And So It Begins...

On Sunday we were told it would rain - 50% chance. Of course, that also meant 50% chance it wouldn't. It didn't. Which, for the outdoor chore department, was a good thing. I had planned to spend a rainy day inside doing dishes, laundry, cleaning (all of which really does need to be done), but I opted to do outside stuff until the rain came. Translation: I spent the day in the yard!

The piles of hardpan dirt (I refuse to call that stuff soil) were shovelled into the wheelbarrow and mixed with peat moss, pearlite and vermiculite, and then shovelled onto the top of one of the veg gardens - I'm trying to build up the soil in this spot ala "lasagna gardening" (no tilling, just piles and piles of stuff on top of the ground). I have some serious weeding to do there (I'm not convinced this is the best way to build a garden; it's great in theory, and probably works like a charm if you have good, and copious, sources of compost, topsoil and manure to layer, which I don't).

I then set about digging weeds from the regular veg beds. Six beds are now weeded and nicely raked into raised plots, ready for planting. It sort of looks like I have six new graves in my yard, albeit very long and narrow graves! Ten beds remain to be done.

I was sorely tempted to plant peas. I spoke with a neighbor in the morning as Toby and I passed by on our walk. He, too, was contemplating putting in his peas, if he could get his tiller going and his garden dug up. I heard the tiller running most of the morning, so I suspect he did just that. In the end, however, I passed on the peas. I know "they" say you can plant them as soon as the ground can be worked, but, sheesh, it IS still April! It may have been in the 80s Sunday and Monday, but snow is not out of the question yet. Maybe I'll rethink peas next weekend.

Meanwhile, the garlic have all come up beautifully and are standing tall at 6-8"! I'm very excited about this - I may have garlic to sell come fall! AND, I found some onions and leeks from last year's seeds still growing! Hm - maybe starting them from seed isn't too bad after all, although to have maybe a dozen survive out of 150 isn't really a good survival rate. I think I'll stick to ordering sets for now.

I did make a mistake on Sunday: I put the tomatoes out in the sun. I thought a little sun would be good for them. Unfortunately, I overdid it - their tender leaves were scalded. I thought I got them into shade quickly enough, but apparently I didn't. So now I'm nursing them along in the house, back under their grow lights. Their second leaves are growing, so I'm hoping most will survive, especially since I had planned to sell some this spring!

Patience - it's a hard lesson to learn, and even now I find that I want to rush along, even though I really do know better! Sometimes you can cut corners, but more often than not, you cannot. Ths can be a hard lesson to learn.

Dressing the Garden

I have a lot of books. Some folks would say I have too many books. There are those who ask if I've actually read all the books I own. The honest answer is no, but they are there just in case I want to. But most of them I have at least glanced through, with the exception of the really old books (many of which are poems by the likes of Byron) rescued from my grandparents' homes, and a good number of them I have even read in part.

So what does this have to do with gardening? Well, I have a goodly collection of gardening books, most of which are fairly new. When I get interested in a subject, I tend to read as much about it as I possibly can. Just to be sure I have all the information available, y'know. Still, this doesn't mean that I necessarily follow all the advise.

Take soil preparation in the garden. Every garden book worth its salt will tell you that the most important thing you can do for your garden, before you even get close to planting anything, is test the soil and then add soil amendments to make the soil the best it can possibly be for the plants you want to grow.

Add to this the fact that not every plant likes the same type of soil. Some prefer soil a bit more acidic, while others are piggies for nitrogen. Gardening and chemistry go hand in hand.

This can be a little overwhelming. Afterall, all you wanted to do was grow a few carrots and peas. So, it is easy to brush all this advice aside and just dig up the ground and throw in some seeds.

And yes, you might be lucky and your plants will grow. They may even produce flowers and food. BUT - will they have grown and produced to their fullest potential?

I discovered this last year. It was my first year with the veg garden. Space was limited. I had a great idea to save myself space and time: I would plant the pumpkins right in the lawn - when they grew (and we all know how pumpkins take over), they would cover the grass and I wouldn't have to mow! What a genius I was! It turned out to be a hot, dry summer, and even though I watered my piddling little pumpkin plants daily, they refused to grow. I had two or three flowers, but the plants never even reached the size of a dinner plate. You can forget any pumpkins.

