Sunday Planting

Today, I started off the morning by planting four blueberry bushes into our southeastern orchard. I bought the four plants in one gallon buckets from Big Frog Nursery.  These plants, unlike the Tractor Supply blueberry bushes, looked extremely healthy with plenty of healthy stems and rooting systems.  Jill, one of the owners helped us with the purchase.

The varieties were Duke, Pink Lemonade, and Blueray.  The quality was so high, we are going to return to Big Frog for more blueberry plants.

In the late morning, work on garden raised beds was undertaken.  A raised bed on the southern edge was started on Saturday.  Today, raised beds for three tomato trellis systems, and the northern edge was undertaken.

The tomato trellis systems were build using the humus from the winter composting project and the soil left over from raised beds.

The humus from the soil buidling effort we undertook this fall and winter looked pretty decent.  However, I noticed some substantial quantity of bermuda roots in the material.  Hopefully, that will not germinate.  The humus was dark, but it looked like a lot of the woody material was still intact.  Mixed with the clay, hopefully, the soil will be satisfactory to the vegitables.

Placed cardboard along the pathways of the garden.  Plan to mulch over those pathways with chicken coop shavings and mulch from Spartanburg landfill.

In the late afternoon, I planted my Jerusalem Artichokes (sunchokes).  These were ordered online from Safaa Alhashimi.

I followed the instructions of the NC Agriculture Extension for planting.

Earlier in the day, I disassembled one wall from my former compost bin.  I spread the compost out along the north edge of the garden, the base of my northern raised bed.  The compost was a beautiful dark. I have been putting food scraps into the compost area up until as recently as one week ago.

I shovelled the wood compost from the base of the garden into a pile mixed with the compost.  Planted the sunchokes into this bed.  It stretches about fifteen feet toward the western edge.  You can see the edge in the background of the picture above, just north of the visible cardboard.