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| photo by my good friend and fellow gardener Daryl Byler |
The rabbit fence you see consists of discarded window screens salvaged from renovation projects around the Village. It works well to protect the peas, lettuce, and the various kinds of beans in that end of the garden,
Down the middle of this area is a five-foot woven wire fence where the sugar snap peas grow that we are enjoying this time of year. These are planted in March to give them a head start over the pole lima and green beans I plant right next to them in early May. Since the peas are harvested early, the pole beans simply take their place for harvesting later in the season.
The unfenced end of the garden is for tomatoes, squash, cantaloupe and Swiss chard. They can all be close together since the caged tomatoes are growing vertically while the squash and cantaloupe vines cover the horizontal space.
Every year some volunteer plants appear along with the planted ones, especially potatoes and sunflowers. We mostly leave such visitors undisturbed as long as they are not crowding out any of their neighboring plants. And we apply generous amounts of compost and shredded leaf mulch around all of the varied companion plants, a practice that largely eliminates weeds, provides needed fertilizer, improves soil quality and greatly reduces the need for irrigating the garden (But we were so grateful for the rain we've been blessed with in the past 24-hours!).
The overall result resembles a kind of food forest rather than a manicured set of cultivated rows of fresh produce. But the joy it brings to our table, and frequently to those of our neighbors, is beyond words.
Glory be to God for dappled things......All things counter, original, spare, strange;Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:Praise him.
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