So, this year I planted the pumpkins right in the manure pile. Pumpkins are what "they" call heavy feeders, which means they want a lot of nitrogen, and here we are a month and a half later and the leaves alone are larger than dinner plates! These pumpkins are happy plants. Lots of food and nitrogen right there at their root tips! The difference is amazing.

Last weekend I looked at the cukes and squashes that I planted in the garden. The same amount of time has passed for them as for the pumpkins, and the cukes were still just two leaves each, while the squash weren't doing much better. Hmm. I dug up a little manure and "dressed" the top of the soil around each plant. VOILA! Super Squash! Courageous Cucumbers! Well, it wasn't' quite that instantaneous, but the difference a little dressing of horse manure made is down right amazing!

And when the dripper hose company recommends drippers spaced 6" apart for veg gardens, and you try to save money by purchasing the 12" drippers in stead, thinking you will just wind them more closely together, you come to the conclusion that the company actually knew what it was talking about and next year you will order the 6" lines to replace the 12" lines you put in this year.

The moral of this story is, yes, you can do it yourself and try to figure things out on your own, or, you can save yourself some time, money and aggravation and actually follow the years and years of advice that other gardeners have put into print just for us!

The choice is yours, obviously. As for me, I may just start to read those books again and take some more of that advise to heart.

Tilling, Tomatoes and Driplines

We finally got some sunny and warm weather, and some real rain, over the last four days. I took advantage of it to get some more gardening done.

First on the list: get the new beds made! I pulled off the plastic to find that the lawn had been mostly killed off, so armed with string, flour and the tiller, I attacked the patch and created five new beds. Flour? Yes. After measuring off the spaces for paths and garden beds, making them straight with string attached between two sticks, I mark the ground using flour. It's cheap, it's available, and it's biodigradable. Once my flour lines are on the ground, I can wind up the string and till away, no worries about string getting wrapped around the tiller tines, or my beds being crooked! So, I now have two more long beds and three short beds running perpendicular to the long beds (had to work around an apple tree, so these three beds have a different alignment).

After tilling, I got out my super duper square-ended spade (from Lee Valley Tools - the best garden purchase I've made to date) and cut the edges of the beds. I have found that the tiller really doesn't do much but maybe stir up the top inch or two of the lawn. A good shovel and a broadfork really prove to be the best for making the beds, in my opinion. This time, though, I opted not to use the broadfork - I'm trying multiple techniques this year. The old beds were all broadforked when made and again this year. The older new beds were broadforked this spring. Then there are the "Weedless Gardening" beds where the lawn was mowed, newspaper put down and manure and mulch piled on top. And finally, these last five beds: the soil from the edging piled on top of the "tilled" center bit, which, as stated above, really isn't tilled deeply. We shall see if any of these beds prove to be better than the others!

So, the lawn was tilled, the edges dug out and plopped on top of the "tilled" center, the clumps were broken up and raked into slightly mounded beds. About an inch of manure was spread on top and the whole thing sat for a couple days, resting.

The next chore: completing the drip irrigation system. My new lines and clips arrived, so in the heat and humidity of Friday my mom and I installed dripper lines. I had been using 12" drippers, but the new lines are 6" (this is the spacing between the drip holes). This is what Dripworks recommends for veg gardens (12" for flower beds), and I am thinking now that they are right. Still, we use what we have and now all the beds are equipped with water for the summer. I have the system set on a timer that has four settings per day, seven days a week. I have set it for 15 minutes of dripping each time. We'll see how that goes. Too much? Too little? We'll have to wait and see. Sure beats standing out there with the garden hose for over an hour every night after work!

Finally, the tomatoes. I have TONS of tomato plants. I was over ambitious this winter ordering seeds: they all sounded so interesting! As a result, I ended up with about 18 varieties of tomatoes (Paul Robeson, Black Prince, Rose, Siletz, Rose di Berne, Roma Paste, Grandma Mary Paste, Bellstar Paste, Blue Beech Paste, Dad's Sunset, German Lunchbox, Principe Borghese, Brandywine, Amish Paste, Cherokee Purple, and I can't recall the others). And when you plant from seed inside in the winter, you plant extra seeds because they might not all germinate, and those that do may not all survive. Long story short: I ended up with 150+ tomato plants! I have filled the two new long beds and one short bed with tomatoes! And I still have plants left over! If you are going to be in Newcomb anytime soon, and you want tomato plants, come see me!!!

