Startup 2012

I love having all of my garden stuff over here at a separate blog. Classify stuff? Yes, that's me.

Anyway, we got a little later start on the garden than last year, and after seeing the late frosts that we've gotten, I'd say it's a good thing. We thought we had lost some tomatoes and eggplants to a frost a couple of weeks ago. But when we went to plant more tomatoes yesterday, we discovered that though the plants had lost a few leaves, apparently the roots were okay, because they were putting out new growth. We only lost one plant, so New Daddy went back to Home Depot to return four tomato plants.

Here are the current totals in the garden:
Tomatoes
4 Better Boy
4 Mountain Pride
2 Roma
2 Cherokee Purple (heirloom)
1 Mortgage Lifter (heirloom)
1 yellow cherry

Peppers
2 yellow
2 red

Eggplant
2 Ichiban- thin, Asian variety


Because we have chickens and a dog who like to get into things, we have fenced the whole garden off with wire fencing and chicken wire. And it's the perfect structure for our Rattlesnake beans and pickling cucumbers to grow on. So those will be all around the edge of the garden- and hopefully very accessible. We'll be planting those seeds on Thursday and Friday, the next two good planting days this week.

Before we put down cardboard and straw for the same weed/moisture control as last year, New Daddy made a trip to Back to the Garden to buy beautiful, black, organic compost. The trailer-load cost $100, which, given the quality of the compost, was a good price. In March, I heard a talk on composting and learned that the reason our eggshells and plant matter weren't compost was because our tumbler didn't have enough water in it. I've started adding more water, so maybe we'll have better success. There have been lots more flies in the compost lately, so that should start some good worm-action. This year, our composter did not provide enough compost to sufficiently amend our 18 x 40-foot plot of mostly red clay. Maybe I can get things more active this year, and we'll have several usable batches by next year. For this year, Back to the Garden was a huge help.

Before another tilling, we also added lime to the soil where the tomatoes were going to be planted. I think New Daddy tilled the garden a total of three times this year! Good thing he got a self-propelled tiller a couple of years ago. It went pretty quickly.

I'll try to get a camera outside and edit this post with a picture. I really like how the fencing and straw make the garden look neat. We can actually mow around it and keep the edges confined this year!

To-plant list for Thursday and Friday:
rattlesnake pole beans
okra
squashes- with diatomaceous earth in the planting hole to prevent boring worms?