Turan in the Western Mountains

sanderson wrote:CN,  I was just going to contact you to see if everything is okay.  Haven't seen you around.  There are a few topics on soil blocks under the Search feature.  

Real life is getting in the way and the weather isn't cooperating. 

I planted peas this weekend, two types of sugarsnaps and a circle of sweat pea flowers. I also threw some poppie and linaria seed around. In the greenhouse the lettuce is sprouting, no sign of peas yet, I hope i have watered enough.

This morning the sky was clear and it was near 60*! So I watered the greenhouse and left the door open. The wind came up while I was gone and tore the door apart. sigh

Gotta figure how to fix that before it is tomato planting time. But the sprouts are just thinking of their first true leaf, so I have time.

Oh, no. I'm sorry you lost the door. You have the neatest green house.

It has been a gorgeous spring day. I am now sore

DH reassembled and fixed the greenhouse door.  He added the nifty bungee cords as a better system to hold the doors open against wind.  I am so pleased.  I will be planting tomatoes in a couple weeks.



Remember the composted manure test?  I am still unsure.  These snow pea leaves look tiny and it has taken forever for things to sprout.  So I think I will spread it onto the pasture, but I will leave this growing and see how it develops further.



I got the broccoli and cabbage beds weeded.  Then I laid out the soaker hose and then covered with 6" of old hay, watered it well, and covered with the black plastic.  These two beds have a persistent problem with this really tasty ginger mint that I unwittingly planted many years ago.  Maybe this will help.  I uncovered the unplanted carrot bed and raked the tiny weed seedling in and then recovered, this time with some once-clear plastic.  I hope to planting carrots next week end.

Good job!  I tried the "radish" test and they developed true leaves.  So I used the compost for all the beds. Thank you for the suggestion of the "pea" test.

I planted carrots and parsnips today.  It is rather cloudy and cool and threatening snow tonight.  I read that carrots actually do best germinating if they get a cold shock first.  So here goes...
I was going to plant out the broccoli, but decided to leave them in the greenhouse for the night instead.  Tomorrow maybe.
DH put in a beg for rutabagas so I better get some started.  It would be nice to start some bokchoy too.  

The beans of the compost test are the plants looking hte most affected, they have no true leaves.  I got to remember to do this test.  How often when a crop fails is it because of trace herbicides in the compost? 

Daffodils are blooming.

Turan wrote:The beans of the compost test are the plants looking hte most affected, they have no true leaves.  I got to remember to do this test.  How often when a crop fails is it because of trace herbicides in the compost? 

Oh, no!

sanderson wrote:

Turan wrote:The beans of the compost test are the plants looking hte most affected, they have no true leaves.  I got to remember to do this test.  How often when a crop fails is it because of trace herbicides in the compost? 

Oh, no!

Well, that is what the test is for.  Forewarned is forearmed, or in this case, not put on the garden but into the field.

Ahh, I love spring. The temps are staying above 40 at night now.  
The last couple of days I got rutabagas and bokchoy started in soil blocks.  And I seeded pots with the Beit Alpha cucumbers and a heirloom variety called Home Made pickles  And a couple pots with butternut squash.  

I spent today doing bits of digging, popping dandelions out of where I want to put potatoes. They come out very easily, this is the area in deep mulch last year.  To maintain that I needed to cover it heavily last fall, but I didn't.  
I also put the strings for pole beans in the greenhouse and fixed one of hte soaker hoses.  Tomorrow I plant beans.  And fix more hose.  And maybe other stuff.

You've been busy!

This is such a busy time of year, good thing the sunshine and garden make me a bit hyper happy

The potatoes area is dug and fluffed and the first layer is planted with 2 pounds of All Blue, a late season potato. There were 13 small potatoes (1/sq with a slight fudge to fit the 13th).  The plan is that in a month I will hill them with more fluffy soil mix and plant a similar amount of Satina in a second layer.  Josh did something like this one year.

The radishes are up in the carrot/ parsnip bed so I took the cover off.  Just got to keep it gently watered.  I sprinkled the top with sand because it does not crust so it is easy for those plants to sprout through.

Here are the garden beds.  I saw an asparagus spear starting to poke up! The peas are sprouting and the cole crops are settled in.



The greenhouse is mostly planted.  Tomatoes and peppers on the right, beans on the left.  Inside the cukes have sprouted, they and a butter nut squash will go the left as well.  Basil starts are planted on the left and a few marigold volunteers.



At last we have tulips and other flowers, I am glad even to see the dandelions! 

That's a lot of work you did. Layering potatoes sounds interesting.

My goodness May has flown away and now it is June.  Today I planted the second layer of potatoes, a yellow called Satina.
 
A Hopa Crab apple, Hopa was my name for my grampa.


Eggplant tucked in the cold frame.  These are Ichiban and Diamond.  A week later and I see buds.  The ones in the greenhouse have not done well and I am replanting them along with a new bed that hopefully will water better.


The winter squash and zucchini planted out in a deep mulch.  They still feel like the sun is too bright, hence the thin blanky.


