planting the spring garden

A foggy morning and forecast rainy mid-day has me able to take a breath and catch up on inside jobs, like posting here. Yesterday, I planted 18 kinds of seeds and kohlrabi, cabbage, broccoli, beet, and onion/leek/shallot starts. I'm trying to figure how many individual seeds I put in one by one. 2300? Something like that. Plus 124 individual plants (onions, you start in a clump, and then pull each one out, and plant it by itself, so one cell of onions can take 45 minutes to plant!) It took over 5 hours, though part of that time was running back to feed the fire of yard waste. Most pictures of it would look like bare dirt--not exciting--so here are four cabbages:

And yes, don't worry. Everything I planted can take 28 degrees, and some of them can take 20. Also, being lower to the ground as baby plants makes them get another couple of degrees of heat as the ground holds onto it during the night.

This morning, I checked my saved seed potatoes and cut the big ones I bought from Tractor Supply. What I learned was that keeping them in the fridge kept them from sprouting, but in the dark in a box covered by newspaper in an unheated room was not enough to sustain dormancy in the red potatoes (Chieftains). So next year, I'll refrigerate the red ones but let the gold, white, and russet varieties stay under cover in a cabinet in the garage. where they shouldn't sprout. I also discovered pretty small potatoes--the size of a big strawberry--sprout fine. How many potatoes those little guys will produce is yet to see, but I'll give it a shot.

I didn't count precisely, but I think that's 160 potatoes or potato pieces to plant. If 20 fail, and 20 don't produce many potatoes, that's still supposed to yield 600 pounds of potatoes if you count by plant, and 300 if you count by weight. Somewhere in between those two amount will be my likely harvest. (remember, 20 pounds of that gets saved as seed potatoes for next year.) Those cut ones need to scab over for 5 days, and so any time between 3/17 and 3/31, I'll plant them all one morning or afternoon. I'm going to try using a bulb planter, which sounds like a good approach when planting this many potatoes by hand.


Except for the endless task of picking up sweet gum balls in my front yard every other day, I feel pretty much caught up outdoors. The next two weeks are mostly a matter of tending to seedlings, which includes taking the flat of flowers I have started outdoors into the shed at nightfall if temps are to drop below freezing by the next morning, and schlepping the four trays I keep inside under grow lights outside on afternoons over 50 degrees so they can get mostly hardened off sooner. Plus weeding, as weather allows, plus planting the potatoes.




Mowing hasn't started yet--about April 20, when frost-sensitive plants are in the ground, I'll do my first mowing. And I have less to mow! Yay, me! So right now, with the spring garden planted and most of the yard waste burned, it isn't too busy outdoors for the next 3 weeks.

By the time May 1 arrives, when tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers go out (about 115 plants, plus their trellising/stakes), the earliest spring crops are ready to harvest. So that starts a pretty busy time, as crops need to be cleaned, eaten, given away, sold, or preserved.

I got two compliments yesterday while working, though I was in the backyard, and barely visible. Neighbors are happy when I say to drop by in August for tomatoes (with 68 plants, I should have plenty to give away) and in a few years, for apples. (This assumes I don't get pissed off at the government here or tired of being taxed to extremes and move out.) I computed how much strawberries I'd have next year if I kept all 100 plants alive and weather is good: 3.3 bushels, mostly in June. And I plan to allow every plant to produce 2 daughters, so in 3 years, I could be getting 10 bushels! Look, I love strawberries, but no one loves them that much!

Yes it's hard work. But that's my exercise program, and I love the outdoors, and I love seeing the yard change from weedy useless lawn and dead trees to a vibrant, life-filled system of healthy plants.

too tired to take pix, but...

I have that pile of wood chips spread. It might be a little too thin in places, but it got the whole 1/3 of the yard done, all the way to the start of the future apple area. 5500 square feet in chips or mulch now (I measured). Yay, me! I'm rather old, and it made me tired to work that hard four hours per day, but it's done. Here's an updated plan of the side yard with hatch marks to indicate where I've chipped both last year and this. The apple tree section I'll get to this autumn.

There's a lot of trashy stuff at the bottom of the pile of free wood chips, like branches that didn't get chipped, so tomorrow, I get out my little electric wood chipper and grind up branches probably for six hours.

Saturday is burning day, and all the trashy bits and branches too big to fit in that chipper plus all the pine limbs that fell in an ice storm get burned (winds permitting). Sunday, I re-fence my "Big Bed" for more rabbit-proof space to grow in. Then rain comes and settles in for the week, though only one day will be heavy, and I'll be able to dash out a little bit every day other than that. But sporadic time will be enough! Because most of the big projects are done for the spring, due to this bizarre false spring of 10 days that let me work like a stevedore and zip through my list.

Any time after 3/15 when forecasts have no 28F or below nights predicted, I can get in my brassicas and seed potatoes. A few days later, I can seed carrots, spinach, and lettuce. April 2-5, my 138 bare-root fruit plants arrive and in they go.  This includes:

Yum, right? Also, weeds are more a problem in the spring, so there will be a lot of weeding.

The bluebird house is up and positioned better than it has been, so I have hopes of bluebirds this year. I have five trays of seed starts going, and in ten days I start 2 trays of tomatoes. Irises and daffodils have poked their noses up. Its truly the run-up to spring. Here's to a wonderful growing season for us all.