planting – Parsol Farms

Everything hurts. Did you know digging holes is a lot of work? I guess let me back up a bit and talk through the day. So this morning we were like ok let’s plant the blueberry bushes since we finally got the OK from the utility places that we can dig in our backyard without issue. Kels wanted a third plant and we needed to get some soil amendment to help increase the acidity of the soil so we left for the gardening store.

On top of getting a third blueberry bush and the soil stuff, we also got some more potting soil, a pot, and four flower type things that Kels will prolly write about. Loaded everything up and came home.

We originally were thinking about putting the blueberry bushes along the back of our yard so I dug a hole and then we were like hmm actually this is a bit shady so maybe we should move them. So now we have this random hole in the back of our backyard cause I was too lazy to do anything about it but maybe we’ll plant something there later <__<;

Went to the area near our raised beds and proceeded to dig and dig and dig.

With all the soil out, we mixed in this planting mix at a roughly 50 / 50 ratio with the native soil.

A different angle – you can see the soil to the left and the grass above (we put the grass soil elsewhere)

After we mixed up the soil and the mix, we put the plant it (after making sure to loosen up the roots). We then covered it all in mulch being careful to not get the mulch too close to the base of the plant.

Repeated this step three more times (oh my goodness my back) and we ended up with this (Apologies for the not so great photo).

While I was doing this, Kels put in some of her flowers near the strawberries.

Bed 1 after 1 week and with the new flowers put in

The last thing for the day was potting our new lavender plant and placing it near the raised beds. Hopefully this plant will flower and help attract bees to the nearby plants.

And that’s all for the day! Looking forward to not having as much work to do in the upcoming weeks. Watering is nice and chill. Although I think we may need to rip off the flowers on the blueberry plants to encourage growth for the following years (and encourage it to not produce berries this year). More investigation is needed.

Today we finished getting the soil and bought a variety of things to plant. Soil is so heavy and it’s hard work to just get the amount of soil we bought into the beds (in total we used 16 bags of soil + 2 bags of a soil amendment). Each of our beds is 4 feet by 4 feet with a depth of just over 12 inches.

Bed with all the soil + compost mixed together

Here’s all of the starter things + plants we bought (but there’s also some seeds not pictured).

After unloading everything and getting the soil all set up, we went about putting the plants in. As you can see above, we got 4 different types of strawberry starters (Tri Star, Eversweet, Albion, and Seascape) – but whoops did we totally not realize just how many strawberry starters are in each container. We ended up taking 6 of each of them and filling up an entire raised bed – but we still had tons leftover! We messaged our neighbours who we’ve previously talked about gardening with to see if they wanted any so hopefully they won’t go to waste.

Planting the strawberries were really interesting. We had to dig decently far down so that we could put the roots in without them bending. We weren’t really sure what to do with fertilizer so we just like dumped some in the hole and mixed it in with the soil. Guess we’ll see what happens lol.

The raised bed full of strawberry starters (pre watering and pre any seeds being planted between them)

After we finished with the strawberries, we began the second raised bed where we are planting a lot of other things. We did two rows of different types of lettuce seeds. Planting lettuce is pretty interesting – you basically just use your finger to make line in the soil, plop the seeds and some fertilizer in, and then lightly push the soil back on top. Hopefully some of them germinate!

Other than the lettuce, we also planted some onions, scallions, garlic, and chives. For the onions, we basically just had like little bulb starters that we stuck in the ground (as you can tell we have no idea what we’re doing but just trying things). The other plants we just spaced out as was suggested and did much of the same.

The second bed with the lettuce seeds on the left and the garlic, onions, and chives on the right.

Once we finished up those raised beds, we decided to take the strawberry starters and just plant some in random spots throughout our yard to see if any grow. I’m not expecting much from those but it’s fun to experiment anyway.

Kelsy planting strawberry things in random spots to see what happens

A more complete look at the two beds together after everything has been watered

You may have noticed in the original photo of all the plants that there’s two bigger ones still in pots not pictured above. We decided to get some blueberry plants – but due to state laws, we have to have someone come out and mark the gas lines on our property before we can dig a hole to put those blueberries in. Photos and more to come for that in future weeks.

Overall today was a lot of fun – albeit a lot of hard work. I’m tentatively hopeful that at least some of our plants will work out ^_^

Tag: planting

Diggin’ Holes and Plantin’ Blueberries

Planting day!