Garden tasks done this week

I've finally started the tomatoes indoors. Good thing the time came to do that, for I kept buying tomato seed varieties. I feel a bit of a hoarder! I have ten sorts, and 1-5 of each sort planted in 20 ounce drink cups. I may also grab a sun sugar hybrid tomato start at Lowe's when I go there Monday. (I'm at Lowe's so often, it's ridiculous. I see the clerks there more often than I see my relatives.) Sun Sugar is the sweetest tomato I've ever had and I wouldn't mind one every year. My peppers are coming along, as are my eggplants. I have a lot of potted flower starts awaiting that forecast that says that for the next 10 days there will be no freeze.

I'm in the process of hardening off all these indoor plant starts. I have head lettuce and herbs and potatoes-in-a-bag all hardened off ready to go outside permanently once the weather cooperates.

I did go ahead and plant root crop seeds and put the onions and leeks out. They can tolerate 30 degrees, and that's the worst that is in my forecast right now--and that frost is only one night of the next 10. So white turnips, yellow beets, and two varieties of orange carrots are seeded in the big garden. White chard and rainbow chard seeds are in with them, as is bok choi. Kohlrabi starts are planted out.  Kale starts are planted out and looking good.

rainbow chard. image Wikimedia

I've also been working on "infrastructure." I put in anti-rabbit fencing around sensitive crops. They leave potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes alone, so I don't need to fence them. Melons and winter squash are too big to fence, though I'll put row covers over a chicken wire cover over them until the female flowers appear to prevent insect damage, and I'm hoping it deters rabbits.

I also worked on repairing my shed, which has some rotting wood and the bottom where it touched soil. I'm cutting away the worst of it, putting up new wood, and the door had pretty bad peeling paint (despite facing north), so I did one whole day of just scraping, wire brushing, and sanding. I'm waiting for the next rain storm to come and go before painting the door and new boards.

It's the photographer who is crooked, not the shed!

Once that's done, I'm tacking chicken wire to the bottom all around the shed to prevent rabbits from living beneath it. I bend out about a foot of the chicken wire fencing along the ground too, so they can't dig in, a trick I learned from gardeners on the internet.

Where I put compost already and I will plant nothing until at least the first of May or, in one case, not until next year (currant bushes), I've put in daikon radish seeds. They're big, and the concept is, they send their big roots down and break up clay soil. Instead of harvesting them normally, you break them off just under the surface, cover them back up, and let them rot in the ground. So they've forced a tunnel into the clay and over a year's time, the rotting vegetation will incorporate itself into the clay soil with the help of worms and make the clay less impenetrable, and something of the tunnel it made will remain. The compost will help loosen the soil too, as will the leaves and cardboard that are under the compost. (I applied those in early December.) I've lifted the cardboard and can see the worms already at work on it, so the system is working so far. It will take three years of similar mulching, cover crops, and so on to make the clay soil into something that won't bend your spade when you try to dig it after a dry spell.

After the shed project is done, I'm building trellising for the tomatoes, which won't be planted out for another month. I'm using either seven foot t-posts with pig fencing attached, or nine foot metal electrical conduit that I'll drill holes into to use as stakes or as framework for a nylon net trellis I bought for $8 online. It's all a bit of an experiment, though I do know I need to tie tomatoes up better than I did last year. I've also learned that it's perfectly okay to top your tomato plants off once they reach the top of your trellising system. You probably aren't losing a lot of tomatoes doing so, as those last bits flowering 10 ft up in the sky might not have gotten ripe before the first frost anyway.

conduit + net trellis.

I also replaced my sliding back screen door with about the most expensive one Lowe's sells, and this thing is going to last for a while. The installation is simple as can be.

So many of my veg are planted in the ground or under grow lights inside for the spring and summer garden. Repairs and improvements are coming along. I have bare-rooted strawberries in hanging baskets (the only way I can get a strawberry; otherwise, squirrels will get them all.) I haven't messed up anything in any big way yet, though I've learned lessons that will help next year be much more streamlined and simple.

The main lesson learned? Plant everything you can possibly plant via seed directly in the ground. The plants will be hardier, the stems thicker, and the hardiest will survive. Pretty much all I'll begin inside under grow lights next year are peppers, eggplant, celery, and tomatoes, which have such a long growing season there's really no way around starting them inside. It'll save not only time and money, but the endless mess my kitchen and dining room have been in for the past three months! I'm getting tired of apologizing to visitors for how it looks.

I'll report in ten days or so with photos of my little crops as they grow up in the great outdoors.