Ending and Beginning

Today is another gorgeous Spring day. I have a bad cold, which detracts a bit from my enjoyment of it, but I’ve still managed to get a couple of things done.

Did some more hand-mowing (some with the help of the boys), and dug clippings into part of the garden.

Set up a new 4′ x 4′ bed for one of the vining squash. Put down several thicknesses of newspaper to kill the grass, then soil from garden, then a layer of fresh green grass clippings, then another layer of soil from the garden. I’ll add more soil in 2 or 3 weeks, then plant. That will give the squash room to vine across the lawn. The soil in that Southwest corner of the yard is very rich, so they should do well.

You can see two of the small fruit trees we planted last fall in the above photo. I have, alas, forgotten if we bought two plum and one pear or two pear and one plum. At any rate, it looks like they all came through the winter fine and are getting ready to leaf out in the next week.

My perception of our yard is changing. I used to think of it in terms of a nice, largish suburban yard (even though we’re not really in a suburb), an asset in terms of property valuation. Now I think more and more that this is the last place I will live, and so the value of the yard to anyone else becomes irrelevant.

Our yard has become a place to grow food and support our family in other ways in the coming [insert doomish adjective of your choice here] times. It’s appearance doesn’t matter. It’s a working yard now.

All that’s good.

Delila, champion mouser, was out enjoying the weather also:

Finished the fence around the garden today. Came in at around 210′.

Mowed some long grass with the non-motorized mower. Raked up the grass clippings and dug them into the garden where we’re going to put the corn and some of the tomatoes.

Dug up more quackgrass.

DW planted 3 rhubarb crowns along the South property fence near the East end.

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.