Raised Garden Bed for Blueberries

Our ongoing saga to grow blueberries has taken me in many different directions over the years and in many locations.  I love blueberries and we buy and freeze about 50 pounds of them every year.  I grew blueberries back in San Diego and endeavored to grow them again when we moved to North Dakota.  The problem is the soil here is very alkaline and blueberries need and love acidic soil.  20 to 30 miles or so to the East, the soil is acidic and blueberries grow easily and plentifully, but here in Grand Forks, in the heart of the Red River Valley?  Gardeners consider any attempt to grow blueberries as pure folly. 

This is what the blueberry area first looked like. It's the space between the two doors, right behind the black iron railing (admittedly not a great photo - but this was when we first saw our future home).  It faces East and was a useless space with a few irises (not my favorite) and some unruly grasses and weeds. This space stayed this way for a few years after I finally got annoyed enough at having to mow/weed-whack the area each week.  I'd planted blueberries in another part of the yard directly in the ground and watched them languish for two years, barely surviving.  It was at this point that I actually learned that blueberries don't like the soil here.  The solution? A raised bed.

I dug out the whole area about 18 inches down, removing some old pieces of a concrete sidewalk that was there and also totally useless.  I made the hole slightly concave, and this also had the added benefit of catching any water overflow.  When we get heavy rains the gutters can't handle the runoff and we'd occasionally get some water in the basement at this point of the house.  We no longer have that problem.  Extra runoff finds its way in to the hole, gets soaked up by the copious amounts of mulch, or into the holding area at the bottom where it absorbs back in the ground or is soaked up by the peat moss that fills the bottom 6-8 inches.  I feel like this is one project that might have taken me a few years to push from planning to action, but was pretty well thought out and done correctly.  I shall savor these instances as they don't happen often. 

There was a good amount of material that was removed and we used it to make some raised mounds/flower beds in front of the house.  There's always something that you can do with extra soil, and I've found that raised beds/mounds are much easier on many levels. 

I had helpers the whole time.  Actually they didn't help, they were the opposite of help and usually only wanted to sniff right where I wanted to put the shovel in, it's quite disruptive. 

All cleared out, dug and ready to roll.  I had some branches and logs from a pine tree that I'd trimmed in the front yard that I added to the bottom of the pit.  They'll not only slowly rot and provide good nutrients to the soil, but hopefully help keep the acidity of the soil down to a level where blueberries will like it.  Despite all the work to keep the soil acidic, I'll still have to add soil sulfur, ph lowering amendments, and pine straw and wood chips as mulch every year to keep that ph down. 

This is fast forwarded a few months.  The blueberries are planted and thriving.  I added some verbena and sweet alyssum for some bursts of color, to attract beneficial bugs, and help fill some space whilst the blueberries spread out. 

Happy verbena blossoms.  We put a temporary wire fence around the area to keep inquisitive/nosy pooches out and give the blueberries a chance to grow without being stampeded or chomped by crazy canines.  This worked well for a while until Alycia decided it was time to get something slightly nicer looking. 

I just put this up last week and I'm happy with how it turned out. The black iron fencing really gives the area a much more "finished" look, and it'll look even better when there's green leaves to see.  I'll upload pictures once the blueberries have leafed out and are green and happy, then this area will look awesome.  Stay tuned for more pictures in a future post.

Blue Scilla - First Blooms of Spring

We've written about blue scillia before on Deaf Dogs and Benevolent Gnomes.  Every year we eagerly await their appearance in a handful of spots on the homestead.  Even though the flowers themselves are fairly small, they bloom at a time when literally nothing else is flowering, so they really pop out.  They're the one splash of color on an otherwise drab palette as plants try to push through the last hold of winter and begin greening up, growing, and blooming.  

The blue scilla are the first bulbs to pop every year.  They're a tiny delicate blue flower, and the plant itself is only 2-3 inches high.  They're supposed to naturalize here in Zone 4 and they're started to do so, spreading out in larger clumps in a few places.  These are actually native to Russia and do very well in our cold climate with long winters. 

These little blue flowers are the most powerful sign that Spring has finally arrived and a very welcome sight on the homestead here in North Dakota. 

Three Happy Wiggling Wagging Deaf Dogs

I had the foresight to grab the camera when Alycia arrived home the other day and captured the dogs greeting her as she came in the door.  As you can see the baby gate that we've set up is pretty necessary, otherwise one would be subsumed by a crashing wave of puppy love.

It's hard to stay grumpy, even if you've had a bad day, when you get this kind of reception upon arriving home.  Dog owners will understand this, they experience it every day.  Even if you're only been gone for a minute, dogs are thrilled to see you, and they let you know it with every butt wiggle, every second of tail wagging frenzy.  No matter who you are, it's nice to feel loved. 

The Final Gardening Frontier - Human Urine as Fertilizer

I've started reading articles with increasing frequency about utilizing your own "liquid waste" as fertilizer in the garden.  Perhaps this is because I'm reading more extreme gardening publications than ever before, or maybe it's because the idea is starting to go more main stream (yeah I deliberately made that two words so that it's also a potty pun).  Either way I've been reading a lot about using human urine as fertilizer. 

Even though human urine is almost completely sterile and is easily the most innocuous thing to come out of the human body, there is still the ick factor of peeing in your garden, especially if it's around plants you plan on eating, like ever.  Urine is a rich source of nitrogen, so rich in fact that they recommend watering it down 20:1 with water so that it doesn't burn your plants. And even if you don't want to use it directly on your plants, adding it to just your compost pile could really boost the activity in your compost pile.

