Introduction to my garden

The plan for 2007 goes like this:

On the porch roof at my house, there will be tomatoes as usual.  This year I got a bunch of awesome heirloom tomatoes.  I didn’t mean to get so many, I only wanted one really, the black krim.  We get lots of tomatoes from our CSA and don’t really need many more.  But the place I ordered from had a minimum order, so I had to get 5 kinds.  I started them kind of late, on March 29.  It’s been kind of cold, and they are not actually germinating all that great.  I tried not to get carried away this year, I only planted three seeds of each kind, because all I really wanted was one plant of each (maybe 2 of the black krim).  Any extra seedlings are going to Ivanna because she won’t be back in Boston in time to start her own seedlings.  Anyway, these fancy seeds are not germinating all that great.  I’ve got one out of three germinating in each little pot.  Maybe the rest will still come up as it gets warmer. 

Also on the porch roof: I’m planning on growing eggplants for the first time this year, Rosa Biancas, which are supposedly less bitter than regular eggplants, and also white with lavender streaks.  Also cayenne peppers and paprika peppers, because someone once said "you’ve NEVER had paprika until you’ve grown your own!" and I want to try it.  The eggplants and peppers have not sprouted yet, and I’m getting anxious about them.  I wish it would get warmer, I don’t have the money or inclination to set up an artificially warmed and lighted seed starting place, I only have my bathroom window.  Finally, there will be lots of basil up there with the tomatoes and eggplants and peppers, as per usual.  Basil is the only thing I’m really good at growing.  Two of my plants from last year are still living in the upstairs bathroom, we’ve had fresh basil whenever we wanted all winter.  Genovese and Thai basil are sprouting happily.  I will have some to give away if anyone wants some. 

This year I’m planning on establishing an herb garden in my tiny little patch of a front yard, near the ornamental cherry tree.  I think I’ll dig a small bed, outside of the drip line of the tree, and put some other stuff in pots, inside the drip edge.  That’s so the tree roots don’t grow into the garden and hog all the water and compost.  I already dug up and gave away the little bush that was there, a pretty little pink-blooming spirea shrub.  It’s nice, but it was in the only sunny spot, and I can’t eat it.  It went to a good home at JP Cohousing.

I already planted some sugar snap peas in window boxes on the front porch, with hemp twine strung up to the porch roof for them to climb on.  But they haven’t sprouted, and it’s been nearly two weeks!  I’m real bummed out.  I dug in the dirt, looking to see what the seeds are up to, whether they’ve died and rotted or what.  But they’re there, all plump and green, just not sprouting yet.  I guess it’s just been too cold.  I’ll keep waiting.  The seeds were old, maybe that’s slowing them down.  I’m also planning on planting some snow peas as well, and have been wishing I’d planted them sooner, but apparently it doesn’t matter since the others haven’t come up yet.  I’ll get around to it soon.  Apparently I made a mistake with the hemp strings – I anchored them to rocks in the bottom of the window boxes, so the string goes right down into the dirt.  Duh.  My super duper compost rich container mix rotted the hemp string and now they are just floating in the breeze.  If any of these peas come up I will have to come up with another way of anchoring the strings to the window boxes.

 

My super-duper hemp-rotting compost, freshly sifted:

In my community garden on Oakdale Street, I’ve already got 80 heads of garlic growing, that I planted last October.  I haven’t checked on them lately.  They probably started growing in that warm spell in early March, then got stunted.  It’s been so cold at night, I hope they haven’t been damaged by frost.  I gave them a good layer of mulch back in the fall – once it warms up more I’ll pull it back and let the sun shine directly on the dirt to warm it up.  The plan for the rest of the Oakdale garden is Jacob’s Cattle beans (which apparently tolerate some shade, and there is some shade there), and maybe some edamame, which grew well there last year. 

The Oakdale garden also has a shared orchard.  My favorite tree, the old peach tree, is on its last legs and needs to be cut down.  There is another peach tree sapling that can be dug up and moved into its place, but it’s a lot of work and almost too late to do it (here’s one place where the cold spell is actually helping out).  Maybe next weekend.  I can use volunteers for that. 

