wiredfool

Well, the stuff (spinach, carrots, beets, chard) that I planted in at the beginning of August is doing well. It all sprouted really quickly, since we had a week of every-other-day rain. Nothing like heat and rain to do that. Unfortunately, it’s bringing out the slugs as well.

Then yesterday, we had a big harvest. A cauliflower. big. Two Broccolis, small and larger. A handful of beans. A carrot, a parsnip. A decent sized zucchini, 10 lbs of red potatoes, some chard that was getting de-bolted, and 4 pints of blackberries.

All of it good sized, all perfect looking and the sort of thing that would sell in the non-organic must look beautiful section of the grocery store.

The sunflowers are mostly about as tall as I am, the infrareds are out, the verigated ones are close behind. The giants aren’t out yet, and it’s getting hard to tell how they’re doing since I can’t see the top anymore. The pole beans have started to have little 1/4 inch beans show up. And the pumpkins are nuts. Huge and sprawly. And not small pumpkins either.

Monster version to come.

July is almost over, and we’ve had the first rains since July 3rd the last few days. Some notes and observations for next year.

• The hot weather stuff is happy with weekly or slightly more often watering, once they’re a decent size and have roots that go down deep enough.
• Seedlings and shallow rooted stuff aren’t as happy and need more water, and the reseeded carrots are really not doing well.
• The infilled beans and squashes are doing well.
• We’re getting our first zucchini flower now, with many to follow soon.
• The corn is still a disappointment. Spotty germination, slow growing, rabbit munching.
• The tomatoes are going nuts. The tomitillo probably needs more support than it has.
• The peas are dying out, and the trellising that we had put together for them flopped over onto the potatoes. We need to run two long rows of peas per bed next year, with a central trellis that we can get to both sides of. Also, more peas. We should have reseeded when the April seeding failed completely.
• Favas are tasty, but one bed is about 1 1/2 meals, if that. Thankfully, we’ll throw down a bunch of fava seed as cover crop for overwinter.
• The potatoes are now showing the difference between the two older plantings. We should plant more of them, and keep them together in the garden for watering purposes.
• In general, we need to think about the watering plan, so that things that need watering more often are closer together, without drought tolerant stuff in between them. Also, there’s one corner that’s in the rain shadow from a couple of firs, and that portion is a lot drier. That would be better for some of the better established stuff, since it’s also farther from where I usually water.
• Spinach & salads should be planted more at 6 week plus intervals, not monthly.
• Raspberries like a little water when their fruit is ripening. Also, ripe raspberries are like nothing else.
• The first of the overwinter and fall stuff is planted. Spinach, Carrots, and Chard, and Beets because we finally got around to planting them. I need to be careful to keep these beds moist. I’m thinking of covering the carrots with clear plastic for moisture retention till they sprout.
• Kale is planted too.
• $3 ’starts’ of basil are best from Trader Joes. They’re small bushes.
• The cilantro is nuts, and the seeded ones are starting to bolt. I think it’s time to plant more.

So. June was a real mixed bag. Specifically, really cold and wet for the first half, trending to really damn hot for the last few days. The hot weather stuff planted early wasn’t exactly happy with the conditions, so a lot of it needed to be re-seeded, at least for fill in.

