The Nitrogen Challenge I face is that this property is heavily wooded and the area I cleared was mostly clay infused earth with a LOT of rotting leaves on top and a LOT of rotted wood chips too. Then I have a hen yard with several years of wood shavings that have been mucked out of the henhouse and tossed into the hen yard, that gets raked into piles and then I've got 5 yards of horse poop...well, suffice it to say that my composting process is more like a chemistry lab - not to mention the Ph levels, which tend to the strongly acidic and I have to move the levels with some wood ash as needed.

So far this year, the peas and lettuce are moving well, the broccolli is going to be late, the tomatoes and peppers are going to have a hard time (I should have dropped those last 10 trees, the sun isn't really coming around to the clearing early enough) but we did OK with them last year in a worse place. The lettuce, kale and spinach are just fantastic, already harvesting that.

Green beans will be another tricky crop. I don't think it's possible to NOT grow zuchinni.

We will try - for the 3rd year - strawberries - but it seems that each year we have critters eat them.

This year's wild raspberry crop looks like it will be MASSIVE so we'll make that into jams in late July.

In all honesty, this year's garden is really a prototype, if I get 50% of what I hope to get harvested, I'll call it a success. But next year's garden is already in planning.

We need a LOT of land work to get a good garden and as much as I hate to do it, at the end of this season I think I'm going to really need to knuckle under and spend a whole winter dropping a bunch of trees and then coming in with the backhoe to really tear things up, pull out the stumps and make a nice clear area and then drop 25 or 30 yards of decent top soil into it. Since I have free use of a backhoe and a neighbor who is a tree guy who will drop certain trees for free if he can keep the wood to sell as firewood, and he also has a massive chipper, I think it will work out. I do like having the garden where it is - out front of the house - but it needs much more work.