Beans in the greenhouse are running up their strings.  Cukes and squash are growing.  Tomatoes are blooming and some fruit has set.


Corn is up, Golden Bantam and Painted Hill.  Painted Hill was a day earlier only.


A lovely red cabbage.

You have been busy, Turan.  I have been busy pulling up couch grass and digging up creeping buttercup.

Kelejan wrote:You have been busy, Turan.  I have been busy pulling up couch grass and digging up creeping buttercup.

I had to look up couch grass, yup, it is my garden bane as well.  I know it as quack grass.  I have part of the garden covered with black plastic with holes for broccoli and cabbage to grow through, all in hopes to stop the quack grass and mint in those beds. I can battle it to a stand still, but it is never defeated.  Good luck in your pulling.

Turan, "it is never defeated"?  I guess couch or quack it is one of many that will also never be defeated.  One thing I find about it is that is fairly easy to pull up by taking a little at a time and pulling gently.  Do that on a regular basis and it doesn't look too bad.  The creeping buttercup is harder to remove.  My worst weed is horsetail or mare's tail that spreads via creeping roots, spores, and by just leaving a little bit in the ground.

I am sure the my little house, if left for a few years un-inhabited, would disappear under salmonberry bushes that send out underground tendrils underneath  four-foot wide landscape fabric and also ivy that can climb everywhere. Something to be said for living in a condo.

Yep, nature will reclaim if we don't stay on top "weeds or noxious" plants in our yards.

It frosted last night. Got down to 29*.  The potats and corn look pretty sad, I know the potats can recover but maybe it will erase the difference between the two layers/types?  The corn should recover mostly.  I did some research and the corn should recover because its growth point is either in the ground or just at soil level still.  They are going to look sad for awhile though.  I think I will give the corn some blood meal as a nitrogen boost.  The winter squash was covered and mostly looks fine but a few leaves were hit. In the greenhouse the bean and tomato vines that were growing close to the walls were burned.  We will see how the pole beans in there recover.  I watered well just now and by evening I will have a better idea of the damage.  

The snow on the mountains looks lovely though 

Oh no, so sorry.  I cannot imagine frost this late in the spring or maybe early summer.

I'm so sorry.

This is when you think of people who have to rely on what they grow just to survive.  So far when our gardens get kicked in the teeth, we can go to the grocery store down the road. But that could end if a whole country gets into trouble.

It will remind me start replacing all the food I had stored canned, frozen or dried etc.  I have been working at clearing my canning jars as I did little canning last year but the year before I had gone wild due an abundance of tomatoes, and fruit some of the jars were two or three years old.three years old.

Sorry about the frost damage. 

Kelejan, similar thoughts on survival have been dominate in my morning coffee pondering of late.  Here it is June and my harvest is chives, mint, garlic greens, lettuce, and 2 gallons of radishes and eggs.  How could my family survive on that?  It is a good thing our ancestors had dairy animals.  I think spring must of been really tough times living off of bits of this and that dried food stews with dandelion greens to hold off scurvy.

That late frost is not terribly unusual for here, but not common enough to expect either.  The weather forecast was for 32* at 5 am, just a light frost, but it hit 29* and was below freezing for several hours.  Even in the greenhouse anything taller than 3 feet shows damage.  

Good things are that I had just mulched the corn, so its growth point was fairly well protected.  One strip is fairly undamaged.  When I see how the rest is doing I will 'thin' the healthy strip by transplanting into the hardest hit areas. 
I already see baby leaves popping out on the pole beans so that should recover well, though probably in a bushy fashion

Today I am planting eggplant in the greenhouse.  I made a regular bed for it there instead of the long narrow containers I had been using there.  I think that will help the watering be more even. The eggplants that had seemed to be dying that I planted a month ago got transplanted in the open garden and were frosted.  One near the greenhouse wall already has buds of new growth near the ground.  Another was well covered so only slightly nipped.  So we will see how they do.
 The eggplant in the cold frame are blooming and I just buzzed them like I do early tomato blossoms.

The potatoes look very sad.  I wonder if I should cut off the frosted tops or just leave well enough alone.  They had already been hilled once so they have plenty of growth area to rebound from.

I started gardening as an experiment to see how many months it would take before being able to eat from a garden and how much it would produce. I started collecting information on homesteading (prepping?). I started seeds in February, 4 small beds made in March (Ken) and seedlings transplanted.

. . . Sorry, I'm back. Got to reading my first year journal, complete with photos, and was captivated by the journey. Basically it was May before I could snack in the garden. That is a long time from October (the idea) and May (the veggie).

Certainly gardening is not an instant gratification, if your focus is on food alone.  Thankfully the process has enough positive feedback to keep me going until I can feed my family from it.  Just thinking that is really a luxury that our ancestors did not have because it implies a choice that in some places was not there.  Though here, in a northern valley, horticulture of any type was not a survival technique until the last century.  Any rate~

It is intermittently pouring today and yesterday, which is good for my recovering plants.  The recovery is going well.  It is amazing how resilient plants are.

Corn putting up new leaves.


Potato regrowth on the frosted plant and the second layer planting sprouting next to it.


Ichiban eggplant blooming