• The peas are just now starting to bear, we’ll have a harvest soon.
• The chard is nuts, starting to bolt in places. The salads, similar. Kale is well bolted by now.
• Potatoes are looking good, March and April are about neck and neck, with May’s significantly behind. The first two month’s worth are flowering now.
• The things that were seeded May 15 are somewhat happy, some of the carrots and parsnips came up, since reseeded to fill in.
• The bush beans came up (planted 5/15), were eaten by slugs, and then hated the cold weather. Beans that were planted 6/1 sortakinda came up when the weather got warmer, and now the ones that I planted as fill are coming up after being in the ground about a week.
• Squashes (summer, winter, pumpkin) mostly came up, needed fill planting on three hills, and are now all growing like mad with the warm weather.
• Corn. Didn’t like the cold. Reseeded, have been expecting it to come up, but it hasn’t been.
• Basil. Transplants didn’t like the cold, I should have covered them. Then the slugs ate them.
• Sunflowers planted 6/1 germinated well and really took off growing when it got warmer.
• Quinoa, germinated reasonably well and quickly in the cold. It coul dprobably do planted a bit earlier.
• Lavender seeds germinated, and growing really slowly. They probably should be done in little pots, then transplanted out when it gets hot.
• Tomato transplants went in 5/25 and stayed under row covers at night and during cold days. They look very happy with that treatment. The covers have been off for a couple of weeks, and they’re solid.
• Brassicas (cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, parsnips, turnips) have all had spotty germination, probably due to not keeping the seeds moist enough. (actually, that’s probably a pretty common issue). The ones that sprouted seem to be doing well, and the ones that didn’t have been replanted. They have a really wide growing season, so this will just mean that we’ll have a few ready to harvest a few weeks later.
• Onions probably need a lot more water than they’re getting. And they need to be protected from kiddos.
• I’m not sure that the leeks are growing as fast as I think that they should.
• The cilantro sprouted well, the sets we got are already well on the way to bolting. Basil hasn’t sprouted, it’s probably still too cold.

• Parsley has sprouted, and remarkably well, considering that the last time I did it, I got one or two plants total.

• We lost our one cherry. We still have 3 apples on one tree, and a couple on the other. The other three trees didn’t set fruit.

• The raspberries have set a bunch of fruit. The blackberries… a ton. We’re getting a few good salmon berries, and they’re far tastier than at the old place. Though, the kids get most of them.

Now that it’s June, it was time to put in the hot weather plantings. Tomatoes got in under cover a week ago, with peppers and a tomatillo. This just past weekend, we prepared the two additional gardens that had been rototilled earlier with a light round of rototilling to knock down the new grass and weeds, and a little compost to cover the surface. Now, the nevada shaped garden is planted in 5 1/2 rows of corn and 1/2 row of quinoa. These are experimental, the corn because it’s so cold here, and the quinoa because while i have seen evidence that it grows here (at the county fair), I’ve never actually seen a plant of it in the ground. The other garden, known as the sprawly one, has sunflowers, pole beans, and various squashy things planted.

If it all grows, there may be 10+foot tall sunflowers, 6′ bean vines, and 20′ pumpkin vines. This is a scale that doesn’t really work for the littler raised beds that we have in the main garden patch.

In the other garden patch, something ate most of the beans. We need to replant. The spinach is going berserk, as is the lettuce. Somehow the latest plantings of salad stuff wound up pretty unevenly distributed, so I have to redo some of that. Most of the cauliflower came up from the first planting, and the two remaining hills got replanted and are showing tiny leaves. The biggest is about 4″ tall now. Broccoli is coming up, as are the leeks, carrots, parsnips, turnips and rutabagas. Not so sure about the lavender or the wildflowers, but the other flower bed is showing some activity. The kale that was transplanted in last fall, and then moved this spring is just about done, to be replanted at the end of the month. And the potatoes are going nuts. They like this weather. The two first plantings are about neck and neck, the one from mid May is pretty short still. The radishes have all been eaten, and now replanted to have more things for Ben to pull up. It’s good to have things that we’d prefer he pulls up, rather than going after the stuff that we wish he didn’t.

It’s a little nerve wracking when the seeds haven’t come up in a bed, and you don’t know if it’s something that you did or if the weather is just against you or what. So far though, we’ve only completely lost one planting of peas (which I suspect something ate). And most of this stuff can be replanted a few weeks later without too much trouble.

This is the main patch as of about a week ago: And Really Large: a 4000 px wide version of the original 11k pixel wide panorama.

As amazing as it sounds, I think that the next thing to to in the garden is hang around and wait for a couple of weeks to plant some more stuff. The March salad bed is in, the March potatoes are in, and the beds for the next batch of planting are in pretty good shape. I may throw out some cover crop to crowd out the weeds germination, but there’s just not that much more heavy lifting that needs to happen for the near future.

