The Blackberry Garden

Wanting to expand our blackberry garden, we've tilled up a new garden bed with the garden tiller and mixed some compost into the bed to get the plants off to a good start. Our blackberries were climbing out into the yard and we got many new plants to start a new blackberry bed just from the new starts. We love to can blackberry preserves and give new plants to family and friends, and having a few to snack on while out weeding the garden beds isn't such a bad idea either.

Blackberries don't take a whole lot of time when it comes to maintaining them. Other than a yearly pruning, it really is one of those set and forget type plants. It doesn't hurt to give them a drink in the middle of summer when your area is under drought-like conditions. But they could survive just as well on their own. If you want to propagate your own new blackberry plants, just loosen up the soil in a spot near the tip of one of the blackberry canes and lightly stick the tip of the cane into the loose soil. Compress the soil just enough to hold the tip in the soil and the tip will root within a few month. Once the tip has rooted, just cut the cane about 6-10 inches above the new roots. The leaves of the plant will actually be upside down, but the plant will adjust to its new role in life and when the new leaves come out they will be right side up. Pretty cool to watch nature at work if you just take the time to really pay attention.

One can never have too many blackberry garden patches. So if you decide to grow your own, don't worry about having to buy more plants in the future. Just till up a new bed with the tiller and get ready to plant some more blackberry plants.

Raised Vegetable Garden Beds

Establishing a raised vegetable garden
As soon as you have chosen where to localize your raised vegetable garden, you'll need to remove weeds and sticks. This is not always necessary but it may preclude relentless weeds from flourishing in your new raised bed. Leveling the ground will enable your raised vegetable garden bed to sit squarely on the underlying earth.

There are a lot of distinctive materials that can be used to build your raised vegetable garden. Lumber, concrete blocks, tires. Your imagination is the only limitation when building raised vegetable garden beds.

Growing Worms for the Garden

So why would you want to grow worms for your garden? Well, without a healthy population of worms in the garden, you're not going to get the best results with your gardening adventures. Worms chew on the garden crumbs and in return leave behind valuable fertilizer for your garden plants. Now, you could just throw out some chemical fertilizer and think that's building healthy soil. But the fact of the mater is, every time you throw a handful of that stuff on your garden soil you are actually doing a great disservice to your soil and the health of it. Worms will go crawling for greener pastures and you can imagine your little fertilizer factory following them. Bury some scraps in the soil. Worms love leftover cornmeal, lettuce, pretty much anything organic. Feed them regularly and they will fertilize your garden for years to come.