The garden strip

Our potager (vegetable garden) is what I call a four-square design. That is, it's four plots, each one being a square of four meters by four meters separated by a grass strip one meter wide. That's sixty-four square meters for planting. I based the design on a kitchen garden that I saw at the Château de Fougères-sur-Bièvre, not far from here.

In addition to that, we also have a small plot in the back corner of the property that was once a compost pile. That spot is about one meter by two. Ken has a collard greens patch back there this year.

But a few years ago, we decided that we needed a bit more space, so Ken tilled up a strip along side the four-square plots. The strip is the width of the rototiller and nine meters long. Originally, we grew the overflow tomatoes in it. This season, as you can see on the left, I've got lettuces, chard, and leeks planted there.

Our soil is mostly clay with lots of rocks and the strip seems to have more than its fair share of rocks close to the surface. We've started to dig out the top layer of rocks and are replacing it with some good bagged soil. I'll be interested to see how that tills in next spring.

We've recently decided that we should invest in a chipper/mulcher for the garden. We have more yard waste each year than our three compost piles can handle. Most of it is the result of the annual trimming of the bay hedge. We try to burn it each year, but that means piling it up somewhere to dry then covering it until we're ready to burn. It's a pain.

We figure that a chipper will help to reduce the trimmed branches to a more reasonable mulch that we can spread on the garden plots to keep the weeds down over winter. Then, in spring, we can just till it into the garden soil. Excess mulch will easily go into the compost piles (along with the tons of apples that fall in the yard every year).