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!

Spring Haiku I

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Soft spring rain
shivering in the breeze
pale cherry blossoms
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Welcome...

Welcome to my blog about gardening!

My family and I have recently moved to property (five acres) and I have been assigned to the garden. I wanted to journal the whole gardening process for my own benefit so I can refer back to see what works and what doesn't. I realized I might get more benefit if I could get input from others smarter than I am at the same time as share my experiences so others could learn from my mistakes... so I started this blog. I have a two week spring break, so I'll try my best to show my work over the next two weeks. After that, I'll be back in school for ten weeks before summer, so posts might be few and far between. I'll start posting regularly in the summer again since I won't be taking summer classes.

So to get myself started, I have been doing a good amount of reading on organic gardening techniques. I am going to try to keep things as organic as possible in the garden.

My library of books includes six excellent books:

- Organic Gardening by Geoff Hamilton

- The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener by Karan Davis Cutler

- The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward C. Smith

- The Backyard Orchardist by Stella Otto

- The Backyard Berry Book by Stella Otto

- The Organic Gardener's Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control by Barbara W. Ellis and Fern Marshall Bradley

The first three are very similar, but they are thorough and give different details that the others don't give. I recommend them all!

Wanting to start out small (you know, kinda get the hang of things), we carefully shopped and ended up with the following vegetation to put in our garden:

Vegetables:

- Roma tomatoes

- Provider Beans

- Nantindo Carrot

- Red Weathersfield Onion

- Yellow Ebenezer Onion

- White Ebenezer Onion

- Super Sugar Snap Pea

- Broccoli

- Red Sails Lettuce

- Buttercrunch Lettuce

- Cimmaron Lettuce

- Samish Spinach

- Luscious Sweet Corn

- Alliance Pepper

- Elite Squash Zucchini

- Multipik Squash

- Raider Cucumber

- Parsnip

- Kale

- Beets

Herbs:

- Caesar Basil

- Santo Cilantro

- Vera Lavender

- Vulgare Oregano

- Plain Italian Dark Green Parsley

- Winter Thyme

- Chives

- Lemon Balm

- Chamomile

- Mint

Fruit:

- Pear

- Plum

- Peach

- Apple

- Fig

- Cherry

- Cantaloupe

- Grapes

Berries:

- Strawberries

- Raspberries

- Blueberries

Flowers:

- Marigolds

- Zinnias

- Nasturtiums

- Violas

So we don't overwhelm ourselves, we saved pumkins, garlic, leeks, potatoes and geraniums for next year. I didn't put the varieties of the fruits and berries down because I was too lazy to go to the garage and write them all down. Most of them we bought in several varieties. Should keep us busy for a while. Most of the fruits/berries we got at Costco. Most of the vegetable seeds we got at Harris Seeds. We didn't have much of a choice when it came to vegetable seeds since we bought the seeds late in February and a lot of what we wanted was on back order at other places. (Note to self: buy earlier; December probably isn't too early to start shopping.) I'll probably do a bit more price comparing next season.

This past Saturday, the fun began. We had some friends from church over and they helped us till our garden. I'll get some pictures up of the whole process, soon!