Garden Update

Wow... I've been so busy lately that I haven't had time to post anything. The garden is alive, but I am finding that I will need a lot more practice to have a terribly successful garden. One of the biggest things I have found is that the garden needs a lot more water than I have been giving it... sometimes more than twice a day. This especially shows up during the germination process. If you don't keep the soil moist, the seeds are either going to germinate extremely slowly or simply cook in the soil.

So, this is what I started with just after getting out of school for the summer... a ton of weeds!!!

I planted the second half of my garden after getting out of school. The beets, which I planted earlier, weren't coming up (probably as a result of too much water... a lot of local gardeners were experiencing seeds rotting away in the ground from too much rain). The carrots and parsnips were sort of coming up (here is a current carrot picture below).

However, they weren't coming up in the proportions in which they were planted. The lettuce did pretty well at the beginning. As it got hotter, it didn't come up as well (again, it probably needed more water for proper germination).

Chives were/are doing well... these little fellas take their time when growing, but they do come back every year. Spinach didn't grow at all... actually a couple of weeks ago I saw it popping a couple heads through the ground, but these got picked by a couple of overambitious weeders a couple days later (he he). The spinach might not have made it anyway since it isn't very fond of hot weather. The peas have done nicely, but I had some problems with them pulling my trellis down; of course, I made the transition to a more robust (2 x 4) trellis. Even so, the peas put a good deal of force on the strings of the trellis pulling them off to the side. I am going to try wire next year. I think I might also double my pea crop, as the trellis we have now doesn't hold enough peas for our family.

Onions are doing great... not much to say there. I mulched them with straw (which I should have done a long time ago) because they need a lot of water and the straw helps them to maintain there moisture levels. Grass clippings are supposed to be a good alternative.

Cilantro is likewise doing well. I let the silly things flower because I wasn't exactly sure if I had to harvest them when they got to a certain height and... well... now we are growing coriander. I might plant some more cilantro this summer so I can make some fresh pico de gallo when the tomatoes and onions are ready for picking.

Now for this summers plantings: I put beans and cucumbers in, supported by my homemade "tee-pee" trellises (dimensions given in a later post); Three trellises were for beans, two were for cucumbers. The beans are only six inches high and growing well, but I doubt that they will produce enough beans for our family. I might have to make a couple more trellises next year.

I planted 5 zucchini and four squash. From what I hear about the prolific nature of the squash family, I have a feeling that I will be cutting back on my squash plantings next year. The neighbors might get tired of squash offerings and we might might get tired of zucchini bread (if that is possible).

The broccoli had problems with the first planting. Several came up, but only one made it (probably a water problem). I replanted several indoors and they all came up; I ended up losing a couple more. I think I ended up with six altogether. They are pretty small and growing slowly. I am wondering if there is a nutrient deficiency or if broccoli is just naturally slow growing. I sprinkled some bone meal around them because some had a pinkish/purple tint to the leaves; I suspected a phosphorus deficiency. I'll have to see if this helps.

The tomatoes are the next heartbreak. I planted over 60 tomatoes.

I transplanted them 6-8 weeks ago in nice weather. That night it hailed. After suffering through some more bad weather, they finally got there sunshine; it was too late for some though. I am down to 35 (after buying 12 full grown beefsteak to replace some of the dead tomatoes). The bright side is that the ones that did survive are gorgeous and full. I am just hoping that the season is long enough for them to produce. I have heard that an old Amish trick is to place red tiles under the tomatoes. They absorb heat and release it throughout the night and, what's more, the red color in the tile encourages them to produce early. I am going to check Craigslist and see if I can get some red tile for my tomatoes.

I planted some basil alongside the tomatoes (supposedly growing the tomatoes and basil together will improve the flavor of the tomatoes); I also planted kale and filled in the carrots and parsnips. Germination was not great. So the other day, I covered the carrot bed, parsnip bed, basil and kale bed with newspapers with straw on top (I was careful not to cover the already sprouted seedlings). I am going to give it a week or so and then uncover the beds to see if I can manipulate some of the seeds into sprouting.

Oh, can't forget about corn. That is planted and is coming up nicely. It wasn't knee-high by the forth of July (unless you got down really low), but it is growing quickly and I hope to get some good corn from it. I have been watering it every now and then with fish emulsion in the water. I think the corn has enjoyed this special treatment.

A couple of improvements I made to the garden are covering the rows between the beds with newspaper and straw. This makes a nice neat path and cuts down on the weeding that needs to be done.

