Garden Early May 2018

It finally feels like full-on spring! The sun has been shining, temperatures have been in the upper 70s and low 80s, the grass is lush and gorgeous green, and everything is growing very well. The lilacs and redbuds are in full color. The lettuce in the garden is thriving, and between last weekend (late April) and this week (first week of May) I've planted almost as many tomato plants as I can fit into the gardens.  Here is the photo journal for the last couple weeks of the successes, and a few failures.

 

To harden off the tomato plants, I left them in the as-yet unplanted herb garden outside my kitchen door. They get full afternoon and evening sun, plus a good deal of wind on the corner of the house (which is on a high spot in the area). They dry out a little faster out here than they did inside the 'nursery' on the second floor with the south facing window, but that's easily remedied with extra water.  I started planting more tomato starts in the ground simply because I had the large green plastic stakes that will remain in the garden until the fall -- but I was short on the wooden dowels to support the younger plants.

The first batch of plants I put out with fertilizer got a bit of a shock. The leaves started turning yellow and they looked very bad starting about four days in. Temperatures weren't bad, and I considered they might be getting too much water. But I think it was too much fertilizer in the soil to start with. Just a hunch. In the meantime I've watered periodically and noticed new growth; today they look better than they have since going into the garden. So I think we're on the right track.  Here are a couple picks from the 'sickly' stage.

Last weekend the lettuce was looking pretty good. The cabbage was beginning to curl, the salad lettuce was coming right along.

Last Saturday we bought a Ford F-150 truck, and I was happy to get that crossed off the list so I could get some things planted! Here is the "sauce" garden before and after on the evening of Monday, April 30. I planted four rows of four tomato plants, including great sauce tomatoes like San Marzano and Roma.

I didn't have time to plant the 8x4 tomato garden Monday night, but I did set out more plants to harden off. Here's the bed in need of prep after the winter. On Tuesday and Wednesday I was able to add a few plants to the garden, then we had some major storms Wednesday night. Two inch hail was predicted, and three tornadoes touched within about 10 miles of us. Needless to say, it was windy. Fortunately the hail never materialized, and besides some 60 mile an hour winds, we only got some good rain. Everything we planted made it through the storms just fine.

I noticed one of the Dark Galaxy tomato starts was snipped off at the base yesterday. I'm not sure if that was the storm or an animal -- I'm pretty certain it was a rabbit, mole, or some other creature.  We had some big issues with something eating a lot of our bell pepper plants last year, and I was in no mood to let our starts get eaten again this year. Thus, I added a layer of rabbit proof fencing to the 8x4 tomato garden. I have not yet been able to secure that to the wooden base, however -- my staple gun isn't shooting staples. It's on the list for my next (three time-weekly) trip to Home Depot. I left a few spots open to add some more Dark Galaxy tomato plants once they're a little farther along.

Today, Saturday, May 5 was a busy day outside. Goal #1 was to work on the flower bed on the northeast corner of our house. It gets some morning sun, but it's mostly shade. We've mostly ignored it for the first 11 years we've lived here. We've always wanted to do more with it, but haven't put a lot of time into it beyond taking out a lot of the fill plants the builder put in and adding a few flowers here and there.  As I was looking for ways to clear out more of the area, I thought about completely removing three holly bushes. They're big and bushy (as the name suggests). But then I saw they were covered in bees! So I decided the holly could stay so that the bees would help pollinate the nearby peach, apple, and cherry trees.

The garden already had plastic edging around most of it, so at Home Depot I bought another 20 feet of plastic edging (and used 16 feet of it). I also bought 30 bags of top soil -- 1,200 pounds of it. Thanks to the new F-150, it made it home without a problem.  I'd already purchased a 220 foot x 4 foot roll of ground cover material at Costco. To begin, I raked up old mulch and dead leaves, pulled a lot of stringy vines and weeds out of the ground, then removed some sort of vining ground cover plant that was trying to take over everything. That thing had a huge root system and took some time to come out.  At that point my wife stepped in and we smoothed the ground and stapled the cover material down, then dumped thirty forty pound bags of topsoil in. She also brought around several five gallon buckets filled with compost from our composter in the back yard.  Once we had raked everything smooth, we sprinkled a bag full of "butterfly and hummingbird" seed mixture over a majority of the area, and also put a border of Sweet Alyssum and pink / purple Dyanthus along the front. Hopefully we'll start seeing some sprouts in the next week.

I also prepped and planted a separate flower bed out back that held mostly sunflowers last year. Today I dug out some of the larger sunflower bases left over from last year, then tilled the soil. It was already soft and rich, so I didn't work it much. To this bed I added several of last year's sunflower seeds (giant sunflowers that get about 12 feet tall, plus autumn sunflowers that are 6-8 feet tall and have beautiful colors). I also added half of a big bag of seed mix that was called "rabbit and deer deterrent." I'm not sure what's in there -- we'll see soon enough, I hope. While I'm hoping to see some pretty flowers, I'm hoping more to keep some of the rodents away from the vegetables, lettuce, and strawberry gardens.

Here is what the gardens look like this evening (Cinco de Mayo). The lettuce is thriving, although some of the starts that I transplanted earlier this week from the upstairs nursery (I missed them initially) are still taking root.

Over the course of the next week there are a few new projects in the works: transplanting the lilies under the bird feeder, moving the bird feeders, then adding a new 8x4 raised bed for our many tomatillo, jalepeno, and bell pepper plants.  After that, we want to add a new flower bed along the south side of the house. But that's a longer story for when we build it.