Compost and Garden

This is one of my compost bins. I went with the pallet construction because they are free and I like free. Robin has often said my bins are not the prettiest, but she has no problem with the black gold that comes out of them.

I would love to have one of those cool (expensive) composting barrels, but this method has worked for us so far, and a little pitchforking never hurt anybody.

This hayfield is our vegetable garden. That's right, if you don't know, we are lasagna gardeners.

We tried the "no dig" method last year and were pleasantly surprised how well our garden did. So we made the garden bigger and this is where our potatoes and onions are planted. The hay kind of flattens the picture out, but you can see some of the hills started for the potatoes in the back.

Strawberries are coming along nicely, we have our fingers crossed on these guys.

Homegrown pumpkin

This pumpkin was grown in our lasagna garden. This was the first year we tried to grow pumpkins. I say tried because one year they grew on the compost pile by accident. This was saved from carving and is soon to be a part of some delicious dinners.

Garden cleanup

This year for a vegetable garden Robin and I tried a lasagna garden. Today we harvested the rest of our potatoes, beets, and onions. Being our first go at it, it was a learning process, but as far as yield we did all right. Summer squash, zucchini and pumpkins did well. We have heavy clay soil, so the lasagna method worked well amending the soil and from what we saw digging up the potatoes the soil is beautiful. Next year we will just layer over the top of what we have already.