Garden Prep and Puzzles

Well, it's back to winter again.  I finished mulching the garden paths yesterday, and even with gloves, until I worked long enough to generate some heat, digging into the mulch bags felt like stabbing my icy fingers.  We're making up for the past two balmy winters by having a darned cold one that's lasting forever this year. 

Where is the sun?!

It always feels good mentally to get the paths mulched, even if it's back-breaking during the hours it takes to do it.  This year, it took extra hours and extra bags of mulch because I had virtually neglected this chore the last couple of years.  Aside from building up the east end bed where it sloped away into the yard, I did the much needed work of marking out all the paths anew and hoeing out shallow trenches for most of them so the mulch wouldn't float away into the beds when we get heavy rains like it always has in the past. 

I think it was worth it.

Unfortunately, I had set out onions before I got around to buying more mulch to finish the west end where the onion bed is this year, and before I decided to create another mulched path through that bed, so I ended up crowding the outer row of onion sets.  I expect that will reduce my harvestable onions by a good number.  I was concerned about it for a bit, and then decided that I haven't had a good onion harvest since the first year, so I didn't care quite as much.  And now, I don't care at all. If the onions do poorly again this year, I'll quit planting them and use the space for something else. 

I read an online article about growing onions from seed for better luck, and after less than a minute decided that was way too much trouble, and the transplanting looked like way too much work.  Store bought onions are fine.

onion sets ready to be covered with composted manure

Speaking of growing from seed:  I had numerous six-packs of seedlings coming along nicely in my cellar set-up when one morning I went down to check on them and mice had eaten over half of them down to the soil.  They'd gotten past two traps and a container of poison bait to do it, too - had actually gotten the trap bait out of the traps without springing them, which was a Houdini trick for sure, because I always jam those cranberries tight into the trap's teeth so that doesn't happen.  They must have dried up enough to loosen themselves.  The biggest surprise was some industrious mouse had buried two of the poison pellets in one of the cells after there was no longer a plant in it! 

Unfortunately, I didn't get over the shock and irritation before I started reseeding what I'd lost, and I picked up a tray of tomato seedlings that had survived without replacing their labels (which I have to lay down beside them to allow the light fixture to be lowered as far as possible), leaving me no way to identify the variety.  When I realized what I'd done, I had to curse myself as much as the mice, pull out all the remaining seedlings and start over.  Unfortunately, I didn't have any spare seed for two of the cherry tomato varieties.  Live and learn.  Hopefully.

I don't know what I'm going to do about the mouse problem.  I lost some seedlings to the same thing last year, but not nearly so many.   I thought about getting more traps and encircling the seedlings so they can't get past without springing one, but my concern with that is that they'll walk across a trap to get to the seedlings and only get a leg caught.  There's nothing worse about mouse traps than coming upon a mouse with a broken leg caught in one and trying to get away from you.  Believe me, I know. 

I have one of those electronic plug-in devices down there, which obviously doesn't work.  I'm going to try a different type, and if that doesn't work....??  I can't in good conscience lock the cat in there.

Birds!  Another flock of grackels coming through.

I'm hoping, but not getting excited about the possibility, that this rhubarb plant is going to have red stems when it grows up. 

A couple years ago I dug up  two plants from my mother's little patch.  Why are hers - which always have red stems - coming up with the new leaves red, and mine are green?  Could it be because hers get shaded by the asparagus where she has them crammed in at the end?  And why do the ones I transplanted not have red stems when they grow up like hers do?  This is a puzzle to me.

It seems like the stems on some of my varieties are red when it's cold and they're growing very slowly, but once it warms up and they start growing large enough to harvest, they're mostly green.  I have one variety that has rosy pink flesh inside the green outer skin, but I can't remember which one that is.  I'll have to tell you when I harvest this year.

I ordered some seed from a company that specializes in rhubarb of two types that were supposed to be the very reddest.  Not for me.  Recently I read that even from seed, it's iffy to get a red-stemmed variety, and the best way is to divide a plant you already know is red-stemmed.  So, why aren't the ones I divided from my mother's red-stemmed varieties red?  The only difference I can think of is that mine are spaced generously and growing in good soil.  Hers are crowded and growing where the roots are constricted.  But that can't be the secret, can it?  Surely the people who grow rhubarb commercially don't starve their plants.  Do they?  I haven't found any information that says to crowd them and compact the roots.  I'm stumped.

