Still from Garden Cam 1 showing Richard raking.

Now that both garden cams are merrily humming along, I thought this might be a good opportunity to describe the garden, or what you can see of it on cam 1.

The garden is comprised of 7 wide rows, from the narrowest at 3 feet to the widest at 6 feet. You can see parts of four of the rows on cam 1. This is all surrounded by a hedge on three sides made up of Hick’s Yews. The hedge is about 5 feet high. A Jonathan semi-dwarf apple tree grows in the corner of the hedge, near the top of the frame.

A number of salvaged picket fence segments are piled toward the left side of the frame. Last year I made a 4-sided “temporary” fence using the picket fencing. Chicken wire was stapled to the bottom of each segment to keep even the smallest bunnies out of the carrot patch. It worked well and there is yet one bucket of carrots buried in sand in the root cellar from last season.

The row farthest from the eye is about 6 feet wide. The soil has been turned over with a broadfork and raked smooth. At the far end, lettuce is poking up near the apple tree, and there are about 80 onion sets on the row inward from the lettuce.

The next row is 4 feet wide, and has been turned over with the broadfork. Richard is raking it smooth. The broadfork is a marvelous tool for loosening and aerating the soil. The one we use was designed by Eliot Coleman, creative market gardener and brilliant writer. You can’t go wrong reading Eliot Coleman. Johnny’s Selected Seeds sells the broadforks, and a whole lot of other hard to find tools.

The next row, 4 feet wide, hasn’t been turned over and is full of weeds, with the exception of the tarp. Although some folks have suggested there might be a dead body under there, the fact is that the tarp covers what’s left of the horse manure we dug into the garden late last fall.

The partial row (also 4 feet wide) in the lower right corner of the frame has raspberry canes, about a foot high. I sprayed them with a foliar feeding of worm tea earlier in the spring. We dug out the ones that had migrated into the path. They started two smaller beds which I also sprayed with worm tea. The transplants are all thriving, too.

Next time, we’ll go over to cam 2 and I’ll describe the layout and the action in that part of the garden.