I also added a drip system to the garden. This is a nice addition as it cuts down on my watering time... it took nearly and hour-and-a-half by hand.

Here is the drip system running through my potatoes.

To install the drip system, I had to first install three extra water spigots around the garden. This involved digging a foot-deep trench half-way around the garden and laying down piping... that was quite a job, but I had some lovely assistants who were a big help.

The third improvement (which I am in the middle of completing) is putting a weed barrier down around the garden. Since the garden is backed up to a hay field, all sorts of obnoxious weeds find their way into the garden. To slow this down somewhat, we are digging a clear three-foot wide path around the perimeter of the garden. Then we are going to lay down black garden fabric and then cover that with stones. We'll see how that works!

Here are some more pictures for your enjoyment:

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My strawberries haven't been allowed to flower so as to direct all energy into growing big... the raspberries produced a couple berries each, but should be more productive next year.

Little bro cherry pickin'...

... and here are the "fruits" of his labor.

Here is a final up-to-date picture of the garden; it is definitely looking a bit better!!

Planting the Garden

Had to get some of the early seeds into the garden on Saturday. A lot of the seeds we have to save till May or June to plant, but carrots, onions, peas, broccoli, lettuce, spinach, parsnips, beets, cilantro, oregano, parsley and chives can all go in at this time of year where I live. I'll post a scan of my garden plan when I get a minute to give an idea of where everything is going to be placed in the beds.

The book "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible" gives a list of companion plants that supposedly "like" each other. Some plants attract the predator of the pest of their companion plant or they repel the pest of their companion plant due to their odor; or some plants supposedly increase the yield of their companion plant or improve the flavor of their companion plant. Anyway, there are literally books written on the subject of companion planting, but I haven't gotten deeply into it; I tried as best as I could, however, based on the list in the book, to plant seeds next to each other that would benefit each other.

Anyway, there isn't much to say about planting seeds except follow the instructions on the back of the package. Actually if planting in beds, you can plant seeds a bit closer than the packages say because the roots do a lot more growing down than out in beds. The Gardener's Bible discusses spaces for individual plants, as do the other books I mentioned in an earlier post. Most of the herbs that I put into the garden won't be put in beds. Some herbs (especially mint) are extremely prolific and can be a bit of a nuisance if not kept under control. So, I devoted a corner to herbs in the garden. I sunk a bunch of pots (below) into the soil and plan to just plant most of the herbs in those. The exception is cilantro, which we will probably need in larger quantities for salsa and cilantro pesto.

The only other thing worth posting about is my pea trellis, which I put up Saturday to plant the peas around. It was pretty simple to make; I got a 1"x2"x8' pine board (the real dimensions are .75"x1.75"x8') at Home Depot for 87 cents. (I love those things; I am making bean and cucumber trellises of a different style out of these things for really cheap... more on that in a future post.) First, I chopped a foot off of it because I didn't need all the length, then I sawed it in half lengthwise to get two poles .75"x.75"x7'.

I then marked it with a pencil two feet up from the bottom. This will be the depth to which I pound the stakes. After this mark, I make a mark every three inches on each stake until I reach the top. Using a manual miter saw, (the electric miter saw would give me a curved cut instead of a straight cut because of the radius of the blade) I cut along the pencil marks to a depth of about 1/8" or so. After I was done, I realized it might have been simpler to make these cuts before I sawed the board in half, but who cares.

After making the depth cuts, I pounded the stakes in the garden about 9 feet apart...

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...and using the string left over from laying out the garden I tied sections of string up the posts at the three inch marks making sure each string was securely in the grooves on both stakes. When tying the strings on, the stakes like to flex near the top since they are relatively thin and you have to be careful not to pull the strings too tight as you work your way to the top or the bottom strings will go slack.

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After the horizontal strings are all tied, then comes the vertical strings. I tied these every 6-8"; the tedious part is that you have to tie the vertical string to each of the horizontal strings to create the netting.

The trellis is very simple, but somewhat tedious to make. I had it made, though, in under an hour. After the trellis is up, you can plant the peas. I spaced the peas 1" apart staggering them on either side of the netting. I should have a thick wall of peas in a couple of months... good eating!!!

Here is my lovely assistant standing in front of the finished trellis...

... and my little girlfriend again with her bouquet of dandelions.

Planting Berries

Since our berry beds were going to be permanent, we made a permanent bed section in the back of the garden. We made these beds a bit bigger (about 4 ft) with a "double-shovel-width" path between them... the larger path is a bit easier to walk in for the purpose of berry-pickin'. So, we got grapes, raspberries, blueberries and strawberries to put into the garden. The strawberries were mostly leftovers from the previous owners garden... I transplanted over 70 of them into pots before tilling the garden. Just to break up the pattern a bit, we dug the berry beds perpendicular to the vegetable beds.

