After a good solid month of working around the house and planting the garden I can say as of last weekend I have all of the spring plantings complete. In the last month I have torn down and re-built a rock retaining wall, installed a new concrete block retaining wall added two new 4×8 beds, trellised some wild raspberry transplants that the wife relocated last year from the woods and planted our garden vegetables, two new blueberry bushes and eight or so new strawberry plants!
The hard neck garlic above from the Maine Potato Lady has taken off and below in the bottom right of the photo the smaller shoots are for the French Gray Shallots that we planted in the fall.
Some of the stems are a solid 5/8” to 3/4” in diameter which is well bigger than what we had last year with a generic soft-neck garlic. The heartier hard neck varieties really seem to be correct choice for our climate. It has been hard not to try and pull one up to see how big the single clove has grown. Looks like we will have to wait until July/August to find out just how big the garlic actually gets!
This year we have planted two varieties of potatoes that we picked up from the Tractor Supply Store. There is a five pound bag of Yukon Gold and a five pound bag of red potatoes. I wanted to get some seed stock from the Maine Potato Lady, but I just and out of time and did not around to placing an order. We are trying a couple new locations around the house for the potato cages we built last year and are also going to try a raised bed method of growing our potatoes.
This will be our first year for strawberries and have planted (14) plants. We went with all June bearing varieties of strawberries except for one variety of ever bearing. With any luck we will get some strawberries next month. Above our some older photos but many of the plants have flowered and have started growing some berries. This being the first year the harvest will be light. From what we have ready the plants have roughly a 3-5 year lifespan so you are encouraged to continually plant new plants from year to year. I believe you can harvest runners from the mother plant that you can than re-use as new plantings. We still have some research to do but they are in the ground!
Above is our raspberry trellis basically two metal posts with a couple wood cross members and some wire strung between them. We had watched a couple You-tube videos from the U-Maine Ag Office which over the course of a couple 5-6 minute videos teach you how to grow, and care for your raspberry plants. It was in the videos that we learned you should spread the canes apart in this v-shape to allow for good air movement between the plants. This run of raspberries which is close to 5’ long was started last year when Wendy dug up two clumps of canes from the wooded edge of our driveway and brought them up to the house. This year we should have a good crop or raspberries from the floricanes.
Thank goodness for these two hard workers or I easily could have been into June before I wrapped up the spring plantings!