The result is that I've got a huge bed of rhubarb - much more than I can use - in my attempt to get red-stemmed plants.  Some of my neighbors appreciate the produce.  Whether it's red or green, it all tastes the same. 

Not much to do now but wait for some warmth and sun. 

The seedlings I have out in the portable greenhouse are still alive, thank goodness, but they're not putting on any growth.  I don't blame them.  It's too cold and dreary to do anything but hunker down until the sun decides to return.

The weather forecaster is not encouraging.

Let the Planting Begin!

Most of the garden prep work is done, and the first of the early spring planting is done.  I worked steadily all day yesterday to get it done because the weather forecast said it would rain all night last night and all day today.  It's 10 am, and so far, not even enough water to measure in the rain gauge.  But!  A lot of work is finished.

Here's this year's layout  (plant sizes and numbers are not actual!):

Last year, I pretty well neglected the garden as far as much needed improvements were concerned, so this year, I had lots to do.  The east end sloped away so much that my mulch paths were all but washed away, so I built it up to a gentle slope and placed an edging wall at the most severe section.  Now, unless we get a gully washer (which is not unheard of), the path should remain in place.  And, just maybe, if the path remains in place, I won't have to remulch it so often.

slope remediation, mulch paths marked

I also dug a shallow trench in portions of the path at the higher side of the garden to help keep the mulch in place, and my theory is that it will also act as a little irrigation ditch to keep more water available on that side.  I planted the lower, outer ring with short rows perpendicular to the arc, which will fight the whole purpose of rain water direction and erosion, but I made shallow depressions of the planting rows, so hopefully that will help to mitigate that particular faux pas.  We shall see.

I've left large spaces between the rows so I can make staggered plantings two weeks after these come up, and have a continuing harvest of young greens.  I always think I'll do that and never do, so maybe this time, with orderly rows instead of scatter planting, I'll get the job done.

Planted and eagerly awaited are: peas, mixed lettuces, arugula, celery, tatsoi, and carrots.

I plant about 3x as densely as is called for on packaging  (except for carrots, which I tend to overplant every time).  The package recommendations are for gardens that get a tiller run down between rows and that have more conventionally placed and spaced rows than mine.  Even if you have that type of garden, you can easily get away with planting twice as densely as recommended.  Don't be afraid - pack 'em in!  You'll get a good crop, and fewer weeds.

peas ready to be covered  

My plan was to leave the path mulching until after all the rain we were supposed to be getting.  Looks like that wasn't necessary, but I wouldn't have gotten as much done on the rest of the garden if I'd stopped to mulch paths.

Unfortunately, since the winter was cold and the spring quite chilly, there hasn't been any grass to mow for mulching the planted areas, and I couldn't readily find a substitute.  I've tried using dried cypress needles in the past, but they just blow away.  I'll have to remember to save this fall's grass clippings in case the same thing happens next year.

I don't know how many cart-loads of composted soil I put on the east end beds, but I whittled down my compost hill quite a lot doing it.  That much shoveling ought to whittle down my waist, too, but it never does. 

When I've depleted that compost hill, I'll probably consider my garden sufficiently built up with good soil.  Since I rotate types of plants amongst beds, I don't till, and I don't add chemicals, after that, I'll probably just spread a little composted manure around from time to time.

Last fall, we had a dead tree and two ancient huge old tree stumps removed and shredded.  The dead tree didn't shred into small enough pieces to use as a mulch (maybe the tree trimmers didn't have the proper equipment?), but the old, rotted tree stumps ground into something more like compost than mulch, so I used some of that to build up the beds where the onions and the okra will go.  My theory is that it will improve the soil drainage as it works into the soil.  The soil in the garden actually drains well as it is, but over the years, it can't hurt to have it amended.  I hope there's nothing in that compost that's inhibiting to the growth of the plants.  I'm all about experimenting, but perhaps I shouldn't have covered the entire beds, just in case.

rotted tree compost

Another of my theories is that if I leave the woody stumps of larger plants like okra, basil and peppers in the ground all winter, some of the fine roots will rot, feeding the soil, and when I pull them out of the ground in the spring, it will act to loosen up the soil as well.  I believe it, so it must be true.

pepper stumps

My little flower seedlings are holding their own, and if the sun comes out again, they may even get large enough to be potted up to bigger containers.   They need to get cracking, because I've just sown my tomato and herb packs, which will be needing the space.

