In the middle of last week, we said goodbye to the garden. The kids helped me pick the remaining tomatoes. There were quite a few green ones! So we have lots of green tomatoes, little and big!
Maggie’s tomatoes are amazing– they are striped! I have never seen a striped tomato before! They came from heirloom seeds our friend gave us this spring. Amazing!
I have always wanted to cook with green tomatoes– I am excited! The southern girl in me (southern Wisconsin, that is) is doing a little dance.
Our two vegetable garden plots are doing well. Our oldest daughter takes care of one. About the only problems we have had are with the egg plants and carrots.
Our butterfly garden is doing very well. We have seen a few butterflies in the area, but not many. None the less the flowers are wonderful to look at. Enjoy the pictures:
We now have vegetables in our garden! We have two beds, each about 6foot by 10foot.
I have been learning about composting and discovered that used coffee grounds are a good mulching material and addendum to soil. The article I got most of my information from Starbucks “Grounds for your Garden” . Starbucks offers free one gallon bags of used coffee and espresso grounds. In Grand Forks, the Starbucks I visited places these out front for people to pick up. I also picked up grounds from my favorite local coffee house, Porpoura Coffee House, Grand Forks, ND. Our soil is clay rich — the coffee grounds cause the soil not to clump as easily, making it more permeable. Grounds are also carbon rich, contain some fixed nitrogen, and sulfur.
We also picked up six dozen (72) earth worms from Cabela’s, East Grand Forks, MN.
Coffee grounds are not as acidic as coffee. Also, earthworms love coffee grounds — and slugs hate them! This is pretty cool.
We decided to mix coffee and soil in a 1:2 ratio in a five gallon pale and then add two dozen worms. Three pales of addendum were made this way, one for each garden bed. For the butterfly garden, we churned up the dirt in between the flowers we planted on Saturday and spread the coffee/dirt/worms over the bed. For the vegetable garden we dug several trenches and filled these with the coffee/dirt/worm mix.
The vegetable garden, so far, has a row of carrots; two rows of alternating kohlrabi, eggplant and pepper; three small size tomato plants (Sweet Million, Japanese Golden Pair, Grape); and a row of mixed peas and beans. We also sprinkled basil, parsley and cilantro seeds between the plants. The idea here is to have the small herb plants displace potential weeds. These herbs also deter insects. We alternated the kohlrabi, eggplant and pepper in order to increase the diversity of these rows. Here is a good list of plant families: Canadian Country Woman. Well, we will see if any of this works by the end of the summer 
Here are the latest pictures:
On Friday night we ordered dirt from Jet’s Black Dirt and Road Gravel (John Lutheran Jr., Owner/Operator). He delivered three yards the next morning — he is prompt and reliable. Before ordering from Jet’s Black Dirt, I shopped around for dirt delivery and spoke with three other businesses. Jet’s Black Dirt was the best deal in town. I highly recommend him.
We built another butterfly garden box, tilled around the base of the previous box and filled each up with dirt. We also tilled around the front of the house. We lined the tilled ground with Suncast Lawn Edging (USA made, recycled plastic). You can get a similar Suncast product here: Suncast Composite Edging
Here is a list of the Butterfly Garden plants we planted today. Latin name is followed by common names:
Rudbeckia fulgida, (Black-eyed Susan, Brilliant Coneflower, Eastern Coneflower, or Orange Coneflower) Anethum graveolens, Dill Bandana Pink Lantana Asclepias speciosa, (Showy Milkweed) Asclepias incarnata, (Swamp Milkweed, Rose Milkweed, Swamp Silkweed, and White Indian Hemp) Echinacea purpurea, (Eastern Purple Coneflower) Heliotropium arborescens, (Marine Heliotrope, Garden Heliotrope) Verbena bonariensis, (Purpletop Vervain, Tall Verbena, Clustertop Vervain, or Pretty Verbena) Not sure, verbena x hybrida? (Label says: Quartz Merlot Mix) Aster x dumosus, (Woods Blue, Hardy Aster) Tropaeolum majus (Garden Nasturtium, Indian Cress or Monks Cress) side note: Nasturtium literally “nose-twister” or “nose-tweaker”.
Tomorrow we plant the vegetables! The dirt has all been used up. And now pictures of the butterfly garden:
My oldest son and I have built the central planter box for the side yard butterfly garden. The idea is to have a three tier system after we till the ground around the base of the box.
Speaking of tilling, we are very happy with our new Troy-Bilt 26cc 4-Cycle Gas Powered Cultivator
Butterfly garden lower box.
Upper and low planter box for butterfly garden.
Troy-Built 4-cycle tiller (review coming soon).
We tilled the food producing portion of our garden. We had a pile of old bricks that the kids desperately needed to turn into a wall. The best way to handle this behavior is to ask, “I am getting a wall whether I want it or not — were should it go?”. Peregrine and Maggie are shown here busily constructing a wall — I was going to make the raised beds with green treated lumber — but got an awesome brick wall instead. The other bed is bordered with concrete test forms from the mechanical engineering department at the local university. So a brick wall is a pretty good counter point to that. The awesome thing is that the two year old went to bed with little trouble tonight — and I have the vegetable beds for our garden pretty much figured out. Tomorrow some more tilling and then we work on the butterfly garden. The kids are such an awesome power at helping me — I just need to learn to get out of their way!
Peregrine (Bob the Buider) exuberantly taking on the job of building a brick wall.
Sure they could pinch their fingers -- this is a good way to learn!
The plan calls for a butterfly garden on the side of the house and a vegetable garden in the back yard that is twice the size of previous years. We also hope to put in at least two or three fruit trees (plum, cherry, apple?). We started by tilling the vegetable plots. I will review the tiller we used at a later date.
The plan.
Map, West -->
Location of future butterfly garden.
Happy Mothers Day! to all Mothers past, present and future.
Today we went to All Seasons — we are getting pretty excited about this garden. My oldest son spent a few hours last week measuring the positions and sizes of all immovable features of property. Tonight, he and I set about creating a computer model of our property using Google Sketch-up. We gave the model enough detail to look neat without overloading our computer too much. All this model has to do is give us a rough idea of what different arrangements of raised beds, trees and shrubs will look like. So here it is, showing only those things we do not intend to move. Our next post will hopefully show the plan we decide on.
Map, West -->
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Looking North West
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Looking South West from the ground. This creepy looking guy has been stairing at our fence ever since we moved in. 
In previous years our gardening activity has been pretty, well, lame.
Our younger kids are now to the point of being able to carry through on chores and they are very excited about this years garden. My wife and I are trying to establish a decent plan and my oldest son (14 in June) is using Google Sketch-Up to make a computer model of our yard. (Check out the book Wiley Pathways Introduction to Google SketchUp
Something I have wanted to try for a long time is a butterfly garden. Because all gardening is regional in nature I checked our County Extension Office. Sure enough, they have a great Introduction to Butterfly Gardening with information specific to our region (upper plains, US). I am looking over it and writing a shopping list to take to All Seasons, a locally owned gardening store we are fond of.
As for the food portion of our garden, a good friend of our has turned us on to a type of gardening called Permaculture. Specifically we are interested in the work of Sepp Holzer and his book Rebel Farmer
