We are still drying out after last week’s 7-8 inches of rain. Today I found standing water on the other side of the plot, so I brought 7 or 8 wagonloads of woodchips out. I covered most of the rest of the path through the middle of the garden, out to the wet spots. I didn’t manage to cover them fully as the sun was going down and it was dinner time. Hopefully tomorrow.
The strawberries are really getting there- nearly all of the recently planted crowns are doing fine. The wettest area of the bed is so nearly-dry that you can finally see the trenches that we dug (!).
there is still water pooled in the trenches we dug
Meanwhile, the Chandlers are still there but the grass around them is growing faster than I can keep up with. The Chandlers themselves are not growing much.
The garlic is still there, too, at least in part. I found this bug that needs looking up (if I’ve photographed enough details of it). Hoping it is a beneficial predator.
Today I put a bunch of woodchips just past the entrance to the garden and partway down the path between the north and south sides because there was standing water (and/or uncovered ground). I got out to the strawberries for a few minutes this morning and tried to cover up the roots that were sticking up under some of the crowns – we’ll see if that worked. It was raining on me as I worked and I tried to take pictures of the raindrops hitting the puddle down at the end of the bed. This photo is from late in the afternoon. I think the puddle looks smaller. More rain to come. Hopefully over the years we’ll get the soil to the point where this no longer happens.
We had about .20 inch of rain today. I got 15 strawberry crowns into the ground (by extending the bed to the drier north rather than continuing in the already-prepped south) today to bring the planting to a total of 70ish. The forecast as of a few days ago was for 6 inches of rain in 10 days. So that might be it for planting strawberries – we’ll see.
The planting I did this evening was in the tiny dark area at the top of the garden bed. In the other photo you can see that we’ve been doing some mowing.
I think I saw a millipede, a centipede, and a harlequin bug today. Plus countless slugs.
my view as i approached the (purchased) compost pile this morning
Today in anticipation of the rain I brought 5 or so wagonloads of compost out to the garden and spread it on soil that was bald/degrading. Some of the soil is cracked and dry, other soil is cracked but looks like it is growing some kind of moss or something. There are some new gopher mounds, since the gophers have really gotten going in the last 3 weeks and there seem to be a lot of gophers. Thanks a lot, cats, occasional hawks, foxes, owls, etc. Last night we spread bell bean seed in some bald areas in the “wheat” bed and in the bed that includes tillage radish (organic matter maximizer, was it?). I also dropped some fava bean seeds to the east of the east row of brassicas (there is a red cabbage that looked perfect yesterday and just past its prime today) and to the west of the old strawberries.
I have to check the strawberry plantings very closely because they are all producing buds or even flowers (!). I have pretty much decided to leave them on the old strawberries since there are so many, but it means that if we have a frost, that fruit will likely not make it.
if you look closely you will see a pretty strawberry flower
On Monday I started to clear the old brown and red leaves out of last year’s June-bearing (iirc) strawberries. You can really see the difference, but the ground underneath looks so impermeable. I wish I had time to finish that job and put compost (and maybe spray some fish/kelp stuff) around each plant.
I caught up on weeding the newer strawberries, garlic, and onions over last weekend, and started a new compost pile on Sunday (added in the remains of the previous compost, since there was still a lot of straw in there).
Z fixed the major irrigation break from the last time I mowed in the garden, and we keep discussing how we need to pull out all of the old drip tape. I found this mess today – either we had 4 lines in that bed, or there were 3 and one line was replaced but the old one hadn’t been removed.
4 pieces of drip tape stuck in horizontal holes in the old corn/beans/okra bed
The new strawberry clones (Seascapes) that I ordered have arrived! They were a bit dry in their open ziplock bags- I hope they will be ok. Parts of the bed were just about ready to be planted in before today’s rain 😦
I just ordered some strawberry crowns (and seeds, of course!). Hopefully they will come before the rain this next week. Or the rain the next week after that. Hopefully the ground will warm up and dry up enough so I’m not destroying the soil in my attempts at planting. Yay!
