The Cheap Vegetable Gardener

The Cheap Vegetable Gardener has moved

9.7 years ago new start, Uncategorized

So after decades of living in home in suburbia with a minimal amount of land this month I have moved to a new location where we have 1 acre of land to work with. 

Great news is there is awesome potential for gardening here, it also means I have to start over from scratch leaving my previous more mature plants behind…

Though this definitely provides me with some additional space for a garden there are a good portion of our land has some mature trees so still a good portion of space that is devoid of good light for vegetable gardening.

I started by planting a couple apple trees and as a last minute decision I also picked up a pear tree…

Now for the apple trees I did my research and made sure the varieties I got were compatible (Honeycrisp and Ginger Gold) to use as pollinators for each other by ensuring there was not a dreaded black dot when looking at the compatibility chart below I took a picture of at the Grey Barn Nursery where I also bought my trees.

The pear tree (Bartlett) on the other hand I was not as careful by just buying the one so looks like another tree purchase may be in my future.

I also planted a blueberry bush this time spending a bit more money for a mare mature plant given the little stick version I bought at my local home improvement store probably took 4 years to get this size and was just starting to produce.  Hopefully this way I might even get some berries to snack on this year (if the birds/squirrels/raccoons don’t beat me to them)

Also found a good fence line to plant some raspberries knowing moving was in the future last summer instead of throwing the sprouts that would pop up in my yard or sneak into my southern facing area for summer veggies into the compost I carefully removed them and put them up into pots which I transplanted into my new location…guess this is a bit of bringing my old garden with me in a way.

So for my actual vegetable garden I am sticking with cinder blocks since they are cheap and I can easily expand the garden as I have more time and plants to fill it (not no soil on blocks on the right going to expand there soon.  I also continued my habit of filling the cinderblock holes with strawberry starts.

One great thing about having a bit more space I can now buy screened compost by the yard and let it sit in a pile for a while, much cheaper than my previous buying bunch of bags of mystery compost opening them up and wonder if they mislabeled bark as compost….

For my planting I am going with the tried and true Mel’s Mix (1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss (or coconut coir), 1/3 vermiculite) which I load up into my garden cart (another new purchase) and add to my planting areas.

So a pond is also an addition to our new property, though I like the look/sound of this reality of maintenance has me a bit nervous so guess you may be hearing a bit about this in the future.

One other potential addition in the future to our property will be chickens we haven’t pulled the trigger on this yet though I have bought the wood for the chicken coop…the building of said coop has not made it as the next priority of projects since we moved in…not sure how chickens and cheap vegetable gardening may go together exactly but sure they will come up 🙂