- kitchen garden
The Kitchen Garden
The kitchen garden is the heart of a farmstead. Ours is 60ft x 60ft area surrounded by buildings and good 6 foot fence as we live in a deer and bear area. It has a south exposure with deciduous shade trees to the east and west for good sun in the winter and some shade in summer, also notice the most important part to the lower right.
There is a chicken vault below the solar water panels. Somewhat noisy and smelly but very handy. Weeds and waste from kitchen to feed the chickens and eggs for the kitchen as well as manure for compost for the garden from the chickens. As we live in a hunting area of fox, coyote and raccoon we need a varmint proof vault to keep the chickens in.
As you can see this is a late fall picture and much of the growth is dead from nearly 3 weeks of frost. Even so there is much going on in growth and food for the winter even under the coming snows.
- Winter food, carrots, turnips and cabbage
Winter crops of turnips, carrots and peas as well as winter cabbage in the back ground will be welcome this winter even in the snow
Sawdust from the sawmill to fill the pathways and keep down the mud and help to create more soil.
Leeks and garlic need to be planted now for early spring as long as they are planted deep to protect the roots from freeze heaving
We are at 2200 feet elevation in the northern california sierra foothills so it does get cold and snow but generally not for long periods so a winter garden is possible. 8-) pg
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A number of errors on creating this post , need to recreate this and improve it.
pg
The light blue drums? Planting for selected items? At first I thought, before blowing up the pics, that they were connected to the solor panels and designed to increase the ground temp. Do you have a greenhouse or use a coldframe in your neck of the woods? How’s the topsoil layer around your area, with all those trees and hills(rocks), can’t imagine it’s probably very thick and you have to work at ‘growing’ it too?
(More questions than a kid, well life is a circle, right?;-)
@Pascvaks; Yes, at the start the top soil was thin and very poor, even weeds grew poorly! By scrapping the soil together I had about a foot wide bed per 4feet at 8 inches deep. After 15 years the beds are 12 inches deep, 24 inches wide on top and the weeds grow very well. The blue drums were to get 24 to 30 inches of soil and a gopher proof container. these also serve as an anchor for the ends of the bed and increase the planting density. They are a pain in the rear for tilling. The subsoil is an ancient volcanic mud flow, about 80 feet thick and full of rocks and ash beds that floated in the mud flow. Some is as hard as old rotten cement. As to the green house, we have a dug into the ground greenhouse that I need to do a post on. The picture of the hammock was taken from the greenhouse roof. pg