I love gardening. I love being able to grow my own fruit and vegetables, but that's difficult up in the mountains. Not only do you have to contend with cooler weather, high altitude, and short growing seasons, you have to plan for the animals. Deer, racoon, skunk, fox, squirrels, birds, bears, bobcats, mountain lions. If we want to keep a garden, and chickens, safe we have to have a fence.
We started with a relatively flat spot. I've noticed that my definition of 'flat' has changed since I've moved to the mountain.
We had some friends with Llamas that generously allowed us to pick up a lot of their dung. We didn't have the fence up but it was outlined, so we guessed on where our raised beds would end up and layered some dung with paper and cardboard for cutting down on weeds.
We guessed pretty close because we didn't need to move too many. We did this last fall so it would have all winter to compost.
We also started the fence. Our goal was to get the fence posts in before the frost. Thanks to our late winter we managed, finishing them just before Thanksgiving.
During warm spells in the winter we hung the fencing. Then, this spring we've been working on putting in the raised beds. It's been a lot of work due to the slope and the rocks and all the digging. So much digging. But we finally have a garden.
It's still a work in progress and we'll have a fence dividing it in half so we can have chickens in the back, but we've been able to get some vegetables planted and now we'll see what we can make grow.
