Garden Progress

This weekend has seen some real progress on the garden. Here's what it looked like on the morning of 4/2.

Recall that the area on the left side of the picture had much less snow on it than the area on the right side. Over on the right side, sporadic hairy vetch plants survived the winter, but their spring progress has been less than enthusiastic. More towards the left side, not only did the vetch survive, but the "annual" grass and weeds survived. There were two main expected benefits to the vetch, one is that the "vigorous" growth in the spring would out-compete the weeds. Unfortunately, this vetch didn't seem to get that memo because both the grass and the weeds are growing faster than the vetch. The other benefit was nitrogen fixation. To check on that, I pulled up a vetch plant to look at the roots.

Those little round nodules are where the symbiotic bacteria live and do their fixation. Since there seem to be a good number of those, it seems likely that they are doing their job.

However, they won't be doing their job for much longer.....

Yes, I finally gave in and decided to till. The thing that really changed my mind is that the no-till works best when you have permanent beds that won't be compacted by walking on them. Because of the space constraints in my backyard, I don't really have enough room for permanent beds. I will have to rotate the location of the plants from year to year, so I won't really be able to have permanent beds. The other thing is that the vetch wasn't really doing its job of suppressing weeds and the longer I let the weeds/grass get established, the harder it will be to get rid of.

Thanks to Dave and Amy for letting me borrow their tiller, and thanks to my lovely wife for taking some of these pictures. Personally I think she should have been the one doing the modeling in these photos.

Before tilling I did spread out the modest amount of compost I had. I had started the compost in the fall and put a good amount of stuff in then, but I hadn't put much in over the winter. I did turn it over with a shovel a few times, but I wasn't really expecting it to be ready this spring. It actually looks like pretty good stuff, but after spreading it out, there sure wasn't much of it.

After tilling, I watered the soil and then planted all the snow peas, about 1/3 of the Pak Choi, Rainbow Chard, Arugula, and Green Onions areas. Also, the Onion sets were scheduled to go in next weekend, but since the weather report is looking so warm, I decided to plant half the bulbing onion area.

Not having much experience with many of these veggies, (or at least their seeds) I was surprised at what some of the seeds looked like. For instance the tomatoes. When you see tomato seeds in an actual tomato they are little round disks that look like they have a gellatinous envelope around them. The tomato seeds I planted last week were tiny irregularly shaped disks with fuzz on them. The Pak Choi was little tiny hard spheres. The onion seeds looked like very fine, rough gravel. The weirdest was the rainbow chard. It looked like popcorn-sized kernels with sharp spiky protrusions on them.

I was debating whether or not to still put down newspaper to suppress weeds. You're supposed to put something down on top of it to help keep it moist and keep it from blowing away, but mulch turns out to be kind of expensive, and the two places I went to didn't have any straw. I started to put down newspaper anyway, but it turned out to not be a very enjoyable task. I ended up just putting it down in three small areas of the garden that I thought might be the most likely to have weed problems. Then I sprayed it with water to weigh it down and help it stick to the dirt. I expect that if there is any significant wind in the next week or so all the paper will end up in the corner of the yard.

Oh, and one other thing. The seeds I planted last week are starting to sprout. Two of the three broccoli seeds sprouted. Somehow 7 out of the 6 tomato seeds I planted have sprouted. Yes, I realize that doesn't make any sense. An extra one must have snuck in there somehow. It looks like several of the pepper seeds have germinated and have sent out roots(they were planted very close to the surface per the instructions). So far, so good.