Garden of Iniquity

I am back from my work trip last week and returned to a mountain of things to do. Unfortunately I have done almost none of it.

My kitchen herb garden from Mountain Valley Growers arrived (an Xmas gift from the Fossi) while I was gone. I decided to mount two window boxes outside the back windows and bought some basil plants and some seeds (catnip, cilantro) too. However, I will probably plant the herb plants themselves in one or more large pots. Since they include rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano, and tarragon it would be nice to try and save them. I don’t want to buy any more pots though, but it would make it easier to keep them over the winter if I did 9″ pots so I could put them on the window shelves in the kitchen.

This week I have to plant the tomatoes, the plant sale plants, and harden off the herbs so I can get them planted.

Next week I will plan to plant peppers, eggplant, and maybe cucumber. The eggplants may end up in containers but I believe they will do well there.

I need to get the radishes out so that I can use that space for something, maybe zucchini? Also the spinach did not sprout (maybe planted too deep) so I will just re-use the space for peppers rather than waiting any longer.

I also discovered that the vegetable bed stops getting sun at 3:30PM. This is due to the leafing out of a tree in the neighbor’s yard. Sun from 8AM - 3PM equals 7 hours of sunlight, hopefully enough for everything to produce well.

Planted half row (3 feet) of Tenderpod. Dug a trench 2″ deep, sprinkled seeds 1″ apart or so, then covered the trench and watered.

Planted half row of Triomphe de Farcy, in the same way.

Created a bean teepee out of 4 6′ bamboo stakes sunk into the ground in an 18″ square. Planted 4-6 seeds of Asparagus Yardlong around each pole. I plan to thin this to two plants per pole.

Research - call tree guy to discuss crabapple tree in front yard
Call landscapers to get estimates for retaining wall
Plant stuff from plant sale
Plant beans
Plant tomatoes, peppers, cucumber, zucchini, and eggplant - after 5/18
Mulch stuff

I need to plant my beans. I have yard-long (asparagus) pole beans and two kinds of bush beans. I have been agonizing over how I will trellis the pole beans. I bought some bamboo stakes but they are very skinny. I am planning to make them into two teepees and place two plants per pole. If they can’t support the weight, I guess I will have to prop them up somehow.

Also the Friends Plant Sale is this coming weekend. I don’t know what I am going to buy and I still need to find a cart-like device to take with me.

Today I created two more rows in my bed with 4″ furrows between then. In the first (southern) row, I planted spinach. In the second row, I planted leaf lettuce in the eastern half and radishes in the western half. In both rows I broadcast the seeds in the row then raked gently to cover, then watered well.

Today, I planted one bundle of Long Day Sampler (20 each of Walla Walla, Mars, and Ringmaster) from Dixondale Farms. I separated the colors and planted 3 rows, 2″ apart, in a 12″ wide raised row. The eastern half of the row is all white. The western half is red and yellow. I will thin out the center row and every other plant in the outer rows when they are green onion ready.

When we moved into our house last fall, we identified the spot for our veggie garden - an approximately 20X25 plot behind the garage, out of the way but with plenty of sun. I spent quite a bit of time this winter daydreaming about the garden I could plant out there. However, we knew when we bought the house that we would have to rebuild the garage at some point, since the inspector declared it structurally unsound. (Hasn’t fallen down…yet). So I didn’t want to devise an elaborate raised-bed system just yet, in case the new garage changed the light exposure significantly. Thus, B and I agreed to do a small, in-ground garden this year, to be followed by my dream garden at some future point.

Yesterday, armed with our brand new garden tools, we trundled out to turn over the soil. Ten minutes later, B had already bent a tine on our new Fiskars garden fork (lifetime warranty!). He switched to raking while I used a spade to cut through the sod. Another 15-20 minutes go by, and the rake handle shatters in his hands.

The culprit, aided by B’s over-enthusiastic ground assault, was the root system from a long-gone tree. The stump had been ground down to soil level, but the roots wound their way throughout my precious land. While I would have been content to carve out small plots among the roots, B seemed to be suffering from an overdose of testosterone and declared war on the fibrous beast.

A visit to Menards resulted in two things: First, laughter from the ladies at the return desk, who refunded our money for the broken tools but were greatly amused by B’s brute strength. Second, we purchased a maddock, which sort of looks like a pickaxe. B was confident that this manly tool would do the trick.

Today, Thom and Rebecca came over to lend a hand. Through much sweating, swearing, and grunting, the boys were able to extract most of the roots from a 10X15 patch. It was tough work.

Rebecca came to rescue by running off and borrowing her brother’s rototiller, which finished the ground prep nicely. The same day, I got my onion plants from Dixondale Farms ito the ground. Yay for friends! And dirt!