Mother Earth News had an article about liquid fertilizers recently and included using urine as a fertilizer, Popular Science has written about it before too.  In this regard human urine has the potential to be a great organic fertilizer, but can I get over the fact of using personal human waste in the garden?

And for reasons that probably don't need explaining, I don't have pictures for this post...

So would you ever use this liquid fertilizer in your garden?  If you did, would you tell anyone?  I'm not sure that if I ever did this I would tell Alycia about it. 

Shadowfax in her Scary Pitbull Pose

Shadowfax demonstrated her best "scary pittie" pose today.  She has some pointers for anyone else who might want to imitate.

First of, you have to show some teeth.  A little bit of snarl goes a long way.

Second, show everyone else that you're tough and you don't care what anyone else thinks.  Use that fuzzy pink blankie for a pillow, not a blankie.  Yeah, you're a bad-ass.

Finally, do it all from a heated dog bed.  This literally tells everyone "I can stand the heat, so I won't get out of the kitchen", or off the heated dog bed.

That concludes the lesson for the day. 

The Frosting Bucket-Horse Poop Triangle

We gardeners do funny things, that's almost expected.  Whether we're dashing out in the middle of a ferocious thunderstorm to save a prized potted plant, covering up tender flowers with all but our nicest bedsheets, shoveling mulch while it's hailing (I did this today), or using concrete re-mesh to make tomato cages, we gotta admit we do some weird stuff.  I never thought I was above the strangeness, and my neighbors will vehemently attest to that, but lately I've set up a totally legal, but somehow illicit feeling exchange of frosting buckets and horse poop.  Allow me to explain.

I'm big on using buckets in the garden - they're handy as weed containers, hauling small amounts of dirt/fertilizer/sand, mixing potting soil, or cutting out the bottom and placing them over tender seedlings (this works really well to protect from unexpected frosts or marauding bunnies) to make a mini-greenhouse. I use plastic buckets in just about every imaginable capacity. We had gotten our buckets from Alycia 's parents who purchased Tidy Cat Cat Litter and gave us many of the leftover plastic buckets.  This all changed when Tidy Cat switched to plastic bags instead of buckets. 

So earlier this year I was at work lamenting to some of my students the fact that Tidy Cat Cat Litter no longer came in buckets, so my supply of conveniently sized 2 to 3 gallon durable plastic buckets had run dry.  One of my students at the local Community College works at the newly opened Tim Horton's Coffee Shop in Grand Forks, we'll call her Wilhelmina*, volunteered that they throw away buckets all the time and she could probably get me some of them.  The buckets are food grade 2.5 to 3 gallon buckets that contained frosting for delicious Tim Horton's donuts.  

This is what the buskets look like when I get them from my donut shop connection.  They're encrusted in various kinds of frosting/icing/glaze.  I need to clean them up, wash them off, and get all the frosting remnants off of them in order to transport them in my car and hand them off to my other student.

During this initial rambling discussion about buckets and gardening, another student and friend of Wilhelmina, let's call her Gertrude*, volunteered that she had a horse and plenty of horse manure piling up (literally), which would be free for the taking.  The only problem is that Gertrude lives about 45 minutes away, and I don't have a pickup or means of hauling large amounts of horse poop.

So once or twice per week there is an exchange in the back corners of the school parking lot.  Frosting encrusted buckets are passed from Wilhelmina to me, clean buckets are passed from me to Gertrude, buckets full of horse poop are passed from Gertrude to me.  I drive off with buckets of horse manure to compost, spread in the garden, or otherwise make my plants happy.  Like I said, gardeners are a weird lot, and I know that this arrangement and weekly parking lot exchanges should feel a whole lot stranger than they do.

I get buckets back that look like this - full of delicious, nutrient packed horse manure.  So maybe this isn't the strangest thing, gardeners use all manner of manure and have for centuries.  Perhaps it's just the seemingly illicit manner in which I acquire and swap buckets out in the school parking lot that makes it feel slightly odd.  Next week we'll tackle another interesting topic...using your own liquid waste as fertilizer, so stay tuned.     

*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.  

Easter Wrap Up

Easter weekend has come and gone.  It was filled with yard work, ham, chocolate covered goodies, even more ham, and then some more yard work.  The weather was delightful in the 60's and 70's and was perfect for getting out and preparing the garden.  I actually might be ahead of the game out in the garden.  We've cleaned up, trimmed some hedges that were in dire need of a haircut, and gotten ready for the delivery of landscaping bricks that is set to arrive on Friday.

500 hundred landscaping bricks and and equally impressive 10 yards of mulch are on their way.  This weekend should see if our garden stamina is Summer-worthy or is we need some more practice.  Lots of pictures of our newly shaped flower and veggie beds to come. 

Since our Easter wasn't terribly memorable and photogenic (nobody wants to see pictures of me sitting around eating ham and potato salad, right?), how about a review of Easter through the eyes of my awesome nephew Jacob?

Easter started out for Jacob with a trip to the fire station (where his Mom is a Fire Captain).  After sitting in the fire truck, he got to help find all the eggs and Easter treats that were hidden in and around the fire station.

Then more Easter egg hunting and cruising through the park on his scooter.

Followed by some quality time on the playground.  I didn't ask how many trips he took down the slide, but I was assured that it was quite a few.  Nothing like the power of candy to get you through the day!!

Shadowfax Napping

Shadowfax gathered her favorite toys around her heated dog bed, got tucked in (by her concerned people guardians), and wove her noggin through the legs of the rocking chair.  This is how she spends a cool and blustery Sunday morning. And don't worry, nobody was using the rocking chair.