I will find out on April 14 if I made the cut for a second community garden plot, at the BUG garden on Lamartine Street.  Crossing my fingers, because I’ve got about 200 onion seedlings that need a home, and while I love Oakdale garden, my plot there is really small (about 4′ by 16′) and kind of shady.  Clear Dawn storage onions are the ones I’m most excited about, also shallots and red onions.  I’ve got tons of red onions because…  I planted them as an afterthought.  They were old seeds, and onion seeds are only supposed to last one year.  So I planted basically a whole packet of red onions, thinking I’d get maybe 10? 20? to germinate.  It looks like the whole pack germinated though, I think there’s a hundred.  Which is a problem because these are not storage onions, you have to eat them as they come.  If I plant them all we’ll have too many.  Let me know if you want some!  I planted my onions on Feb. 25 and they’re looking pretty good.  They didn’t get enough light in the bathroom window (nothing does), so got too tall and started flopping over.  I read that you should trim them back to 3" if they get too tall, which I was scared to do but went ahead and did it, and they look very happy about it.  The onions and broccoli seedlings are spending their days outside even though it’s cold – they need the sunlight more than the warmth right now, and they seem to be surviving OK.  I’m not leaving them out overnight yet, TOO COLD!

 

The onions seedlings before their haircut:

And the broccoli as little runts:

The plan was that the BUG garden would have onions and bushy beans.  I’ve got some swedish browns that I’m pretty excited about, and some favas.  I thought I’d also do a mini-wampanoag three sisters garden (minus one sister): scarlet runner beans trellised up some Oaxacan green dent corn.  Problem is apparently you’re not supposed to plant onions and beans together, aargh!  I haven’t been able to find out why exactly.  Maybe it’s because beans fix nitrogen in the soil, but onions don’t like too much nitrogen?  I’ve been thinking of planting a buffer plant between them, something both plants can live with, like mustard.  But I don’t know how far away the plants have to be before they have a negative effect on each other, and none of my gardening books will tell me.  So I’ll experiment, and see how it goes.  And it may be irrelevant if I don’t get the garden space. 

One last thing: I’ve got some spring broccoli coming up, and the plan is to grow a couple of plants in large tubs in the backyard.  It doesn’t get much sun back there, but that should be OK for broccoli, which likes it cool and tolerates some shade.  I’d like to fill in the rest of the tub in the early period with some spinach and/or beets, but so far have not been able to sprout any spinach.  Most of my old spinach seed won’t sprout.  The one that will (Space) is getting diseased and dying.  We’ll see if any make it.  If they don’t, maybe I’ll just stick with the beets.  I’ll plant them in the tub with the broccoli just as soon as it gets warm enough!  Then in the fall I’d like to do more brassicas in tubs – more broccoli, collards, and brussels sprouts, which I just barely grew last year and would like to try again. 

Oh and the plan for my shady backyard involves ostrich ferns (the ones that make fiddleheads!), ramps (wild leeks), and a couple of token plants you can’t eat: Soloman’s Seal and Jack in the Pulpit, just because they’re native, tolerant of full shade, and weird looking.  I may also get around to sawing up an oak log out of the playground of the nursery school where I work on the maintenance crew.  Apparently oak logs are the best for growing shitake mushrooms!  We’ll see if I actually motivate for that…

I’m going to be facing a major shortage of containers and good dirt this year, with all my gardening ambitions.  Last year my landlord threw away a whole trash barrel, full to the top, of my own homemade container mix, loaded with compost from our kitchen scraps.  I actually cried.  Right now I’ve got maybe 8 gallons of finished compost, and a trash barrel full of almost finished that needs to be sifted.  But it’s not going to be enough, and the composter is only half full right now.  I’m going to be potting up plants into gradually bigger and bigger pots – I won’t be able to put the tomatoes, eggplants, and broccoli into their big containers until I get enough potting soil together!  Which is kind of hazardous because small containers dry out faster, and the plants get rootbound.  I have killed lots of plants by not getting them into big enough pots fast enough.  So I’m on the lookout for big pots (anything over 12") and lots of compost and other soil amendments.  My potting mix is 1/2 last year’s potting mix, and 1/2 a mixture of fresh compost, coir, and vermiculite. 

I don’t know if this friendster blog thing allows people to comment on what I’ve written, but if so, I’d love comments, suggestions…