All that shoveling and moving soil yesterday might have been tiring work, but the arrival of four new rose bushes just before noon kept me going, as I was excited to get them planted.   I've never planted bare root roses before, so I hope I've done everything properly for them.  Where I originally planned a rose garden for five bushes (one new one per year), after two years, I now have nine!  No space for herbs that I originally intended to plant there as well, but there's room for a few lavender and perovskia, maybe a veronica or salvia.  They'll look much prettier with the roses than other herbs, anyway.

I also have three more roses picked out for next year if I've gotten these four going well.  I have a feeling that I'll be creating another rose bed in a couple of years.  Either that, or I'll have to quit looking at rose catalogs.

The plants that arrived look nice and robust - good strong canes and lots of roots.  I ordered them from Palatine Roses near the Canadian Niagra Falls after reading several comments that people were happy with that company.  I'm very pleased and expect I'll get all my roses from them in the future if these do as well as they seem prepared to do. 

Hint:  If you order from Palatine (or anywhere outside the US, for that matter), and you give them permission to withdraw money from your bank account, be prepared to tell your bank you're going to do it.  I always forget things like that.  It's only a slight embarrassment when ordering and the company tells you that your bank rejected payment, but when traveling, it can put a real damper on things - especially if it's a Sunday. 

The plants took three days from shipping to arrive by UPS, and this is how they came out of the box, bundled and marked, and encased in heavy-weight plastic:

one luxurious plant ready to go into a long soaking bath

holes dug, ready for roses

leveling the plant to the right depth

Hopefully, the roses I planted last year survived the winter.  I couldn't decide how to winterize them since the ground didn't freeze until late, but there were cold winds all along, and no rain.  I finally settled on watering them a couple of times and erecting tomato cages around them filled with fallen maple leaves.  (NB: Nowhere is this a recommendation for overwintering roses.)

The little 'Julia Child' bush next to the house made it, but nothing in the garden rose bed has sprouted new growth yet.  Fingers crossed.  I was disappointed in the growth of the two David Austin roses I got last year from a local nursery - they're too thin-caned and floppy.  And although 'Pat Austin' is a gorgeous color, 'Charles Darwin' was also a disappointment in that regard.  If they didn't make it, I won't be terribly unhappy - more room for new ones when they come out.  (In fact, Charlie D will come out anyway and go on the road bank if it doesn't perform any better in its second year than it did in its first.)  But I will be very disappointed if 'Shazam!' didn't make it, and I really don't want to replace more than one or two, because they're not cheap.

Yes, some day I want to get rid of all that crab grass in front of the garden and seed it with a nice turf that greens up when the other grass does.  That, however, is a larger challenge than I'm up to at the moment.

Happy spring, everybody. 

Almost There

Signs of spring are showing this week.  The weather, however, is nuts.  After two years of winters so mild the grass never browned out, this winter has been very, very cold. Not as cold as years gone by when we had at least a few nights below zero.  But we do have brown grass, and nights below freezing.  Hopefully there won't be many of those left. 

The wierdest thing is the swinging of the temps on a 24-hour cycle.  Up to 50s (and sometimes above) during the day, and down to low 30s at night.  So even though last fall I failed to get an idea of what kind of winter we'd have, I don't think I'd have felt confident about when to start the various plants indoors even if I had.  I've got some snapdragons and delphiniums that are large enough to plant out, but I can't trust the weather yet, so I've been trundling them back and forth between the portable greenhouse and the celler. 

The portable greenhouse didn't work out for overwintering plants that can't take a freeze.  If we'd had winters like the last two years, it would have probably done well, but it just got too cold for winter protection with no heat source.  Also, the wind here is viscious, and I didn't originally have it anchored well enough.  The plastic cover whipped off last fall, ripping some of the seams open.  I had to repair it as best I could, but then with the freezing temps in the winter, it really got beat up.  I've ordered a new cover, and plan to use it only in the spring next time like a cold frame to acclimate my tender seedlings to the outdoors before putting them in the ground.

This was it late last fall when I set it up:

Most of those plants croaked.

I'll just have to go back to bringing more tender potted plants indoors for the winter.  Sad face.

Actually, the one plant I like to bring in and put back out when the temperature is safe for it is the jade plant.  It changes color.  Up against the south side of the house from spring to fall, it gets lots of sun and looks like this:

In a south-facing window with much less light during the winter, it looks like this:

It bloomed this year.  I don't know if I've seen one in bloom before.

