There is still way too much snow out back and three times as much out front, so my thoughts have turned to what else I can do.
I’ve decided I’m going to bite the bullet and go with square foot gardening this year. I’ll build a 4 x 3 box, with the bit against the trellis being raised. The trellis is already home to a grape vine, but I know from experience there’s also room for cucumber and tomatoes, so that’s what will be in the back.
The other boxes will be occupied with brussels sprouts, kale and spinach (for a short time), carrots, bush beans, beets, and something else which I cannot recall just yet. Beside the box I’ll plant a strawberry or two and we’ll see how that comes along. The sheltered area near the shed is already home to a rhubarb which produces 3 crops a year, so that’s all set.
Herbs will go, as they did last year, in a large planter by the kitchen window. I’m thinking I want to find something cheaper than dirt to to fill the bottom 2/3 of the planter, so ideas are welcome.
The apple trees in the back corner will be espaliered this year (I’ve been meaning to do this year two years and keep forgetting, but we’ll see).
I’m also thinking about sticking a blackberry bush in the back alley, since the existing plants there are not doing as well as I’d hoped after the neighbour’s tree came down.
In spite of a relatively chilly(for Coastal Texas) and too cloudy Spring, my tomatoes are doing OK, with about a dozen golfball-sized fruit on each of them now. The peppers have blossoms but no fruit yet.
Near Chicago I’ve got peas, lettuce, kale, chard, carrots, and radishes seeded out.
I don’t start my own tomatoes or peppers anymore. But in a few weeks I’ll get the fumes and shoes started. Ha ha, that’s autocorrect for cukes and zukes.
Grafted some scraps from the apple tree I planted onto some other apples in the yard. I can’t let the baby tree fruit for a couple of years, but I might be able to coax a fruit from a graft and see how it works locally. I also tossed fertilizer under everything.
I planted a butt-load of stuff (and spent a semi-butt-load of money to do so) a week or so ago, and yesterday a cold front drops down from the North.
Weathermen are all freaking out, warning against hard freezes and telling us to cover all our plants. Now, I always blow this off. And last year got burned, or frozen as the case my be. Well, I decided, “Not again!” and spent all day scrambling around to wrap tomatoes and beans and peppers in plastic and covering them up. Disconnected the irrigation system and stored the timers inside.
I get up this morning, let the dogs out, walk outside and it’s just a beautiful, nice day. Sunshine, birds, not really cold at all.
Oh well. I feel good that I at least made an effort. I’ll uncover one later to see how it fared. Supposed to warm right back up, and quick.
!@#$%^&* Squirrels! I have lost every tomato to the little buggers. Finally put up the “bird” netting last week. For some reason they haven’t bothered the peppers and I do have several good-sized bell peppers now.
I also put in about a hundred more caladium bulbs/corms a couple weeks ago and it looks like a lot of the existing bulbs won’t come up this year. I think they stayed too wet over the winter and rotted.
Most pleasing is that I have about a dozen tiny pomegranates on my young tree and a couple more blooms appear almost every day! If even a quarter of them mature I will be ecstatic.
We’re in the Northeast, Zone 7, and every other shrub or tree is either in full leaf (like the red maple right next to it) or budding, like the fig tree which looks like a collection of sticks with tiny green knobs on it. The crepe myrtle looks like dead sticks, with no signs of growth at all.
A ##% squirrel ate all the flower buds and a lot of the leaf buds off my epimedium. I hope it didn’t kill the whole patch. A chipmunk nearly destroyed my new-planted parsley, but I chased it away, and weirdly, it hasn’t returned. Maybe it got a tummy ache.
I have crepe myrtles in front of two power poles. (One in my yard, one in “no man’s land” by the edge of my yard.)
A giant tree from said no man’s land came down a couple weeks ago taking out both those poles and broke a third one. The power company people just whacked away at the bushes and tree to get in to clear things out and install new poles and all.
The bushes are not looking good at all. They had been sprouting growth and all that’s gone.
That shouldn’t be a problem as long as they were healthy. They’ll just be smaller for a while.
I had a crepe myrtle that sprouted up underneath a large rhododendron and I just kept cutting it off at ground level without making a real effort to dig it out and get rid of it. One big springtime storm knocked over a 40’ oak onto the rhododendron, and all I had left was a rhododendron stump next to the tinier, but still sprouting crepe myrtle stump. I let them both grow, and by the end of that summer the myrtle was 6’ tall and had flowered. By the end of the next summer it was a respectable 12’ and beautiful.
