We were blessed to have a beautiful Easter break at our house on Shelter Island.  It was a busy week filled with work, but also relaxing.  The main focus of our week was our garden.  With high hopes that we'll be able to spend most of this summer on the Island, and knowing how lonely for our own veggies we were last year, we tilled a large area of lawn and fenced it to keep the deer out.  At the end of March, Craig broke out our old faithful rototiller, a leftover from our landscaping business (and maybe a dozen years old or more!), and tilled an area of grass to break it up and get the process going.

After a second round of tilling last weekend, Craig got my Dad's old Bobcat started (that's an antique from Dad's construction business, and at least 35 years old, maybe more).  With the Bobcat, he moved our entire compost pile into the garden.  I think it was maybe 5 yards of compost--several years' worth of fall leaves, weeds from my parents' flower beds, sod we've dug out here and there, kitchen scraps.  He dumped it in piles around the garden, and I raked it out as evenly as I could so he could till it yet again:

After another round of tilling to mix it in, you can see the difference below.  What a change from the pathway soil (on the left) and the improved garden soil on the right.

Next I grabbed an old gate that we swiped from my Sister when she sold her house, and I dug post holes to put in four 4x4 fence posts where we wanted our two gates so we can walk through the garden.  Of course I had to buy a $17 hinge kit to hang the "free" gate, but at least I didn't spend ten hours building it, and it worked well right off the bat!  We bought a few metal fence posts and 100' roll of 7' high deer net, and we borrowed both posts and more net from our winter shrub deer fencing, (which we'll have to replace in the fall), and went around the perimeter.  The second set of wooden posts I dug in just has deer net for now, but we will build a gate for that one later in the season.

So here are the results of our work.  The garden is a haphazard trapezoid shape with 5-ish corners, but I think it's around 30x50 feet.  It brought together a few floating garden areas--on the north edge is a row of old evergreen cedars which we branched up to put the fence along their trunks.  The apple tree is next to them, in the bed we dug up and mulched into an island last year.  It's now enclosed too, with some thornless blackberries I moved there last year, along with a new row of about 20 canes of raspberries from our Baldwin perennial bed.  They have been creeping under the fence from the neighbors, and last year they fruited so we got to taste them.  They're not everbearing, but they were sweet and free, so no complaints!  Along the East edge is my herb/rock garden, which now has a Beach Plum (Prunus maritima), which was a major score, found at Southold Agway!  The herbs have been there a few years, but hopefully the deer won't eat my new plum tree/shrub. I need to replace the lavender and rosemary which aren't showing any signs of life yet after this winter.

Along the South edge (the trench you see above, outside the fence), we transplanted a row of Asparagus that I dug up from Baldwin.  I think it's called "Purple Passion" and we didn't like the flavor as much as the green, so we are taking a chance the critters will leave it alone  and recovering a lot of perennial border at "home" in the transaction.  If I recall correctly, my Sister had asparagus in her SI garden when she lived here, and they didn't eat it, but there were fewer deer then.  Time will tell.  Inside the fence (below) you can see our newly planted beds after their first watering.  I got in about 30' of organic seed potato from Wood Prairie Farm, a bed of yellow onion sets, snap and snow peas, small blocks of lettuce, arrugula, spinach, and some Fukugawa bunching onions (scallions).  Most of the seeds are from Scheepers aka Kitchen Garden Seeds.  I also planted a six pack of flat leaf parsley and a bunch of lettuce seedlings I bought locally, to give us a bit of a head start--barely visible in this photo.

And the final touch.  We needed a bar above the gate, so the deer wouldn't get into the garden there, and when I turned around, Craig had added his beautiful finishing touch.  My Mom says she has a great view of it from her yard.  If you can't read the classy orange spray paint at the top, it says Beware of Zombies.

And then we had to go home.  We'll be back in two weeks.  Hopefully it will rain a bit (it has), things will sprout a bit (they will, if it ever warms up here), and the critters will stay out (fingers crossed!).  Happy Spring!