All that remains now to be planted: beans, corn, squash, pumpkins, celery, herbs and companion plants, sunflowers. Space remaining: three long beds, two short beds, and the two "weedless gardening" beds.

Will it be enough?!?!? Stay tuned...

The Weekend Chores

It may still be too cool to get the rest of the garden planted, but that doesn't mean other chores aren't possible. So, this weekend I put up trellises for the growing peas and for the yet-to-be-planted pole beans.

Reading through my notes, I discovered that potatoes should be planted almost as soon as the ground can be worked, like peas. I guess I was confusing potato requirements with corn requirements. Anywho, I remedied my failings by getting the potatoes in the ground on Friday. Four varieties this year: German butterball (my favorites), Austrian crescents (interesting), Carola (also good), and, new this year, red gold. Not only did I plant the 'taters I ordered, but also the ones that had sprouted from last year's harvest (and I never got around to eating this winter). All told, I have three beds of potatoes.

That leaves me only three small beds for the rest of the produce. Not enough. True, there are also the two new beds I created last weekend just piling manure on top of newspaper, but I am leery of using them (what if the manure is too strong, even though it's been rotting almost a year, or what if it provides way too much nitrogen and not enough other nutrients). So, I dug into the compost heap from last year and tossed some of that (still not completely composted, but maybe 70% there) on top.

I peaked under the plastic I put down in April to kill off more lawn, thinking I wouldn't be able to utilize that area until late summer, and it actually looks nice and brown underneath - I may attempt to till up beds there this next weekend (if it doesn't rain). I should be able to get another 4-5 beds out of that plot!!!

Lastly, I started to install my drip irrigation system. Ran out of the clips/staples that are used to tack the dripper lines to the ground, so I had to stop. Installing driplines is really not difficult (aside from trying to get the coiled tubing to lie flat). I had opted for 12" spaced drip line, even though the catalogue recommended 6" for veg gardens, and now I'm thinking they probably knew what they were talking about (but the 12" lines were significantly cheaper). My timer only has four settings per day (rather than the desired six), so I've upped the watering duration from 9 minutes to 15 minutes each time. It works great...except in the spaces where there is no water dripping. I suppose I should dig down to see just how far the wet zone spreads from each dripper, but I hate to disturb the stuff I've planted. I think my next option will be to run two lines down each bed, rather than one snaking its way over the surface. This is how we learn - from our trials and mistakes.

Meanwhile, the crabapple blossoms are starting to open! And two apple trees (Haralson and Northern Spy) have flowers - at the very tippy top where the deer couldn't reach this winter. The Jonagold, which gave me my first apples last year, has no flowers this year - I suspect too much trauma from browsing pressure. The remaining trees (Milden, Black Oxford, and Keepsake) are all too young to have fruits yet (and were also heavily browsed; must find a solution for this).

My azaleas (Northern Lights varieties) are also starting to bloom, just as the rhododendrons (also Northern Lights) are shriveling up and calling it quits for the season.

And, as a final note, the bluebirds are being quite vocal these last few days. I checked my nest boxes on the golf course last night, and found only one with a potential bluebird nest in it. One box is full of twigs - signs of wren occupation. Another had twigs, but they are now covered with a layer of moss - chickadees? I have one enterprising chickadee who was sitting on her nest yesterday when I peaked in; when she flew I counted a whopping eight eggs!!! She's an over-achiever. One other box was stuffed with grasses - I suspect a red squirrel. The rest of the boxes were all empty. As for my boxes at home, well, I've seen bluebirds around, but apparently none have chosen to take up residence (yet). Even though eggs have been laid and chicks are hatching out in the banana belts of the Park (Lake Champlain area and the St. Lawrence Valley), our bluebirds haven't laid their first eggs yet - some haven't even chosen nest sites yet. Yes, we are a good several weeks behind the rest of the state.