Cabin Garden

Here’s how the cabin garden grows. We built this hulgelkultur garden the spring of 2020 during lockdown. It was one of those weekends when we stretched our lockdown borders to include our Minnesota cabin in the woods. Now I realize what a happy break it was.

The garden is made of logs, tree trash, sod, clay, compost, and lots of mulch. Wait, there must be a picture of this work.

Elv used garden tractor power to usher these logs into position and then to fill it in. We ordered in a dump load of barnyard compost in which to actually plant the garden as the top layer. Unless you count the grass clippings mulch from the mountain trail mowing. Then we pulled water off the beaver pond to water it.

These pictures are from the first summer of hulgelkultur gardening. I believe that this is a most satisfactory method of homestead gardening possible, especially in the beginning. We solved stump removal, tree trash removal, foundation diggings leftovers, and a desire to have a garden all within a few weeks.

These next few pictures are what it is now, the third summer. We actually haven’t lived full time at the cabin for any of these three gardening seasons. And this spring, third year, I planted the fox glove and the marigolds. I may have planted another perennial, but I haven’t seen it on our visits to the cabin.

I had forget-me-nots planted from the beginning and each year they reseed on their own, as does the borage which I planted summer of 2021 as a companion to the strawberries.

For now I will plant a few more perennials each year.

In the fall of 2020, our first garden year, a bale of Nebraska straw meant for Lisl’s garden landed at the cabin off of Joshes pickup. Lisl’s garden didn’t ever see that bale.

That straw made year two in the garden appear that we cared. The potatoes loved it. So did the baby strawberry plants, but we made the mistake of taking down the solar powered electric fence. The deer loved the strawberry plants down to little nubbins last fall.

These are first year crops. It was like 2020 drama gone in the right direction just for us.

Second year potatoes from a largely unattended garden.

Buckwheat comes back too. The third year garden is full of reseeded flowers. And the strawberry plants are bearing berries. The deer seem to have taken me seriously and are avoiding the foxglove flower I planted smack in the middle of the strawberry bed.

First summer pictures. I hope you enjoyed my little showing off of the finest garden I’ve ever had. I expect to continue to enjoy it for years to come. It’s always got a nice surprise or two for us when we visit the cabin.