By Jim Davidson and the Demo Garden Team
In 2018, we were into a drought. If we went more that a couple of days without watering selected parts of the garden we had severe wilt in our vegetables and transplants were at risk. Fortunately, our Front bed, the Xeriscaping one, was never watered.
Watering was between a half hour to an hour several times a week. We tried a Rainbird sprinkler once or twice, but found it wasteful and once it caused a couple of taller plants to fall over, having taken too much pressure on their leaves and having a fully sodden root system.
Nonetheless, there were fantastic Nanking cherries, apples and leeks in 2018 at our garden.
In November, we planted garlic amongst the various beds and in part of one of the vegetable beds we heeled-in clumps of extra feathered grasses, golden currants and gooseberries.
The compost bin is a traditional one now, with brown/green layers and with plenty of moisture due to watering. We might use quite a bit less water in 2019, if we get our composting fine tuned.
Thank you to the 2018 team. We had an instructor-lead planning session in the Spring. This resulted amongst other things, moving the Strawberry patch and mulching the Fruit bed with twigs on layers of newspaper.
Next year we should be doing square foot gardening, getting Bee houses set up, demonstrating more gardening techniques and probably putting compost more directly into beds (instead of going into the Vegetable bed and then taking that soil a year later into the other beds… the thought was, that we would eliminate weeds by removing them in the vegetable beds).
Our annual Garden Celebration in July at our site is already in the early planning stages.