The only problem was that it was really not the right place for it, so last February I determined that the slow-growing rhododendron was big enough again to take that space on its own and cut the myrtle down to the ground. I ‘painted’ the stump with Roundup, sprayed new shoots as they appeared, re-painted with Roundup after drilling holes in it, etc. It still sprouts.
Puzzlegal - I know nothing about grafting but…In the garden of the Alcazar in Seville there were fruit trees where lemon had been grafted onto orange (or possibly vice-versa) to make a tree that produced lemons on one side and oranges on the other. They were spectacular - is this the sort of thing that you are doing?
Aside from that - today I finished fertilising and digging over the allotment. My back of an envelope calculation is that I have turned over 10 tonnes of soil. It certainly feels like it.
Been eating the asparagus out of the beds for a couple of weeks now. Wonderful. The early potatoes and broad/fava beans have just appeared. And I have Tuesday pencilled in for mass planting - courgettes/zucchini, squash, pumpkin, runner beans and peas, all straining to fight their way out of the shed at the moment. Cucumber, aubergine/eggplant, french beans, chickpeas/garbanzo to follow, after which I’ll assess if I have space for anything else.
Be very careful planting out tender stuff yet- I can’t remember whereabouts you are, but we had bit of ground frost here in Cornwall last night, and we’re likely to get more tonight. Some people at my allotment had been optimistic, and there were a lot of dead tomatoes, squash and runner beans there today. Even if the cold doesn’t kill them, below about 5°C it’ll slow growth right down and actually delay the crop.
The peas should be fine, if they’re hardened off, but if I were you, I’d hold back on the rest right now. I normally don’t put any frost-tender stuff in the ground outside before the last week of May.
I’m being a bit late with everything this year anyway, 'cos of uni deadlines sucking up all my time. I’ll be sowing the beans and squashes this week, I think. Or I’ll forget and have to buy in plants again. That works too.
My first cotton seedling just poked its head above ground. Blueberries have all set fruit, so now I wait for that to ripen - those take awhile. Strawberries and raspberries are flowering and have some fruit - the first strawberries will probably be ripe in the next week or so. The jalapeno and cayenne peppers are just starting to get flowers. Snap peas are climbing. I am fascinated by peas - how do they know where the closest thing is to start climbing on?
If it ever stops raining long enough to dry out just a little I will get my rototilling started. Sad part is I’m even further behind this year than I was last.
Thanks for the guidance (and I certainly need it). We’re south of London, and the old, wise heads say last frost day is 12 May. So my approach is to get as close as I can to that date and then trust the weather forecast - but that has actually got a little worse over the last few days. Predicted nighttime lows are: 6th = 5C; 7th = 8C; 8th = 6C; 9th = 5C; 10th = 5C; 11th = 5C; 12th = 6C; 13th = 7C; 14th = 7C. So it’s marginal. Or at least, closer than I would like.
Problem is, the cucurbits have taken over the shed, to the extent that they sucked up all the light and the aubergines had to be brought back indoors to an emergency eggplant infirmary. Mrs Trep is not pleased. Plus the peas are now growing horizontally to get to the light. If they come back indoors, it’ll be me and the cucurbits fighting it out for sleeping room in the shed.
So: predicted nighttime lows of 5C, but always with a little breeze - safe enough?
The ideal would be to put 'em outside in a sheltered spot for the day, the bring them back in at night. Assuming you’re not already doing that.
I’m not sure how much growing experience you have, so apologies if this is stating the obvious, but it’s always a good idea to do that for a week or so before planting out, it toughens the leaves up and it’s less of a planting shock.
I’m picking things up as I go along (so feel free to point me in the right direction). I had been told about the hardening-off-before-planting process; problem is, I have so little space in the shed, and germinated plants are so crowded, that untangling plants to move them around is something I really don’t like to do more than once (ie, back of the car and off to be planted) for fear of damaging them. If growing food has taught me anything, it’s that things would be better if they were better, but they’re probably not (and nor are they ever going to be) because of some constraint or other. And as it goes, Pea Boot Camp (as you describe, but without the going indoors at night) has had to be implemented just to free up some space in the shed.
Anyways, BBC are now forecasting lows of 3C on Saturday, and that’s just too risky. So mass planting has now been put off til Sunday, and I’ll have to find overnight housing for peas on Sat.
