The garden's open.

Madison.

The garden is officially open for the season.

Okay, so the Eagle Heights Community Garden has been open for nearly two weeks already, but I've been busy. Yesterday evening was the first chance I had to see how the plot had fared through the winter. This always makes me nervous, having been away since late October / early November. I remember piling on the mulch, hoping it would be enough, but it's too long ago to recall significant details.

We must've done pretty well, since the garden's in the best early-season shape yet. Granted, our first year was a mess. Whoever'd had the plot before us hadn't taken any precautions to winterize it, and I suspect they'd left Madison at the end of summer. The plot was fairly disorganized, filled with the remains of sunflowers and tomatoes. Without any mulch, the weeds had established a pretty firm foothold, and quackgrass was everywhere. I did a single-dig on the whole plot, while Sharon removed all of the weeds and grass roots, and we then lined the perimeter with a heavy-duty weed barrier to keep the grass out. It's been down for two years, no, and looks to be doing just fine.

The plot does have its share of grass clumps and weeds, but not much. The few I tested came out easily, so it looks like an hour or so of weed-removal should have things ready to go. The gardens also have an enormous pile of leaf mulch ready for us, so I can simply pile more of that on the plots that don't get early-season crops and have no worries.

We also seem to have a new resident in our plot this year. At the southern edge, a pair of two-inch burrows suggests there might be some ground squirrels living beneath the former nasturtium bed. I'm not particularly bothered by this. Sure, they'll be more than happy to devour the low-hanging snap peas - which'll be planted right on their front stoop - but it's not as though they didn't make the effort to find them before. Plus, they've got more of a claim to that land than I do, so I'm willing to cut them some slack. I'll trade a handful of vegetables for a little biological diversity.

Also exciting was seeing the hop bines well on their way. Two plots - one adjacent to ours - have hops, complete with large trellises to support them. (At a distance, it makes for a handy visual reference for our plot.) Though they haven't begun to train to the supports, the longest of the bines are already a foot or more. Every year, the plants come back more vigorously than before, so it'll be neat to watch them grow into monsters again this year.

That's also a downside to growing hops, at least for me, at this point. They're a lot like asparagus, in that you need a minimum of several years to justify the effort. In the first year, the rhizomes are getting settled, and only send up a few small bines. At the end of the season, the plant draws all of the nutrients back underground, and tries harder the next year. It'll take three to five years before things level out, before you can expect serious hop harvests. Well worth it for a long-term homebrewing hobby, but not a season-by-season garden.

I won't be here long enough to get a good return on hops, so I never started. It'd be such a shame to know someone else was tearing them out as weeds as April rolled around.