Clearing space for a new small vegetable garden is more work than it will be worth. It took more than a day to remove the thicket of bramble from a triangular area that is only about forty feet from front to back, and not much more than twenty feet wide. After so many years of getting trash dumped on top of them, the brambles were unusually prolific with gnarly root burls.
There is still significant work to do. I still need to condition the soil and groom the adjacent junipers before sowing seed for the warm season vegetables for this summer. Now that I can see that the junipers that were formerly concealed by brambles are worthy of salvage and grooming, I will need to clear a bit more garden space across the road, and cut back a few trees above.
When finished and producing, the garden will not produce enough. The four hundred or so square feet in the main part of the garden should supply enough for two people; but realistically, it would more likely produce enough for me alone, with a bit extra to can for when it is not producing much. There are about a dozen on our crew. They all have families. I need a quarter acre!
The math of it all is frustrating. So is all the work to get it started. It all seems so futile. I know we will appreciate the little bit that we get. I will still get plenty from the weeds that grow wild around the baseball field, so will not take much from the garden.
For now, I try to visualize what the small vegetable garden will look like in production this summer, even if all that I see blooming are the poppies and periwinkle on the outskirts.
Beautiful flowers.
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Thank you, the area that will become the garden is still a horrid mess. It makes me appreciate the flowers more.
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I wish you luck with the periwinkle. I’m still fighting them in the one little corner that I thought I’d cleared.
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I do not bother this periwinkle because it is just above the ditch on the side of the road here, and does not seem to be too aggressive. I would be more concerned if it were in a landscaped area. As I clear more area for garden space, I will pull the periwinkle up. I doubt it will give me too much difficulty here.
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California poppies are truly marvelous. Wish they grew more readily around here.
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They are surprisingly popular outside of their native range. They just do not naturalize like they do here.
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I love California poppies they will grow here in utah but don’t reseed. I’ll never ignore the trusty pickup in the background it looks like it has some stories to tell.
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That pickup has not been here long, and is not old enough to be very experienced. It only photobombed because I was not watching what I was doing.
Poppies can be an odd one, even here within their natural range. They do not compete with the exotic naturalized forage grasses well, so there are few places where they are prominent. They are sporadic here. I have sown seed in some spots where only a few actually grow, and then do not reseed. As resilient as they are, they are surprisingly discriminating.
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