Our Vegetable Garden
The joys of sharing a vegetable garden!
Steve Irvine took this photo of the field south of the gardens in the summer 2022. The largest green circle is the site of Keppel Henge. The smaller green circle is the analemmatic sundial. Skinner's Bluff it the promontory in the distance.
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The mown Nature Traill leads from Keppel Croft by the vegetable garden to our bush, Highview and Painter's Point.
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Bill designed the vegetable garden as a series of rectangular, slightly raised beds with mulch covered paths. A grape arbour grows over the entrance on the west side, and another grows over a water tank on the south side.
A central concrete tile holds water for hand watering. It's filled by a solar pump located in a nearby pond.
The berry bushes .are just outside the entrance. Bill has started an orchard of apple, plum and pear trees on the secondary path to the vegetable garden.
With our volunteers we plan, plant and maintain the vegetable garden. We harvest and share the produce. Bill enjoys planting flowering plantsin the vege garden so bouquets are picked through the season,
The compost from bins by the barn help fortify the garden soil. The compost is screened into a wheelbarrow and then taken to the gardens. We are also composting garden waste at the vege garden
Mulch is deposited by local arborists in our parking lot. It is used in many places in the gardens. We spread it on the vege garden pathways. Aftr several years this rotted mulch is scraped up and added to the gardens, New mulch is laid down.
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Many seedlings are started in our house under lights and are moved to the pit greenhouse. There is no heating there but the warmth of the sun and all that light created great growing conditions.
Several years ago the vegetable garden was in need of a make over. New lumber replaced the original edging for the beds. We scraped off all the weeds and mulch from the pathways, right down to the upside down carpets that underlie all the paths. Fresh mulch filled the paths. The weeds went into the compost pile and we screened the rotted mulch and it made a great addition to the garden soil.
We transplanted lots of seedlings of garden balsam (Impatiens balsamina) from the flower garden and these plants loved being in the vege garden and took over!
The berry garden yielded lots of red, black and white currants. The various gooseberry bushes were laden and the josta berries were great
