Sunday, April 10, 2011

Plot Preparation

We have begun preparing our garden plot! You can see the string and the dead grass in the picture to the left. Last week, we laid out string marking where the garden and the one plot of wheat will be located. We want the garden to butt up against the split-rail fence that we will hopefully be putting up later in the summer. So, first we had to mark the fence line. Because of the odd shape of our property (see Homestead Plan below), we had to lay out the entire perimeter to get the fence line accurate. Then, we marked the location of the garden and the plot of wheat.

After we had marked the location, we realized that we had to move it. The fence we are going to put in has posts spaced every ten feet. In addition to the side fence, we also want to have the split-rail enclose the garden area (but not the wheat). That meant that the garden corners needed to line up with the posts of the fence, or risk having two posts really close together, which we thought was ugly. To line up the garden properly, we had to shift it north by about two feet.

We also realized that there wasn't enough space planned between the east edge of the garden and the side porch (the plot was too wide). So, we decided that we would move the grapes and raspberries to the north side of the garden and make the plot narrower by about four feet. Since we didn't want to move the north side at all, this meant that the south side had to be moved two feet further south. (it's confusing, I know). Now the post in the front will line up, but the post in the back will be off by six feet. That is okay, though, because we want to add a gate on that side, which is four feet wide.

So, now the plan for the garden layout is as follows:

You will notice that the grapes and raspberries are on the north edge. Raspberries and blackberries don't like each other, so we hope the will still be far enough apart (16 feet in the drawing).

So, that is our plan. After making the modifications, we applied RoundUp to the existing grass to kill it (if we just till it under, it and the weeds with it will grow up through the garden). We will wait 7-10 days and do it again. A week after that (April 23) we will till under the grass and start building the raised beds. Before we do that, though, we will need to mark the exact locations of all the fence posts. There is still some snow on the northwest corner of the lot, so we will have to wait for that to melt before we can try to find the survey marker. Then we will know the exact location of the fence.

We purchased a tiller last weekend. It is a Husqvarna CRT900. It is 14" wide, so it should till a pretty good swath, but still fit within the 2-foot wide raised beds (I will need to build a ramp to get it in there).