to experience the luxury of space I have now. 300 onions. Likewise, I recently put in my seed order for my gardening, $250, just for seeds. Admittedly I won’t use all these seeds this season, many will carry over for future years, but man, that is a lot of seeds. It should produce in the end thousands of dollars worth of produce, I will just have to figure out how to harvest and store it all.

Some more pictures of what I planted:

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Posted in: Edible Gardening, Gardening » 

5 Responses to “Planting Bonanza”

  1. Rita Griebel  Says:
    March 3rd, 2016 at 7:28 am

    Do you realize how many apples you can get off just 1 tree? We didn’t when we planted our six 43 years ago. Then I had to figure out what to do with them.
    You can can apple pie filling, which I did. Also froze at one time at least 200 apple pie fillings.
    There’s a good way to do that too. Mine are still good after a number of years. No freezer burn.

  2. Administrator  Says:
    March 5th, 2016 at 5:44 pm

    I know, I had three apples trees are my prior house.

    My goal is to grow enough apples to have tons to eat out of hand, to make enough home canned apple sauce for us to go through a quart a week (so, 52 quarts), to make some cider, and to have some as animal feed.

    Most of my trees are dwarf varieties as well.

  3. Laura  Says:
    March 4th, 2016 at 12:14 pm

    How exciting! I am so anxious to start planting this year myself.

  4. Yannow Investments  Says:
    March 5th, 2016 at 3:25 pm

    Great article. Thanks for the detailed pictures.

  5. Melanie Nixon  Says:
    April 13th, 2016 at 10:21 pm

    Awesome! I CANNOT wait for gardening season to start! We always plant raspberries and saskatoon berries and they’re so yummy to use in everything (especially pies!). Good luck with all your many plants this year! Thats a lot of applesauce to make! Ha!

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