Egg Hunt

Yesterday I was out in the garden preparing to clear away last year's debris when something unusual caught my eye:






The children were promptly notified of this discovery. We speculated on what kind of creature could have left such a treasure in the compost pile:







After a brief and excited discussion, we quickly came to a consensus that the mother probably bears a close resemblance to this specimen:



It was then revealed via Google Search that yon brush pile shall remain undisturbed for 29 days and nights, lest this may come to pass:



That would mean finalizing this year's garden layout would have to wait until after May 20 (give or take); an unacceptable time line and quite frankly not an option for me or my seedlings.

Violent opposition was voiced and revolution was threatened when this course of action was suggested:

It's THAT time of year again

Okay, so after spending the last several dark, cold, snowy months at my computer, scouring the online seed seller websites, both big and small, I think I finally have procured all the seed varieties I could possibly want, for this season, anyway.
I have discovered some new and exciting sources, and have made some variety changes from last season; the reasons for which will be topics for future discussions.

The Cake Garden

I knew I was saving those flimsy plastic cake domes from supermarket-bought birthday cakes for a reason.

Though nights are still below freezing here in early April, the bed against the house, warmed by radiant heat from the foundation and dotted with plastic cake domes, becomes a microclimate for early salad fixins.

Slugs prefer pak choi 10 to 1 over spinach.



Legend has it that a circle of copper deters slugs. The science behind that claim is that copper produces a mild electric charge when in contact with moisture, and slugs find that most irritating. Unraveled copper scouring pads twisted into collars for baby pac choi look like weird plant jewelry.

What the heck is erba stella anyway? I hope it's not like arugula.

Let The Madness Begin

Special thanks to Dan over at the Urban Veggie Garden Blog for the HTML tutorial!

Filling the Raised Beds

The view from my bedroom window provides a nice overview of the garden. It took Pakman and Weatherboy along with Junior Gardener 2 whole days to move the 8 yards of topsoil/compost from the driveway to the garden. Whew I get tired just thinking about them. Those boxes are only 2x6 framing, now I'm thinking I should have spent the extra money for 2x8's. But overall I'm very pleased with how the project is turning out. The yard slopes fairly significantly to the rear and to the left, so those beds, especially the rear ones, are actually level, but are all at different altitudes, so from this angle (and almost every angle) they look all cattywompus. That white pole is for a volleyball net (remember this was nothing but lawn about 8 days ago), the massively cemented base for it fell smack dab on the centerline of this garden rectangle, purely by coincidence. I was going to leave the pole there and make it as a bean trellis,



then I thought it needed a flag with a picture of a tomato and a corn cob on it, but I ultimately decided to take it out and plant marigolds there. The long dirt row to the right without sideboards is going to be planted with Tom Wagner's potato sampler this year~much more on that later. The 10'x15' unmulched area at the rear will be for corn, mostly. It's very dense clay and in need of lots of amendments. And no I didn't loosen the native soil in each box before having the topsoil dumped in. I'm sure the plants, for the most part, will do just fine.

Pray for an Epidemic

Apparently, the school board here has ordered the entire district closed Monday and Tuesday due to swine flu. However, according to the pre-recorded phone call this morning, my eldest will be thrilled to know that A.P. exams will continue on schedule, and students will be admitted "provided they are not showing any flu symptoms", whatever that means. Looks like the weather will cooperate for a lovely unexpected vacation for everyone else. My 10th-grader did for a fleeting moment feel genuine sorrow for the kid who got the flu who prompted this drastic district-wide measure, but don't worry, she quickly got over it.

On the garden front, this week I arranged and leveled all 21 raised beds, dug in170 linear ft. of plastic edging, laid landscape fabric, and spoke words of encouragement and adulation as Pakman and Junior Gardener went back and forth moving 5 yards of cypress mulch from driveway to garden. And tomorrow morning 8 yards of topsoil/compost is being delivered! That means I can have plants in the ground by tomorrow night! I am feeling a little light-headed....

My eldest has taken our only functioning digital camera with him to Anaheim on Tuesday, which is why I have no spectacular mulch photos to post. He is due back tonight, so get ready.

It's becoming a garden!

