Ending and Beginning

Yippee!

Let’s see, that’s 11 days since I laid them out on the sod.

Also, finished pounding in the fence posts today and got about half the fence put up.

Dug in the leaf compost I got last week, dug up lots of quack grass and dandelions. We’ll have to plant stuff pretty soon and just deal with the weeds, then go after them again after harvest. Not perfect, but that’s the best we can do.

Found some software called Garden Planner, haven’t had a chance to install it yet (http://www.smallblueprinter.com/garden/).

Planted another 30′ row of potatoes. Sure hope they start coming up soon….

Was reading a bit about potato bug control yesterday, and it appears that the options are hand-picking or heavy-duty pesticide. I’m not going the pesticide route, so it looks like it’s hand-picking into soapy water (with the soap in there just to break the surface tension so they’ll sink and drown).

And while I’ve done that before, and I don’t think of myself as excessively squeamish, it’s a pretty disgusting job. Neither the adults nor larvae are small, and they lay lots of eggs. Before you know it, you’ve got gobs of bug guts on your fingers.

But one thing that was mentioned in what I read yesterday was wearing gloves, and I was thinking thin rubber gloves would work quite well. Just so long as I don’t get the guts on my skin, I think the job will be a lot less unpleasant.

The other non-pesticide part of control is not planting potatoes in the same place two years in a row. That’s not an issue this year since all the potatoes are going on top of sod, but it’s something we’ll have to plan for after this year.

And speaking of planning, we haven’t planned out where we’re going to plant everything in the garden. I’m inclined to do that with some kind of software, although nothing leaps to mind as lending itself to that purpose. There’s probably something online…and no matter what I end up doing, I’ll post a copy of it here.

Took advantage of a break in the rain to plant another 30′ row of red potatoes in the garden today. Used straw to hold down the newspaper this time and two wheelbarrows of dirt from the garden to cover the potatoes. This photo shows the new row plus the previous row covered in leaf compost.

It’s too wet to do any other work in the garden this weekend, but it’s time to plant swiss chard and probably other things.

Took the day off of work and borrowed CR’s pickup to get some stuff done.

First, went over to CR’s to get the truck. He had put the 25 steel fenceposts in it that we had talked about previously. They are for putting up the fence around the garden.

While I was over there, I loaded 14 bales of straw in the back. Those are for general mulching purposes and specifically for covering the newspaper we put down around the potatoes we plant on top of sod.

After unloading that stuff back at our place, I drove the pickup up to the county leaf composting site on the other side of town, 4-5 miles away. There, a county worker with a loader dumped a load of composted leaves in the back of the truck. Cost me $10. It’s quite wet and heavy because of the rain we’ve had in the last couple of days. It looks pretty much like dirt — you could not identify the materials from which it was made.

Then I drove back home and unloaded it. I put several wheelbarrows full on top of the newly-planted potatoes, since the dirt and wood chips I had previously put on top of the potatoes and cardboard/newspaper was too thin. I put one wheelbarrow on the little bed outside the back door, and I spread the rest on the garden. I was able to back right up to the edge of the garden and fling it onto a good part of it from the back of the pickup. I used the wheelbarrow to get it to the rest of the garden.

That was a lot of work.

Later on, I worked on the fence. Put the little gate in and drove most of the fenceposts.

I noticed that one of the larger tomato plants has flower buds on it. I’m tempted to plant at least a couple of our many tomato plants in the garden and come up with a clever means of easily protecting them from frost…but it’s still very early.

Planted one 30′ row of red potatoes outside on the South side of the garden today. Yippee! They were free, so it’s no great loss if they get frozen, but I doubt they will.

I used the small red potatoes DW brought home from the kitchen at her work. They’ve been in a 5-gal bucket in the basement for at least a couple of months, and they have 6-12″ sprouts on them.

I laid them down on top of sod, one every 4-6″. Again, they were free, so I put them closer together than I might have if I had paid for them. I put corrugated cardboard or newspaper as close to them as I could on each side. I then put some several-year old, quite rotten wood chips on top of the cardboard or newspaper to hold it down, two wheelbarrows full (could have used three if I had a surplus, but they’re mostly gone). The chips were free from the guys clearing roadside trees and shrubs. Then I shoveled some dirt from the garden on top of the potatoes themselves.

So we’ll see how that works. I hope to kill the grass and get a good crop of potatoes this way, and expand the garden without having to turn over the sod by hand. It was still quite a bit of work to do that, but I really like experimenting with new ways of doing things.

In other gardening news, repotted more tomatoes and echinacea today. Moved one of the fluorescent fixtures from the seed-starting table in the living room to the greenhouse, so there are two in each location now. Had all the greenhouse plants outside in the sun until 1 or 2 pm. Also spread some leftover bone meal on the garden and dug some more quack grass.