Also: take pictures. Been too busy working to take pics of the garden.

Our garden has been humming along, until it hit a full stop last Saturday. Two weeks ago, we rented a big roto-tiller (two cylinder, 16hp. Now that’s power) and attacked the mess of gourse and blackberry roots in our large garden location, as well as a killing off the sod in a couple of other spots (one called and shaped like nevada, one like a pie wedge) for some other garden uses.

Last Friday evening and Saturday, I defined the beds in the big garden, and then put in one load of compost over half the garden. Then, stoppage struck, as the compost loading tractor wouldn’t start when I went back for the second load, and half the family got quite sick, and remained that way for most of the week.

The big garden is a rectangle, with 16 3 foot wide beds on each side of a center aisle, each bed about 10 - 14 feet long. There are some smaller ones on the north side, and the ones on the south side tend to be on the longer side. At about 30-40 square foot per bed, there’s a good amount of space for smaller stuff, and there are enough beds to give the bigger stuff its space as well.

Helpfully, I had put the compost into the ‘later in the summer’ area of the garden first, and not where I was planning on putting the early season stuff. One more trip to the compost place, no luck — they’re out for 2 more weeks. So. Garden plans are reversed, and I’m now planting early season where I intended later season stuff.

So, Today (Saturday) I mixed up the fertilizer (following Steve Solomon’s complete organic recipe — 4x seed meal, 1/2x lime, 1/2x rock phosphate, 1/2x kelp meal) raked it into the 8 beds, and planted the first seeds (and starts). There’s a bed of Walla Walla onion starts, a bed of chard, one of peas, and one of favas. Ben has a garden bed of his own with radishes, peas, and onions. Tomorrow we’re expecting to put in a bed of spinach and lettuce, and 2 of potatoes.

Next month, we’ll start more peas, more potatoes, more salad stuff, and probably some brassicas.

In May, another batch of potatoes, more salad stuff, and who knows what else. Probably beans.

Memorial day, we go for hot weather loving plants, tomatoes and peppers. Sweet Corn too, in the nevada plot.

And in mid summer, in go the overwintering things, more brassicas, leeks, favas.

Obviously, there are big plans here, but I think we’re past a large part of the early work.

The recent, possibly unprecedented, run of good weather in February has gotten us off our couches and out into the yard. And the yard looks a lot different than before.

• Last Friday - On couches, sick.
• Saturday - Feeling a little better — decided to go shopping, it was less effort than working in the yard. Bought 6 fruit trees and rented a weedwacker. Left trees at the nursery.
• Sunday - whacked weeds. With a gas powered weed whacker with a blade. That’s power. Also took on gourse and blackberries by sticking the whirring blade in and wiggling it around. Felt a little like wielding a sword. Also dug a hole or two.
• Monday - Looked around at the devastation, dug another hole and met neighbor. Neighbor seems to not like trees, or at least, very willing to cut them down. Decided to cut down a large alder tree before it fell on the trees to be planted. Attacked tree with an axe and chainsaw. Tree trunk is now in little bits, branches strewn across the garden. Now that’s power.
• Tuesday - Pulled little branches off of big branches by hand. Now that’s really bad wood.
• Wednesday - More of that. Now there are a couple piles of little branches, a couple of bigger ones, and 1/3 cord of trunk rounds.
• Friday - Decided that perhaps it’s time to plant trees, so dug more holes.
• Saturday - Got trees, planted them, Pruned them. Now they’re smaller trees, with spreaders to make the branches grow in the right direction. Also, built a fire and had two large piles of small branches fed to the fire. Suddenly, the tree seems mostly gone. Also, found out that one good hit with the axe would cut up to a 2-3″ branch. Had loads of fun whacking them into stove sized pieces.
• Sunday - Rested.

Next weekend — A rototiller.