Remember my two wistful posts back in January about my then bleak and snow-covered backyard which concealed my future garden? Well look at it now! We did rent a sod cutter, and once we got the hang of it, it was pretty easy, except for turning the thing, that took two people. Sorry, no videos or pics of the actual cutting operation, couldn't find the camera at that moment and didn't want to spend time searching for it because we were on the clock, had to have the sod cutter back at the Home Depot by 3 on Saturday or they'd charge extra.

Sadly, to Junior Gardener's disgust and horror, we must have sliced at least fifty million earthworms into a hundred million that day. Running the sod cutter was easy and actually kind of fun, but the really hard (and tedious) part that took the longest was cutting the strips into managable slices (with kitchen knives), rolling them up (avoiding as best we could the half-worms and worm guts, as well as the occasional grub, catapillar, or spider), hoisting the sod rolls into the wheel barrel, carting them to the back of the yard and throwing them onto the skillfully engineered and unexpectedly ginormous sod heap ~ look kids, it's our new sledding hill! The plan is to let the sod compost itself down into rich humus by next spring. Maybe I should cover it with a tarp of some sort.

I could not wait, I just had to go get some of the raised bed frames and arrange them on the fresh ground, just to get a feel of it.

3' wide wood mulch pathways will surround the boxes.

I'm so geeked I can hardly stand it!

Now, add some black plastic edging, landscape fabric, a truckload each of wood mulch and topsoil/peat mix, (and a handful of Motrin), and voila! Le Poteger est ne!

And the really cool thing about this whole thing is--we did it ourselves. And did quite a fine job too if I do say so myself.

...boy am I tired.

Wood for Raised Beds!! Woo-hoo!!!

The thing that has been trapped inside my imagination since last January is going to become a reality! The design and layout has changed a dozen times over as many months, not to mention the countless sheets of paper sacrificed, done over with version after version....but today was the day that those countless arguments about money and feasibility appear to have come to fruition...Pakman took all the seats out of the mini-van and brought back a load of 2x6's from the lumberyard...the first entry on the material take-off list I had prepared just for this venerable occasion...pics to follow.

60 degrees on February 10. In Michigan. WTF????

Hard to believe that just ten days ago, it was 2 degrees below zero, and I was cutting apart pallets for firewood, and we had just invested in a new portable oil heater, it had been so durn cold for so durn long. Then yesterday it was 45 degrees. Today it's supposed to approach 60. So what did I do as soon as the schoolbus turned the corner with the kids? Pruned the lilacs of course! That took all of 45 minutes.

Then I went around to the side of the house, where the people before us had planted 4 "burning bushes" along the garage. What a waste of a good south-facing 40' long brick wall which gets sun all day. It's almost criminal, planting useless crap like that in such a prime location. There ought to be a law. Those have got to come out. And soon. I have visions of cucumbers and vining tomatos, perhaps a kiwi or three, even reaching as high as that second story window...

I got the shovel and tested the soil around one of them. Not frozen, but pretty much a solid mass of roots, even 3' from the trunk. Digging them out is definitely going to be one b*tch of a job. They're about 5' tall, so I'd like to salvage them and transplant them just inside the rear fence, which would screen the neighbor's patio from direct view of our patio. Until I can enlist my son and/or brother to help yank these out, I suppose I'll busy myself cleaning the garage. Yep, spring fever is coming early this year.

First Brush Strokes

In the summertime, the house does not shade the garden area as in this photo. Go ahead--click to enlarge. There will be 3 blocks each 13'x13', separated by 3' strips of lawn. the blocks will each have 4 raised beds that are 3'x8'x8" deep, and one in the middle 3'x3', surrounded by 18"-24" wide paths with gravel or pavers. On the side there will be three 13'x18" wide raised bed strips for trellis crops. Can you detect the design influence of Mel Bartholomew? Yep, mom had a copy of his original book way back in the late 70's. She left it laying around where just anyone, including impressionable young children, could pick it up and read it. Plan to fill those beds with 50/50 topsoil/peat blend from a local dirt dealer. Beyond the garden, a little shed with a trellis on its south side, and a larger traditional plot for sprawling heavier winter squash that won't do well on a trellis. In the back, there will be rows of fruit trees spaced roughly 7' apart, in mulched beds, which will be pruned and trained severely never to exceed 7-8' tall. Got that idea from Dave Wilson Nursery. Left a nice space for a good size grape/kiwi arbor that will double as a party pergola. Might not get built until next season but you never know. Then there's going to be a blackberry patch and a raspberry patch...and then maybe some taller bushes such as blueberry and aronia, along the south fence line to screen the neighbor's swimming pool (which is just outside of this frame)...yes I have put quite a bit of thought into this already.... why?

