Ending and Beginning

DW and I planted 12 more tomatoes and all 8 peppers in the garden this evening. Finished just before dark. It’s supposed to be quite stormy in the next 24 hours — welcome to the real world, little plants!

Planted the first nine tomatoes out in the garden today. Put half a shovelful of compost in each hole and planted them pretty deep. Here are the first three (all with blossoms):

DW planted seeds: pole beans, lettuce mix, two kinds of beets, and radishes.

She also harvested some spinach that came up from last year, which I had for supper (just cooked in a covered pan in 1/2″ of water and some butter). It was excellent. I didn’t know that spinach would overwinter like that. I wonder if you can plant it in the Fall.

The forecast low for tonight in Madison is 35°F, and we can be easily 5 degrees colder than the forecast low, so it looks like I’m not setting any tomato plants out today after all. Sigh. I will plant something.

I planted onion sets in the raised bed:

and Hopi Orange Winter squash in the other raised bed (4 seeds per hill):

and another 30′ row of mostly red potatoes (with a few white ones I found growing in a cupboard). That makes 120′ of potatoes.

At 7pm, yes, it does feel like a frost tonight, so I covered the herb bed outside the back door:

All four apple trees are blooming now, including the one I just pruned a few months ago. Sure hope the blooms don’t get frosted. Last year, the one I pruned in late winter did not have one blossom on it.

Also:

• dug a trench where I’m going to plant corn just north of the raised bed, filled it with compost, and shovelled the soil back on top of the compost.
• raked up grass clippings from yesterday’s mowing, used some for mulch, threw some in the garden, and reserved a couple of buckets for future use.

[Update 5/11: it clouded over and so got nowhere near freezing last night.]

We’ve had a lot of rain and showers lately, enough that it’s been hard to get outside work done, especially work in the garden. It’s time to plant pretty much everything, plus the lawn grass is getting really long.

Mowed the lawn with the power mower for the first time today. Maintaining a grass lawn sucks, no doubt about it. It’s a big time and personal energy sink, plus gas mowers use fossil fuels and are, from what I’ve read, significant polluters. (We’re thinking about getting one of those push electric mowers to replace our old gas mower. MEN had an article on them recently.)

I’d rather do something manually, but I don’t know what. A scythe? Maybe, but probably not.

We do want to maintain some lawn as a play area for the boys. If you just stop mowing, you get shrubs and elms growing in there before long, as has happened in the unmowed NE corner of our property. So what to do?

• Get an electric mower to reduce fossil fuel use and pollution.
• Continue to mow grass that is not too long or thick with the unpowered mower. That’s a better option after the flush of growth in the Spring.
• Further reduce the area being mowed.
  • Maintain unmowed areas as hay fields — don’t let woody plants get started.
• Reclaim current unmowed areas as hay fields by removing brush and trees.
• Figure out how to cut hay manually — try to find a scythe for cheap and learn how to use it. CR probably has one I could borrow.

Here’s one of the showers that missed us, passing to the North.

DW planted most of the herbs (plus one tomato) she started from seed in the bed outside the back door.