Catching up
May 9, 2011
It is now the Spring of 2011 and I have not posted for a while. I’ve been working on relocating households and so postings have slipped.
The New Garden now has six 4′ by 16 ‘ beds and one 4′ by 8′ bed with several more beds getting ready. The soil in Oberlin is very deep clay and it does not drain well at all. The raised beds are therefore essential. Just getting the soil in the beds to break up requires a huge amount of humus. We put several rhubarb crowns directly in the ground last year and within weeks they were starting to rot. I quickly dug them up and moved them to the 4′ by 8′ bed I installed. They recovered right away. With an extremely wet Spring this year, the asparagus was extremely slow to emerge and may have been damaged. My wife and I agreed that we would do a new Asparagus bed also in a raised bed for the same reason. These are the kinds of things that you have to consider when you start a garden. But controlling for variables is just so much easier when you do beds.
Pictures may follow if I can get to it.
