Ending and Beginning

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.

Added 5 gallons of compost to 50 square foot bed outside back door and turned it over with a shovel. Also turned over another row of sod on west side of that bed:

Added 5 gallons of compost to the raised 4′ x 8′ bed in the garden (below), then filled it up the rest of the way with dirt from other places in the garden.

I got the compost from the black plastic compost bin. It’s one of those bins where you add the vegetable matter to the top and take it out from a door on the side near the bottom (and it’s a pain to get out). The compost is not completely finished, but I think it will finish in the soil in the weeks we have before planting. I plan on using the rest of it in the vicinity of plantings as we get the garden in.

We could be, and should be, making much more compost than we’re making. Adding large quantities of widely varied organic materials to your soil is the best way to improve it. Why aren’t we? I think mostly not having a lot of energy left after our jobs and parental duties, but also some laziness and lack of determination to make it happen. We certainly could make it happen if we both decided it was essential.

It got down into the 20s last night, and the thermometer in the greenhouse said 34°F this morning. It’s on the back wall of the greenhouse that’s common with the basement, so it may have been colder near the front glass wall where the tomatoes are. I opened the door to the basement when I went down this morning to warm it up — should have had it open all last night. I’m waiting to see if there’s any damage to the tomatoes.

Yup, three of the tomatoes are wilted, bent way over. I still have some hope that they’ll recover, because the leaves  look good. The rest seem okay.

I’m pretty mad at myself for letting that happen. It’s not safe outside for frost-intolerant plants yet, and I need to pay attention to the weather more than I have been. That greenhouse affords only slight protection from frost.

And now, an hour later, the three wilted tomatoes are standing up straight again! Whew! Got some of them outside for some unfiltered sunshine later in the day:

So I was out in the garden today, trying to stay ahead of the quack grass, digging it up with a small shovel and a spading fork. There’s still a lot of quack grass out there.

Then, I got to a place I had covered with corrugated cardboard and wood chips last summer in an effort to kill the grass. There were a few blades of grass showing through, so I dug into the cardboard. And underneath it, there is a heavy mat of thick, strong quack grass roots.

It gives me the creeps to even think of if, and I take back everything I’ve written about the quack grass problem not being too bad this year. It’s going to be another long, hard struggle.

What about some kind of frame with chicken wire through which you could sift topsoil? I wonder if that would be a way to get those roots out.