First Steps for 2012

Welcome to the 2012 Gardening Season!  I started this blog last year, and did a really poor job of keeping it up-to-date.  I plan to do much better this year!  A few weeks ago, I stumbled across my "old" (circa-2005) camcorder in a box in the attic, so I decided to clean it up and use it in this blog.  I plan to post updates weekly, so please hold me to it!

Ashley and I have been planning our garden layout for the past few weeks.  We plan to increase both the numbers and the varieties of vegetables (and fruits!).  This will include squash, corn, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, apricots, and other plants.  I will cover our plan for 2012 over the next few weeks.

The first step for this year is to build trellises and prune the brambles (blackberries and raspberries) and the grape vine.  The brambles will be pruned to 30" high, and the grapes will be pruned to only 3"!  This will allow the grape to select its own trunk over the five-year pruning and training plan before it actually produces fruit.  The blackberries will eventually grow to about six feet high, and they need to be trained into a "wall" of bushes.  Likewise, the raspberries will grow to about three feet high and need to be trained into a short hedge.  Both of these require wire trellises to facilitate the training.  So, this weekend we built the wire trellises for all three plants.  We had to dig post holes to do this, so we want to dig the holes while the roots are still dormant (damaging the roots will kill the plant immediately).  We also want to prune the plants while they are dormant to minimize the stress.

For the blackberries and the grapes, the trellises have to be six feet tall.  We used 4×4 treated posts, nine feet in length, and buried them three feet deep.  The wire we used was 12.5-gauge steel vine wire commonly used in vineyards.  We put about 200 pounds of tension on the wire by pulling it through wire vises with a pry bar.  We bought the wire and the vises from Orchard Valley Supply.  For the blackberries, we ran wire at heights of 2.5', 3.5', 4.5', and 5.5' above ground level.  For the grapes, we ran wire at 3.5' and 6' above ground level.

For the raspberries, the trellises have to be three feet tall.  My rule-of-thumb for posts has always been to bury one-third of the total height of the post (or one-half of the above-ground height).  So, for the raspberries, that would mean a post 4.5' long, with 1.5' buried and 3' above the ground.  This works fine for posts without a force on it, but it didn't work well when I applied tension to the wires.  The force pulled the short posts when only buried to 1.5'.  To fix this, we will need to dig the holes down to 3' depth, and place 6' posts in the holes.  We will do this later in the week (when highs are forecast to be in the 60's!).  Since raspberries spread out much more when they grow than blackberries do, they require two wires at about three feet high, spaced about a foot apart (so a tee-shaped post).

Setting these posts and wires were the tasks for this past weekend.  My attempt at a video is posted below, and it shows the "before" and "after" status of the trellising.  Next weekend, we will setup our seed starting equipment and start the first seeds!