Spring Is (Finally) Here

After a week of the wettest, coldest spring weather I've seen in a long time the sun is finally shining and the air is warm. So it seems like a fine time for a garden update.

We've been eating mesclun salad since Easter Sunday and are enjoying the fresh greens very much. The first radishes came up about a week ago-- they are spicy, tender, and tasty. Just a few days ago we ate the first of our leafy red-green lettuce. Carrots have their green tops up, the peas are blooming white flowers, and the chard, which I nearly gave up on several times, should be ready for its first harvest soon.

Thanks to a neighbor with some extra chicken wire I have a nice new fence and will soon have a freshly tilled plot to put my tomato and pepper plants in. At this moment they are going through the hardening off process near the back door. I think the squash, cucumbers, and green beans will go in the ground this weekend. I have a basil plant to put out there on an experimental basis as well (the rest I'll keep inside on the windowsill, which is now nearly empty of plants).

I've been using fish fertilizer every now and then to feed the plants, crushed eggshells to ward off slugs, cow manure compost as organic matter as I've yet to master the art of the compost pile. It stays fairly weeded and adequately watered, so hopefully the plants will respond in kind.

Something happened to us when we ate those first few salads. I've been baking our bread for the last month or so, too, and I think we are liking the prospect of being more self reliant in the years to come. I'm putting myself on a ten year plan-- ten years to learn to garden properly, for one, but also to be more of a producer and less of a consumer.

Spring Time, Lettuce Sprouts

Spring is here and our yard is showing it. Little violets dot the grass, and the grass itself is vibrant.

The lettuce and mesclun are up in the garden! They literally popped up overnight, and in the middle of a thunderstorm at that. There is also one little chard sprout. No peas, and it leaves me wondering if the birds or squirrels dug them up. Or maybe they needed soaking before planting to get them started.

I am contending with all manner of weeds already, mostly dandelion and onion grass. Perhaps I need to mulch better between the rows.

The electrical pole only four feet from the garden was replaced yesterday. Thankfully the workmen minded my garden plot and left it untouched. They also dug up and left a bunch of concrete slabs which I will use as little stepping stones.

Meanwhile on the windowsill: basil and tomato plants are growing their first sets of true leaves while the peppers started sprouting. Broccoli is up but leggy and I'm nervous the sprouts will tip over before they really get anywhere.

Out In The Garden

My sister was just in town and so I had her help me out in the garden.

We raked up leaves from the yard and brought them back to the plot. She tilled up some little onions taking up residence in the soil while I raked the plot even and added compost with manure. Then we mixed in the leaves.

I bought about half as much fencing as I thought I'd need and had to improvise by using the chain link fence as two sides of the garden enclosure. We don't have too many critters in our neighborhood but I want to discourage the neighbor's dogs from digging around in the plot. With the fence up we planted chard, peas, leaf lettuce, and mesclun. I dug the furrows according to the package, firmed the soil after laying down the seeds, and gave them a little water.

I've been reading a bit about succession planting and companion planting and have the whole thing laid out so I can put in tomatoes where the peas are now, follow the radishes with peppers, etc. in hopes that we can have threeish crops during the growing season: spring, summer, late summer. Maybe I'll be brave and try lettuce in the fall, too. It would all be a feat considering how small the garden is.

Will go out today to check the condition of the garden and maybe (!) I'll have some pictures to post next time.

Moldy Peat: The Seedling Pirate

Peat pots don't seem to hold in moisture very well. At least not on my windowsill. After struggling to keep them anything but bone dry for days I put the peat pots in saucers of water to soak up moisture over night.

Two days later I found mold spots on the outside of each peat pot.

Yet the next day there they were, tiny sprouts from both the yellow pear and matina tomato seeds. With the plastic off they seem to have maintained some kind of balance between staying watered and not being moldy.

The mesclun mix is doing okay, though some of the sprouts have fallen over. Perhaps they are too leggy from being too far from the window? Isn't that what happens when they have to reach too far for the sunlight?

After the peat pot incident I decided to console myself with a $5 Burpee greenhouse. It comes with 36 pots, has a nice sized cover, is self watering, and included soil pellets, a chart, and greenhouse sized markers. So there are two kinds of tomatoes, peppers, and broccoli in there right now.

Windowsill Germination

I bought basil seeds at the local nursery some weeks ago, just to see if my kitchen window sill is under the right conditions for sprouting seeds. The first batch of basil seeds, planted in a peat pot and covered with plastic wrap, never came up. The second round got knocked off the sill by an unnamed assailant. The third batch, in a self watering planter made of two yogurt cups, sprouted a few days ago. I took off the plastic because it seemed like the right thing to do. There are three little sprouts now making their way up to the sunlight.


Inspired by this progress I started tomato and pepper seeds. They are in peat pots, covered in plastic, and sitting in saucers on the sill. I am careful to keep the draft off them at night and have been turning on the kitchen light when it is cloudy out. Hopefully I can coax some seeds to grow so I can avoid the expense of buying plants later this spring.

A Taco Bell container is now housing some lettuce seeds. I am nervous about not being able to tell lettuce from weeds out in the garden, so I'll familiarize myself with the looks of the mesclun mix this way! Later this week, if the ground dries a bit, peas will go into the ground. Maybe some radishes too.

Free Fence Posts

Today I dug holes and sunk in tree branches as fencing posts. Perhaps they will not last the summer. I just like the way they look. Plus they were free thanks to the ice storm taking down the top of a neighbor's tree. There are now ugly little pea trellises made with the same stuff, too. For the fence I think plastic construction netting will work nicely for preventing the local loose dog from digging (and the cat that winters under our porch from peeing) in my garden.

Now it is a matter of waiting until the ground is good for working. The consensus seems to be to wait to rake until you ball up the soil in your hand and it crumbles a bit when you let go. Otherwise there is too much moisture and dirt clods/soil erosion will result. As soon as the weather is right -- soil temp around 50 degrees, I think -- I'm putting peas in the ground to see what happens.

In the Beginning

Back in the fall I decided to be an ant as opposed to a grasshopper for once. I actually thought ahead. Real gardeners, the kind that don't talk about gardening because it is so seamlessly a part of their lives, were all around town doing things to their plots. Laying out plasticky this and mulchy looking that. Me, as a pretend gardener, decided to follow suit.

After consulting a few of the real gardeners in my life it seemed I should:

1) Pick a plot
2) Lay some kind of something down on the ground there to kill the grass
3) Learn to talk about it all very confidently so A wouldn't scoff at the idea

At the advice of my neighbor I chose the back of the back yard, which abuts a church parking lot, for its full sun and flatness. Water does not tend to collect nor run off that part of the yard, she informed me. Right right, I knew that.

The ambitious 10 x 10 plot shrunk to more of a 6 x 8 blob out of pure laziness and a lack of cardboard. On top of the cardboard went "layers" of grass clippings and peat moss. It looked nothing like the pretty lasagna mounds I'd found online. I covered the whole mess with black plastic, arranged some slate and concrete hunks on top to hold it down, and said a prayer it wouldn't be a moldy mucky pit come spring.

Today I went back there, pulled back the plastic, and wasn't disappointed. I don't think the peat moss and clippings were necessary, maybe the cardboard wasn't either. The tarp seemed to be the key. The soil is soft with lots of little red earth worms in it. I made the slate and concrete into a path into the u shaped plot. If nothing else I will have a tidy looking mud hole in the yard as opposed to a blobby, moldy mess.