Salad Seeds

Earlier today I posted that it was just to wet to plant anything today. The sun and wind dried things out and My 8 year old daughter and I got a couple of rows in late this afternoon.




In my garden, some things get planted in distinct rows like corn and peppers. Other things get planted in swath's about a foot wide. That's what we did today with carrots, radish, spinach and several different types of lettuce. We raked out a flat, level row about 18 inches wide, stretched some strings across the garden to give us nice strait sides to our wide row and just broadcast the seeds on the ground between the strings. A pass with a rake to lightly cover the seeds with soil and we were done.

two new rows of spinach, lettuce, carrots, and radishes

When these come up, everything will be growing too close together and we'll have to pull most of the lettuce and spinach to make room for full sized heads. As soon as the heads get just big enough to harvest, they will be eaten by deer. When we want lettuce, we'll go to a restaurant and get the salad bar. The stuff there is going to be better than anything I could grow anyway.

The carrots, on the other hand, will not be eaten by the deer. Carrots are clever vegetables and they hide underground where the deer can't see them. The carrots will, however, be overtaken by weeds. You can't hoe or spray weeds in carrots because I grow them too close together to be able to weed between them. But the radishes will do great. They grow so fast and in cool enough weather that weeds don't get a chance to take over. Yum, baskets full of radishes.

After we planted today, I wanted to lightly water everything in. It rained quite a bit over the past couple of days but It's good to be sure. I pulled my customized sprinkler out of the shop and set it up for the first time today. Irrigating a garden this time of year is easy but as the plants get taller, they block the sprinkler from getting everything wet. A few dense rows of corn between the sprinkler and cucumbers means wilting cucumbers. The solution I came up with last year is to put the sprinkler up on a post so it can spray over the tall stuff.



Since my garden's twice as long as it is wide, I can irrigate with two sprinklers. One waters one half and the other waters the other half. But I've only got one sprinkler. No problem. I made up customized sprinkler support posts with a sleeve I can slide my sprinkler into. I water from one post on the first night and move the sprinkler to the other post the second night. A garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX. It saves time and makes watering easy. Let's be honest...gardening sucks... why make it harder than it has to be.

Cabbage on a Stick

Looks like I'll probably blog on the weekends. That makes sense since I'll mostly be working on the garden on the weekends.

The weather's finally warming up. It was in the 60's this afternoon and pretty comfortable. The peaches are in full bloom. In third grade science, I learned that each flower will eventually become a delicious peach. Growing my own peaches taught me that they'll all be eaten by bugs, infested with worms, or just fall off the tree for no apparent reason.


I spent a little time today fixing some things around the garden. It's still to cold and too early to do much actual gardening. I turned on all the irrigation stuff and found a few drip emitters that weren't dripping. Replaced those with new ones. The openings in these things are so tiny that a speck of dirt will plug them up. I buy the cheap ones so there's no way to take them apart for cleaning. Instead of wasting money on the good ones and keeping them forever. I save money buy buying new ones every few months. I'll have to rethink that.


Drip emitters drip water slowly right at the base of the plant. I turn the water on in the evening and by morning everything's been watered. I use some sort of drip irrigation for the grapes, blackberries, blueberries, asparagus, and strawberries. I've also got some small spray emitters for the fruit trees. I'm a lazy guy. Watering by hand is like work.



When testing everything, I also found some soaker hose that had been cut in several places. Oddly enough, the cut pieces were right in the same spots that I used a machete in the fall to cut my asparagus plants flush to the ground. Mysterious.

Every year, I like to grow some oddities. Last year it was sugar sorghum (like sugar cane but not tropical), birdhouse gourds, parsnips, and sugar beets. I killed the sorghum when I sprayed weedkiller between garden rows on a windy day. The birdhouse gourds did great. We ended up with over a hundred really big gourds. The parsnips never came up and neither did the sugar beets.

This year, I've ordered some oddities again.


I order weird seeds from seedman, the superhero of seeds. He's got a lot of weird stuff. This year I'm going with Anise, Luffa Sponge, more Sugar Cane (I'll just be more careful this time), Peanuts, and Giant Walking Stick Cabbage. I got my seeds in the mail just this week.

The Giant Walking Stick Cabbage was supposed to be started indoors a month and a half ago. Oops. I started it a few days ago in babyfood containers sitting in the laundry room window. If they make it, I'll transplant them outside in another month or so.



I've never seen Giant Walking Stick Cabbage but it's supposed to grow a straight stalk 8' high and then a cabbage like thing grows at the top. You can eat the cabbage like thing and if you dry the stalk it makes a great walking stick. no matter how you look at it, it's a win-win. You get cabbage which everybody hates and a walking stick you probably don't need.

On a non-gardening note: I was checking out my friend, Fairgirl's blog today (don't think just or reasonable. Think albino), and I see she's linked to my blog on hers. So it's only fair (just or reasonable) that I do the same. You can check out the post and her blog here. She gives a disclaimer about some blogs not being politically correct. I think she's talking about me.

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.