Cold enough for peas.

Today is the last day of a week's vacation at home. Wife says it was 11 days. Felt like more. So this is the last chance I've got to do some more with the garden while I'm off from work but there isn't much to do.

We're on our 9th day of spring and the mercury wasn't out of the 30's at 10:00 this morning.
I think the Nobel people really jumped the gun on giving my buddy Al Gore a prize for global warming. But I guess it makes up for the prize he should have won for inventing the internet.

I did plant another row of peas today. They like the cold. This is the first row of anything in the actual garden. Below you can see the string I used to keep the row straight.



I went to buy some fruit tree spray yesterday. There's a product called...wait for it..."Fruit Tree Spray". It includes a fungicide and a couple of insecticides. Fruit trees need to be sprayed several times during the growing season and the first spray is supposed to be now. One of the insecticides listed in Fruit Tree Spray is Carbaryl. Carbaryl causes "thinning" of peaches. Thinning means some of the fruit falls off.

Last year, I used this stuff and it just happened that all my peaches fell off the peach trees in June. When this started to happen last year, I took a peach over to my friend Russ. Russ has a masters in plant science, spent 3 years doing research on peach trees, and worked for several years as a agricultural extension agent for the state university. If anybody could figure out what was happening to my peaches, Russ could.

"What's this" I asked as I handed him a little peach that had fallen off the tree.
"That's a messed up peach"
"Yeah, but why?"
"Because whoever's growing this doesn't know what he's doing."
"What made them fall of the tree?"
"Probably June Drop."
"What's June Drop?"
"That's when peaces drop off the tree in June."
"What causes June Drop"
"Don't know."

I don't know what I'd do without Russ. Well now, I'm wondering if this stuff was the problem or at least part of it. I think I'll find something else to use to spray my trees this year.

Quote of the Day

Our 8 year old daughter to our 14 month old son: "It's okay, it's just Daddy, he's wearing his gas mask".

Preparing the Battlefield

It's been a busy day. Three posts. It is, of course the first day on this blog. I'm sure my enthusiasm will wane eventually.

The battlefield is prepared. I borrowed a roto-tiller from my parents and tilled the garden this afternoon. I live across the field from the farm where I grew up. The past few years, I've loaded the rototiller on a truck and unloaded it at my place and then did the loading/unloading thing again when I was done. It's a heavy rototiller and it doesn't like to be loaded. This year I got smarter and I just "drove" it the quarter mile across the field. It's self propelled so it wasn't that difficult to walk behind. I do wish it steared more easily but it was still better than loading and unloading.

The garden's roughly 20ft x 40ft. This size worked last year because I can divide the garden into two 20ft squares and water it with two impact sprinklers each doing a 20ft diameter circle. Actually it's one sprinkler that I move back and forth. And actually it's the diameter of the diagonal of a 20' square which happens to be 1.41 (square root of 2 ) times 20 ft or exactly 28.2 feet in diameter. Credit goes to Pythagoras of course.



The ground's too cold to plant anything now except peas. As I mentioned earlier, I planted a row of vine type peas yesterday and I'll probably do a row of dwarf peas over the next few days but the rest of the garden will sit for a month or so. This will let some of the newly exposed weed seeds germinate and I'll kill them off with a healthy dose of glyphosate before I plant anything. Hopefully this will help to keep the weeds down. Easier to spray now than hoe later.

IRRIGATION
I also had time this afternoon to finally extend my underground drip irrigation to the three new trees I planted a week or so ago. Three new 20' lenghts of poly pipe from the old system to the new with 1/4" drip tubing to each tree. I'll eventually add some sort of drip emitter or mini sprinkler to the tubing at the trees. I've still got to fill in the trenches to cover the poly pipe but that's going to be a lot less work than it was digging the trenches.

Boring Garden Layout

Here's a sketch of the layout of my permanent plantings. I started putting this stuff in in 2005, adding a row or two each year. I think I'm done now. I can't think of anything else to put in.

I hate gardening (I know...I don't know why I do it either) so I have tried to make my plants as carefree as possible so I don't have to do much work. To achieve that I've been putting in drip irrigation. Underground water mains feed riser pipes that poke up through the ground. At each riser pipe, I can attach drip lines for each row. It's a lot of work in the beginning to install all of this stuff but it lasts for years and now I don't spend much time watering. I just turn a few valves and the next morning every thing's been watered.

Here's the layout of my permanent plants that produce (or are supposed to) year after year. I also plant a garden of the traditional garden vegetables each year. (click the picture to enlarge.)

Spring is Here...sort of.

It's March 25th. Spring was officially here 5 days ago. It was 36º this morning and we had a pretty good frost yesterday morning. Where's that global warming I've been promised?

Hopefully the frosts are just about done. My peach and pear trees are already covered with flower buds and a frost can damage the flowers. No flowers no fruit. Nature has lots of tricks up her sleeve to defeat me.



Even though it's still so cold, I've already started a few things this year. I ordered 3 more fruit trees and they came last week. I planted them the day they arrived. The new trees are a Fuji apple, Granny Smith apple, and a Hardi-Red Nectarine. That makes 9 total fruit trees in my little orchard behind my house. Three years ago, I planted 2 pears (one Bosc, one Bartlett), 2 peaches (one Gala, one Bell of Georga), and two "5-in-1" apples. The 5-in-one apples were 5 different varieties grafted onto one tree. It's supposed to produce 5 different varieties. I can't prune them right because I'm afraid I'll cut off a whole variety if I cut off a branch. I got a few golden delicious apples last year but nothing else. I'm just skeptical that these trees are going to really be worth much which is why I bought the two new apples this year.

When I put in my three new trees, I wanted to extend my existing irrigation system to these trees. When I first put in my trees, I buried poly pipe with a small sprayer at each tree. Over the last few days, I've been slowly digging some trenches and in a couple of days I'll get pipe in the ground.

We had a couple of warmer weeks already. Several days into the 50's. The soil temperature is right around 45º and some things are already growing. My rhubarb is starting to grow. I planted 4 heads last year but only 2 made it.

I also planted a short row of peas yesterday evening. I've got several rows of posts that I put in the ground over the past two years. Two of these posts support wire for my grapes, one supports wire for drip irrigation for a row of blackberries and sickly blueberries, and a few just give me a place to bring my irrigation pipes up out of the ground to attach drip irrigation for a couple of rows of asparagus, the rhubarb, and a matted row of strawberries.

Well, I had a spare row with posts that's been sitting empty. Since I haven't got anything permanent to plant there, I'm going to use the posts to support trellises for peas and cucumbers this year. The trellis for the peas is finished and the peas went in last night.


If you look at the picture of the above trellis, you can see a posted row of blackberries, two rows of grapes and my little orchard of fruit trees beyond that. The white pipes coming up out of the ground to the left of each row, right at the post, is attached to a buried piece of poly pipe for irrigation. A black soaker hose can be seen under the pea trellis attached to the irrigation riser.