Our 2014 garden is mostly planted. (more…)
Category: Journal
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Planning a 2014 garden
Starting a plan for the 2014 garden
Variety in the garden is important. Crop rotation is made easy with planning software. It is simple to layout next year’s garden. Looking back at old notes and gardens, variety is not my strong suit. I seem to plant the same varieties year after year.
This year will be different. Next year will have 1/3 new varieties. Any failed variety gets booted (Brandywine tomato, Gonzalez cabbage, Tomatillo Roma Verde). I will save seed from our best crops and use some swapped seeds from my family.
Row spacing is changing some too. To cultivate between rows, I’d like to buy a cultivator/hiller for the tractor. It uses adjustable tines, disk and blades. We can cultivate our 5 foot row spaces and then also rows space 2 1/2 feet too. It will hill corn in narrow rows and potatoes in wide rows.
Still need to buy and plant onion, shallot and garlic to be planted in the next few months before winter.
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Volunteers Help in the Garden
This late spring’s planting season weather has been strange. Frosts in May and the 90 degrees two weeks later. Tomatoes got a very late start with the summer heat approaching. Three of 30 early planted tomatoes have survived. The volunteers don’t mind at all. They come just for the joy of gardening. There is nothing strange about the urge to see things grow and get soil in your hands.
The kind people at Exencial Wealth Advisers have adopted garden! They come once per week to volunteer. In the last two weeks they helped finish planting (90 tomatoes, 100 pepper plants, tomatillos, okra, squash and almost 500 feet of corn!) and mulched.
Weeding and cultivating are the chores they took on this week. The picture above shows D’Anna Boone and Ryan Fuller. D’Anna used her hoe to cultivate potatoes, hilling soil around the plants and clearing weeds. Ryan weeded tomatoes, and I think (in the picture) is noticing the low hanging storm clouds moving our way. Within 15 minutes of that picture, we we swamped in a downpour. We hastily loaded up the buggies and sped for the barn. We were all soaked.
The unpredictable weather continues and our enthusiasm remains strong. A small sign of things to come are ripe strawberries! They are sparse and won’t make a crop, but next year they will.
Small as it may be, this is the garden’s first product. The sweet peas in the background will be the first real crop. The trellising has worked perfectly as almost all of the plants have attached to it and are blooming! I wonder if they need side dressing of fertilizer? The peas, onions and potatoes seemed to have disregarded the frosty weather and look pretty good.
Just visible in the foreground are asparagus fronds. The Martha Washington is emerging for the first time.
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Plant list update
This is the latest plant list for 2013. Several plants will be replaced after an early harvest and a second planting of anther variety will follow. The picture below exaggerates harvest time of these early crops like peas and scallions. Pole beans will follow peas and squash will follow the scallions and sweet onions.
Elm Tree Garden 2013 plant list. -
Garden plan update
This plan will be easier to trellis and to keep weed free. Single rows of potatoes, tomatoes and peas will make cultivation between plants simple and trellising will be reduced by half.
More single plant rows for easier cultivation and trellising. The plant count will also be reduced by half. Maybe the improved soil cultivation, weeding and more attention to each plant will raise plant yield some. Still expecting the garden to produce 2,000 pounds this year.
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Plant list for 2013
This being the garden’s first year, selection of varieties is a new chore. Yield has not been a big concern until now. I have always planted according to my fancy. But now yield means helping more people. List is updated based on input from Mary. (more…)
