2025 05 11 - First planting

New fence, west garden

In the past, the outdoors has pretty much been 'mine.' But this year my wife has mowed the yard and was helping with putting up the garden fence. That was a good thing as I bought fence posts that were 7-1/2 feet high and am using a post driver to get them in the ground. The post driver is not easy to lift and keep the posts straight at the same time.

When I started gardening, I bought a 3 foot high fence that I left around one part of my garden and would plant the vulnerable items in there. That stayed in one place long enough that there are wooden branches growing through it.

Then I started moving that fence for crop rotation. And after a couple of bad years for my blue berries I started fencing the berries over the winter. When my parents quit gardening I got a couple of taller pieces of fence from them.

Then finally last year I got a few sections of fence that was five feet high. I was going to get the four foot fence but the 5 foot was cheaper. And I had been buying 4 foot cheap posts. Then better 5 foot posts and later 6 foot better posts and finally I am up to 7-1/2 foot posts. Seeing my fence doesn't go to the top of the posts, I'm not sure the point.

But after seeing that my neighbor was feeding the deer last winter and talking to my gardening neighbor and he is using 6 foot fence I decided to put in a 'permanent fence.'

So far I am less than half done. I know where the fence is going to go. I have berries on both ends of that garden so I am going to fence it all in even though the corn area would not need to be fenced.

Usually I just use compost and two spreadings of 10-10-10 fertilizer. This year I / we decided to put down some more. While we were at Menards looking, someone loading up their fertilizer suggested what they use. One part chicken Poo to three bags of commercial compost. So we bought those four bags plus one of something else. Something that I had been looking at when we talked to there.

Then using barrels left over from the family auction, I mixed up the fertilizer and spread it a wheel barrel at a time. That didn't cover much. So I went back and bought 3x times as much. At some point I realized that we have now likely spent many times more on the garden that we will get back in food.

Between the four bags of Poo and 12 bags of compost ... plus my other bag ... then I found I had a bag just like mine from last year that I had never opened ... and we had a few partial bags of misc so I mixed them all together and ALL the purchased stuff covered the 'non-corn' / non-fruit area of my garden.

Corn, I finally got in my first two plantings of corn. I did not get my third one because by then it was getting dark. I planted the early and the late corn first. I am again mixing it with sun flowers. Last year I planted, and re-planted the sun flowers an average of four times and the area was fenced. I'm expecting we are going to be gone more this spring so I am planting twice as much corn each planting than most years.