The holes for the raspberries were about 1' across 1' deep. After the holes were dug, we mixed all the dug-up dirt with compost. For blueberries, the holes were more like 2' across and 1' deep. For these we mixed up compost, peat, and a handful of ammonium sulfate (per hole) with the dug up dirt. The peat improves drainage and lowers the pH of the soil (blueberries like well drained soil and a pH of about 5.5) and the ammonium sulfate further reduces the acidity. I am writing this several days after the fact and, after a few good rains, I am noticing that the soil is fairly mucky when saturated and the blueberries look a little droopy (I don't know whether this is a fault of insufficient drainage, incorrect pH level or just transplant shock). Since blueberries require sufficiently drained soil, I am considering digging the plants up and mixing some sand into the holes. I'll update y'all if I try anything...

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If plants like it, why shouldn't I?
The grapes I didn't plant in rows. I planted them in small mounds on the edge of the garden where the future fence will go. I plan to put a long trellis up when they get bigger. The strawberries were planted in much the same way as the raspberries: a bit of compost and then pop 'em in their holes. All the berries got some bone meal spread around them to get them started. I also (a couple days later) added some "Lily Miller" Vitamin B Plant Starter. This helps reduce plant shock. We'll see if this helps with the blueberries or if more major surgery is required.

After planting berries, we started our tomatoes and melons inside. Our laundry room has a counter facing a window and it gets a good amount of sun throughout the day, so this is a perfect place to get them started. To start the seeds we got these awesome little pots by "Jiffy". They are compressed disks maybe 2" across and 1/2" high. They come in a pack of 25 for like $1.98 at Home Depot (I hear Walmart also sells them... might be cheaper there).

Anyway, you soak them in warm water for a minute or so and they puff out to about 1-1.5" tall. They are filled with what looks like a peat based soil and the "bags" around the soil are a nice thin material kind of like a tea bag; I imagine they would be a bit easier for the roots to break through than the more popular peat pots. Our tomato selection consists of "Romas" for sauces, "Jellybeans" for salads, and "Early Girls" and "Better Boys" just for fun... I don't know what mom plans on doing with those. We are planning on canning a bunch of tomato sauce, so we started over 75 seeds. We'll probably plant 50 of them in our garden. Can't wait for the fresh spaghetti sauce!!!

Spring Haiku II

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In the garden
under the old arbor
two lonely bells
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Tilling the Garden

Saturday was beautiful... the perfect day to break up a new garden. We got out there by maybe ten or eleven in the morning. Dr. Lockwood brought his rototiller over and we got started. We started by removing most of the large rocks from the surface of the garden so we wouldn't be throwing rocks all over. You can see how our garden looked before we started work:

Rototilling is actually a lot of fun... it is fun to see all the weeds get chopped up and loose cool dirt get turned over and over. (As it turned out, our garden soil is actually very good for gardening; it is probably a bit on the clay-ish end of the spectrum, but a little clay helps to retain moisture.) When rototilling, you have to start the tilling shallow and slowly raise the depth stop for subsequent passes to till to the full depth of the rotors. In the end, the garden had to be tilled about five times to reach full depth. As you can imagine, it was quite the process. But then we had a lot of help;
Dr. Lockwood did some of the tilling...

and I did some...

and Leisel did some...

and Lynnae did some...

and even mom tried it!

Charae and dad also gave it a shot, but I didn't get pictures of it.

After Dr. Lockwood and I rototilled half of the garden, we turned the girls loose on the other half of the garden while we laid out the beds. We wanted to create raised beds in the garden so that the vegetables would have plenty of loose soil to root in. Raised beds also improve drainage in the soil. Laying the beds out is pretty simple: we cut 2.5' stakes from those 1"x2"x8' (87 cent) boards from Home Depot and staked them 3' apart for the beds and 1.5' for foot paths in between beds. Then we dug out the loose dirt from the foot paths and piled it on top of the beds. The following pictures show Austin helping to lay out and dig the beds, followed by a couple pictures of the finished beds:

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Here's a picture of my little buddy looking all chill on the steering wheel of his Deere; (Eat your hearts out girls!!!):

And, of course, a picture of my little girlfriend who carried around a bouquet of dandelions all day:

It was a great day and gave us a great head start on the garden... thank you, Dr. and Mrs. Lockwood!

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Next up... planting the berry patch!