We had my kid’s birthday party at our place today. It was a beautiful 69 degree (F) day. There were about 8 kids present, and we pretty much had our version of a smashing success :). Two brothers played in our yard (I had mowed the grass really short on Thursday) most of the time – Grey Kitty loved the attention that they gave her. I loved seeing the yard get used. I need to get more outdoor toys for my kid “fer sure.”
I eventually showed people around the garden. It’s pretty sad right now – everything except the kales is bolting in the greens beds (this means that there are flowers to see, I guess), the strawberries are nearly invisible in the weeds, and there was hardly any sign that we are actually growing garlic and onions. I heard a mom exclaiming to her daughter when she spotted a ladybug. That kind of thing makes me want to have people over all the time! I did get out there later and weed the onions a bit and kill a bunch of slugs :). I hate how so much of my work in the garden involves killing. There are so many slugs out there. So. Many.
The ground is still so wet that I am having trouble envisioning planting anything. I feel so bad to be disturbing it by pulling out weeds, and I feel bad to be leaving the ground bare- hopefully that’s helping it to dry out.
one of the kids at the party enjoying running around
I worked in the garden more days than I went to the gym this week (4 days vs. 3! on one day I didn’t do either because we took our kid to the doctor)! This was partly due to not wanting to waste time driving while I have a sick kid at home/staying close in case I was really, really needed. I need to see someone to get a weights workout that’s tailored to preventing some of my aches and pains. I also need to do more stretching- I used to do a long stretch/PT every night. These days I usually only do my arms and feet, I only do my situp-type abs at the gym, and I only do water aerobics 2-3 times a week…
Tonight I weeded the strawberries. This involves an increasing amount of pulling off flower buds because the plants need to grow some more and we need to get past the threat of frost before they start producing fruit. It was a bit too wet to be walking out there today- we got about 3/4 of an inch yesterday.
Tomorrow I hope to do the poor onions. I accidentally mowed some of them the other day because I couldn’t tell where the row started. I do have the plants inside of the drip tape, but I couldn’t always see the drip tape to know to avoid it. I need to pull out a row of sprinklers before they get overgrown by the grass, too.
I’m feeling frustrated that I can’t find my companion planting notes- I thought they were on the first page in my notebook. Perhaps that page got torn out by little hands. Anyhow, note to self: marigold to deter cucumber beetles. Also: figure out how to view things on the blog based on tags.
Speaking of little hands, Z and T picked some greens while I was weeding. 🙂 Z’s dad showed me the pruning that he did the other day- mostly just cutting back dozens of watersprouts from under the three pear trees that are in the garden. The poor trees are so sick, and the watersprouts don’t look much better. Now we need to figure out how to get that wood plus the walnut (?) limb that fell this fall out of the garden. I am thinking we have a truck bring it out to another pile of wood near the driveway and chip it all.
Tonight I went out to collect slugs to experiment with dehydrating them with oyster shell lime. I knocked/picked as many as I could off of the greens (everything except dino and what I believe is curly kale is pretty much finished (flowering) and should be pulled out 😦 ). I think I had too many for the size of the container and the amount of lime. I should have added the lime in layers as I added more slugs. I dumped them into a hole that some wildlife had dug, and when I walked past later, there were a number of slugs crawling through the nearby grass. The project was probably also a failure due to the fact that it started sprinkling, and then raining lightly, while I was out there!
I forgot that the other day I hadn’t really weeded the west row of the Chandler strawberries, and started pulling the grass back on the east side. DOH! That other part of the bed is going to be a mess – already I’ve pulled off a lot of blossoms (keep growing, plants!!) and some leaves that were rotting on the wet soil. It is supposed to rain for the foreseeable future 😦
I seriously can only get this much weeding done
I definitely should not have had the mower on its highest setting the other day, as I pretty much need to mow again!! When one is out in the field, one can see the difference in where I mowed, though.
