Garden Pictures: Mid-March, 2023 | The Survival Gardener

Yesterday evening I was feeling a little better so I headed out to the garden to take some pictures.

Spring is here, and the plants are responding.

Here’s the kitchen garden, right off the back patio area.

Some of the beds aren’t finished yet, and many things are still sleeping, but others are awake and growing.

This strawberry plant is ahead of the rest.

And some of the chives are in bloom. Out in the food forest, a crabapple is blooming for the first time.

And the dandelions have been blooming for over a month now. 

Meanwhile, the area we planted after moving the pigs looks great. And it’s time to move the pigs again.

Back to the main gardens: my daughter planted wheat, and it’s looking pretty amazing.

And beyond the wheat are the new Grocery Row Gardens. First, the left side:

And the middle:

And to the right:

You can see the one path I covered with a cover crop. The rest of the area is mulched.

The other day we planted a few dozen flower bulbs through the Grocery Rows: irises, lilies, day lilies, dahlias and more. They’ll be a lovely addition to the edibles.

These Grocery Row Gardens are a little anarchistic compared to my previous ones, as we had to transplant in a mad dash at the end of the year as we moved from our rental house to our purchased homestead. I’m still wondering what’s going to come up. There are gingers, malanga, cassavas, sugarcane, cannas, Jerusalem artichokes, yacon and a half-dozen other roots still sleeping beneath the mulch. And I haven’t a clue what some of the trees are. Our original plan was shattered and re-created here in multiple crazy van loads.

Meanwhile, Jenny watches all this anarchy with a baleful eye. 

In the row gardens, we’ve harvested most of the radishes and some of the cabbages and are now filling in the gaps with other plants.

We’ve planted some tomatoes and peppers already, though you can’t see them in this picture.

And a double row of carrots where we took out some cabbages.

The potatoes are coming along nicely.

From left to right, these are rows of Yukon Gold, White Kennebec, Red Pontiac, and Red La Soda.

The Red Pontiac is doing the very best so far.

This is what that area looked like before:

Beneath the yam trellis just to the left of the main potato rows, I planted a double row of Adirondack Blue potatoes.

They are doing great so far.

Another new addition to the gardens is this Gunnera tinctoria, which I discovered while reading The Voyage of the Beagle. 

It better live because it cost me a small fortune to have one shipped over from California!

So far, so good.

In another month, the gardens will be truly astounding. They’re only half awake now – I can’t wait to see what happens next.  The soil here is so much better than it was at the cursed sand pit of death.

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