Anyway, back to the portable greenhouse: it's working well for seedling acclimation.  I do have to bring them indoors when the temps drop below the upper 30s, but during the warmer day temps, they're getting the benefit of real sunlight that they don't get under my cellar lighting, which is shop lights with fluorescent bulbs suspended from chains so I can raise and lower them to the desired height.

I start my seeds of early crops and flowers indoors in mid-winter in trays set on special seedling tray heat pads.  You can get these online (for instance, Amazon) or where you buy your gardening supplies.  They get warm, but not hot, so seeds will germinate before they would outdoors in cool soil.  I ordered domes online to go over the trays to trap humidity.  (It can be regulated by opening or closing vents.) I've only seen them in stores when sold as part of a kit.  

As soon as the seeds germinate and push their way out of the soil, they get moved under the shop lights, which are lowered down to just barely above the plants.  The lights are cool enough that even if the plants grow to touch them, they won't burn.  If the light is more than a fraction of an inch above the seedlings, unlike outdoors, they'll stretch to reach the light and become spindly and weak.  Therefore, they get placed practically on top of the plants and raised as needed when the plants get taller.

The problem with this setup is that the plant labels are too tall to fit under the lights and must be placed out of the tray in front of the packs of seedlings.  This means I have to keep a very close eye on which label goes with which pack when I invariably move them around to make room for more.  There have been times when I lost track during this shell game if I've got various colors or varieties of the same species and gotten my labels mixed up. I could put a piece of masking tape on the pack and mark it, but I've been too lazy since that means I have to peel that off when I wash the pack to reuse it. 

snapdragon seedlings

'Feathertop' grass seedlings

When the plants have two or three sets of true leaves (those first two leaf-like, green parts are the "seed leaves", or cotyledons, which generally fall off once true leaves are growing), they're ready to go out to the greenhouse/cold frame on nice days.  At first, they need some shade, because the plants are tender and not used to that level of light intensity, so I've slipped a cover inside over the top of the frame that I can easily pull down or raise depending upon the amount of sunlight hitting the plants.

Out in the garden, the rhubarb plants are coming up.  I have yet to get them through a spring without any cold damage at all, but maybe because of the deep drops in temps every evening, they'll grow slowly enough so that they're not all fully leafed out when the inevitable early season frosts hit.

rhubarb emerging

There was a beautiful tatsoi plant on the top of my compost heap that made it through late fall and early winter, longer than those smaller ones in my garden proper and after most other green things were brown.

Alas, January hit it with a vengeance.

I had an idea to plant garlic on December 3 last year, thinking of giving it more time to mature, since what I harvested last year was kind of puny.  Of course, it could have just been the quality of the bulbs I planted, but ever the experimenter - because I know way too little about most things - I put them in the ground and then figured I'd lost that work when the winter got so cold for so long.  

mulched garlic beds

I did mulch them well, though, and voilà! they made it and are coming up.  Also poking up out of the brown earth these last several days are hyacinths, tulips, daffodils, giant allium, and sedum.  A couple of peony shrubs are just starting to peak out.  And the grackels are back!

I love this time of year for the early signs of green plant life.  Every day that's warm enough, I go out and scout around for signs of something new coming up.  I'm not anxious to see some things coming to life, though. I hope the Japanese beetle population got frozen back hard this year.  

I was happy to see a video recently of a British horticulturist (Monty Don - apparently quite well known over there) advising a woman creating a vegetable garden in her front yard to plant very densely.  I've been tempting fate, I thought, with the density of my garden plantings.  

My experience is that planting almost twice as dense as the "square foot gardening" recommendation of current garden experts is perfectly fine, and in fact has two advantages: more produce and fewer weeds.  I think unless your soil is quite poor, plants do fine a bit crowded.  Commercial growing and farming are different beasts that require other methods, and if you're using a tiller, you need room between rows.  Otherwise, raised beds or narrow paths such as I have, just so you can get around and reach all the plants, will do just fine.  Monty's easy-to-utilize guide for distance between vegetable garden plants (other than very large or sprawling ones) is the span of his hand.

Can't wait to start getting some things in the ground.  If the weather doesn't get worse, I think I'll be able to plant peas, leafy greens, celery, carrots and onions next week.  And maybe set out some flowers.  Also, I'm getting anxious to get my shipments of roses and raspberries I have on order.  They should all be coming in this month.  

But first, the work:  I have to mulch paths and add a layer of compost to the beds.   And hope all my roses survived the winter.  That's a story for another day.

Happy spring, people!