Lastly, I turned the compost and thought about ducks and/or weeder geese and how it would be cool to have them eating the slugs and pulling the unwanted grasses.
Most of the time I was out there, I was berating myself for having swept the house instead of gardening yesterday when my inlaws were over. I really did need to do some cleaning and organizing, and having done those things made me feel a lot better about the day.
I think I spent about 4 hours in the garden today! I weeded the strawberries while Z and T ran some errands late this morning and early this afternoon. In the evening, I weeded those Chandlers some more and then put compost under the plants. (Sadly there are plenty of weeds still in the bed). I noticed that a lot of plants that had frost damage had exposed roots, and some didn’t seem to like having their leaves touch blades of grass.
Then I made sure to shift the compost that I started earlier this week (2nd shifting). I put a whole bale of straw out on the path down the middle of the garden and alongside/in the bed of summer strawberries. I’m starting to experiment a bit with using palm fronds as path mulch. I didn’t cut the fronds up at all, so we’ll see if they break down, get slippery, or work well to cover the ground. I put a bit of straw alongside the east greens.
Speaking of the greens, I noticed that the biggest leaf on my chard plant was wilting yesterday and tried tugging on the plant- yep, it had been chewed clean off of the roots. I harvested those leaves and put the plant back into the ground (I should probably try a different spot, though, huh?). There’s a plant that I threw out of the compost pile a ways back that seems to have rooted. We’ll have to keep an eye on that one! So out of 8 plants that looked so healthy and delicious months ago, I now have 0 plants in the garden.
Pest/IPM report: There was some strange poop near the strawberries. I’m assuming it was from a fox. There’s lots of digging from the raccoons everywhere. It’s so awful. I missed one cucumber beetle today and killed one other. There are plenty of slugs around if you’re out after dark and look hard enough. The plants are growing slowly — it’s been around and below freezing most nights recently.
I was hoping to do some mowing since the grass alongside some of the beds is getting to be annoyingly tall, but it’s just too wet. I think there is a sweet spot around 2 or 3pm some days when it’s sort of dry enough, but that’s naptime.
I’m not happy about the cracked soil that’s down below. Need to keep it covered, preferably with live plants.
Well, I still haven’t planted a whole bed of fava beans (there are some growing with our greens). I pulled out some cover crop and grain seeds today. T was excited about the wheat seed, so we planted that in the nicely tilled bed that I was going to put favas in (and hurt my knee trying to hoe yesterday). The things we do to avoid huge tantrums (successfully).
I also planted Territorial’s “Wintermax” which should have been planted in September. It has tillage radish (I really want to grow that!), hairy vetch (iirc we grew purple vetch last year), and rye. I put this in 4 beds, plus maybe the end of the wheat bed. I added bell beans (some were beans that we grew, and some were from the 50 pound bag of bell bean seed that we bought. I put those seeds in the 4 (or 6, depending how you look at it) west-most beds. They need a lot of work, so hopefully some of these seeds will grow. It’s supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow night.
(not sure why Z raked the end of the south beds- maybe to pull out all the excess grass and dirt.)
I would have gotten a lot more done (maybe), but an old friend who is visiting from out of town came by for a visit with her 3 kids and hubby. It was awesome to watch the kids explore the garden together. They picked strawberries (wow, there were some to pick! i hadn’t picked in something like a week) – there were actually some undamaged big Albions. They hung out on the pile of compost. The little girl covered up some of the seeds that were on the surface (we didn’t get around to raking them in). It was so sweet. Then we came inside and they played with what seemed like every one of his toys. It was so much fun!
Z’s family comes to town tomorrow. We’ll have some kids who are currently sick staying with us, so I should really head towards bed…
I read today that nasturtiums can help repel cucumber beetles. I’ve tended to avoid them because in my experience they harbor slugs. Something to research- maybe they can grow on a fence at the edge of the garden.
farmingmum 