Saturday was Planting Day 2015 here on the hill, our first on the property and something we've been planning since before we even knew where we were going to be living. When we were in Portland we had a pretty decent backyard garden the last couple of years - roughly 72 square feet plus potted herbs, peppers, and a pumpkin patch in the back corner - but we knew when we had more space we wanted to expand the variety of what we were growing and add some flowers and other things, so a lot of thought and many sheets of graph paper had gone into plotting this new space.
The rear of the property faces north and gets unimpeded sunshine from rise to set, and constitutes the most open and spacious part of our land. The half closest to the house we intend to keep open for recreational purposes, but that back half is ripe for development, and we've got plans for all of it, the first stage of which is the garden. Because the soil on that part of the property is a touch clayish, and also because of a gopher or two roaming beneath the topsoil like chubby vegetarian sharks, and a touch for cosmetic/management reasons, we opted to go with raised beds filled with a mixture of native soil and potting mix, in our case Kellogg's, not to be confused with the cereal people, although hopefully our veggies will find it as delicious as we do Frosted Flakes.
Most raised beds these days are built of wood, as were a couple of ours back in Portland, but after a couple of years with them - especially in all that rain - we noticed deterioration that while it wasn't an immediate problem would be in another couple years. Even now that we're in a dryer, milder climate, we're not trying to rebuild the garden every seven or eight years. We're here til they roll us out, possibly longer if we end up haunting the next folks, so we wanted a garden that could stand the tests of time and weather and grow old with us. Which meant we needed a do-it-once material to match our do-it-once mentality. Which is why we went with cinder blocks.
Cinder blocks are awesome. They last forever, they can be rearranged, they don't require tools to assemble, and they're cheap compared to planks of cedar, especially if you're getting them in bulk. We use the 16"x8"x6" blocks Home Depot sells for 99-cents a pop. Our (ultimate) plan is for 8 beds, 4'x4', each of which requires two rows of 12 blocks for a combined height of 16", 12 of which is filled with the soil mix. This will expand our total garden space to 128 square feet, almost twice what we had in Portland. "Ultimate" was a parenthetical above because that's the end goal. We got five beds built in time for Planting Day 2015 and will add the others over the course of the summer. Two of the beds had already been filled with soil and sewn, one with ginger - a new addition this year and a whim crop we're mostly just curious to see if we can grow - and another with a mixture of potatoes, golds, reds and purples that have already started to thrive. Of the three remaining beds, we sewed one with a mixture of Green Leaf lettuce and Mesclun in half the bed, then a quadrant each of green beans and jalapenos, we dedicated one bed to herbs - parsley, rosemary, dill, basil and cilantro - and the final bed is divided between a quadrant of zucchini, a quadrant of carrots, and two quadrants of sweet corn. In the three beds still to be built we'll plant two with flowers, varieties TBD, and the last one with pickling cucumbers, peas, and possibly a tomato plant or two. We're still scouting the property for a suitable spot for our pumpkin patch. It's got to be somewhere out of the way but still comfortable enough to sleep in on Halloween night. We'll keep you posted.
Once the soil was in, the quadrants marked and the seeds sewn, it was onto phase two of Planting Day 2015, as well as the initiation of stage two of our overall backyard development plan: the orchard. Our idea as it stands is to start with a pair of four varieties - cherry, peach, apple, and pear - and line the far edge of the property with two rows 15 feet apart. We started with a pair of cherry trees because they were short enough to fit in the back of our truck without hanging out - it's a twenty-minute, leaf-shearing drive down a state highway to the closet tree purveyor - and because they offered us the shortest time between the present and homegrown fresh fruit.
One of us did the digging (each tree required a 2'x2' hole) while one of
us did the supervising and selfie-taking. Planting Day 2016 will
feature two shovels. Regardless, forty-five minutes, two blisters and
four expletives later - mostly when the wheelbarrow of dirt tipped INTO
THE HOLE - the job was done and we were the owners of two finely-dug
holes, if I do say so myself. The trees were positioned, the dirt reshoveled, everybody took a good long drink of water and Planting Day 2015 came to a happy and surprisingly snag-free end.
We capped it all off by slow-grilling ears of fresh corn in their husks and four drool-inducing pork ribs procured from a local farmer as a part of a half-pig purchase Perry refers to, frequently, as "The Other Mrs. Horton."
While we sat on the back porch enjoying a couple or few cold Rainiers, we surveyed the work we'd done. Sewing the garden was a familiar experience, but neither of us had ever planted a tree before, and we were a little surprised at the strong sense of satisfaction it gave us. Looking out on the yard that evening, fresh in its first changes, we could see the trees we'd planted and the trees they'd become, the trees we'd plant next to them, and next to them down the line, how their trunks would stretch and their branches spread, and how what was new now would become as much a part of this place as we would in the years to come, more so, even, because unless we can figure out how to pull off the aforementioned Haunting of Rowland Road, the things we plant here could very well remain once we're gone. It was a heady moment, possibly influenced by the fatigue of honest work and diligent attention to our Rainiers. Either way it was a nice moment.
Next up, we build the rest of those beds and fence in the plot, then lay down some red lava gravel so we're not weeding between rows all summer. But those are jobs for another weekend. Til then, thanks for reading, and cheers.