Empty Canvas

My yard. My future garden and orchard. My solace and my sanity. 75' wide by approx. 120' deep. Dreaming of the possibilities....

Things that are Purple

My list of purple garden crops for 2009 (yes I plan to grow all of these):

All-Blue Potatoes
Bolivian Rainbow Hot Pepper (purple at one of the stages)

Violetto Cauliflower, Falstaff Brussels Sprouts
Hungarian Breadseed Poppy , Carbon Tomato
Lavender (the flower), Purple Tiger Hot Pepper

Purple Beauty Sweet Pepper
Crapaudine Beets (more of a mahogany black)
Flame Lettuce, Dragons Tongue Bush Beans
Forellenschluss Lettuce
Burgundy Onions, Burgundy Okra
Painted Mountain Sweet Corn (ok not purple per se but ears can have blue or burgundy kernals)
Orach, Purple Pole Beans
Pepino Dulce, Purple Sprouting Broccoli
Purple Asperagus
Purple Haze Hybrid Carrots
Purple Globe Radish

Rosa Bianca Eggplant, Rosita Eggplant

Blue Bean Vine (a.k.a. "dead man's fingers", an akebia relative, just for fun)
Chinese red noodle beans
Blackberries, Blueberries, Aronia Berries, Grapes
Not pictured: Purple Tomatillos

Purple things that will not be growing in my garden this year:

purple kohlrabi-mine is "Gigante", a white variety

purple-top turnips, mine will be white and golden

purple plums- I'm planning Green Gage and Toka (red)

purple sage-mine will be just plain old sage-colored sage

red cabbage-too obvious

I am also impatiently awaiting the release of new purple varieties of Pumpkins, Cucumbers, Paw Paws and purple Karelas. What's the hold up, breeders?

Speaking of Tomatoes

Traditionally, January is the month of garden planning. However I began planning mine back in August, so by now the plan is pretty much done. I'm also using a spreadsheet to organize and calculate my choices. Spreadsheets are a very powerful tool, and one must be cautious that such power be used for good and not for evil. So far, 2009's garden will cost approximately $1,614 not counting the stone mulch, cubic yard of vermiculite, and lumber for the 15 new raised beds. Ok maybe that's a little extreme but I have been on gardening hiatus for about 6 years and I guess I'm just making up for lost time. Also the fact that the new house has about 1/3 acre yard with basically nothing except grass, Only 2 trees and is fenced in, makes me a little giddy. Included in that amount is 18 fruit trees and a hedge of Leyland Cypress so don't roll your eyes like Pakman.

I did narrow my tomato varieties from about 25 down to 11 finalists and feel very good about it. They are:

Regular Red Slicers:

New Big Dwarf: Only 60 days, determinant 2' tall plants, producing 12 to 16 oz fruit, going to grow this one in containers.

Stupice (rhymes with "eureka"): 55 days, smallish fruit but sets in cold weather

Longkeeper: supposed to be able to pull up the entire plant, fruits and all, right before a killing frost, and hang the whole thing upside down in the basement and have constant supply of vine ripened fruit through January-February. Cant wait to try this one!

Caspian Pink: Cooler weather plant supposed to rival Brandywine in taste.

Specialty cool colors:

Copia- Red/orange fine vertical stripes

Big Zebra- Green/yellow fine vertical stripes

Ananas Noir-Mottled rainbow colored, photos I have seen show mostly green/purple outside w/ red core

Carbon-purple tomato, supposed to less prone to cracking

Banana Legs- so I can make yellow spaghetti sauce to top red (tomato-flavored) pasta and a sprinkling blue cheese of course.

Currant tomatoes:

Matt's wild cherry- just to see what all the hype is about

white currant-so I can make a salad with tiny white tomatoes, pink fleshed radishes, giant purslane and Bull's Blood beet greens.

(pic of bananalegs is from tradewinds fruit, rest are from gettle.org)