Fresh Start for the Vegetable Garden: Summer 2017

Sometimes a fresh start is a GREAT thing!

Boy, is that ever true! 

But no, seriously, it is so true.  Honestly, with such a busy life and so many factors, the garden had just been straight up neglected.  Like, it got MOWED at the end of the winter season.  Not tilled, not anything.  Mowed and left for dead.

But sometimes, it's good to start fresh.

I found myself, for lack of a better word, feeling a little stuck.  I'd had a lot of struggles with the garden, from pests of all sizes, to struggling with plant placement and crop rotation.  I've had a lot of big ideas and some went great and some feel super flat.  So we just started fresh.

It was middle summer before the garden got back into our focus.  It was so weedy and just a big ol' mess.  We'd thought about going ahead and just trying to plant some stuff and see what took.  But that idea didn't really sit with us.  And quite frankly, we just didn't have the time to dedicate to weeding it all and getting things proper.  So what's a gardener to do?

   

This but on a small scale

Plant a cover crop!  It just seemed like the right thing to do. Hubs and I decided that the best thing to do was get the soil right.  I did quite a bit of research on good cover crops for North Carolina.  Quite a few different seeds would do.  I looked at some mixes at a few different websites but they were kind of expensive.  It was sort of a toss up between cow peas, millet, or some fall cover crop mix from one of my favorite seed sites.

This is how the seeds I bought looked.

In the end, we decided to go with cow peas.  Cow peas are a legume, which can add nitrogen to the soil.  They also spread nicely which is a good weed suppressant.  And if I was lucky, I thought, maybe they will deter some bugs, too.  I worked with a person from New Bern Farm and Garden to pick out the right cover variety.  Instead of spending $14.00 plus shipping on a bag from some of the seed sites I looked at, we got about 3 pounds for $4.00.



I also bought some sunflower seeds because I am a sucker for sunflowers.  Just look at those fancy seed packets!  I almost went home with all of those!



Planting the cow pea seed was super easy - I just scattered them across the garden.  I carefully planted the sunflower seeds along the edges of the rows and made a big patch of them about halfway through the garden.

After that I just sat back and waited for the magic to happen.

Do you ever use cover crops?  What do you do to refresh your garden bed?

Take care,

Rebecca