Back in the Garden again

Long time no see...yes I am a terrible blogger, but I need an account so I can at least leave a comment to my long lost tree planting son. Well, maybe I can jot a few more notes this year.

First poppie in bloom of the season - hurray! It was amazingly hot here today for May - my car thermometer said 32 C. I am glad I watered everything this am. Peas are up and about 6" high onto the fence. We ate about my sixth salad tonight - spinache and lettuce, onion and chives and one sprig of kale - full organic, not bad for an amateur this early in the season eh? Tastes great with olive oil and some dressing.

The asparagus is up about 5' tall now - wow it grows fast. I have about 3 of my main square foot plots still to plant out. This weekend probably. It is very satisfying checking on everything growing after a day at the office. The life in the ground just can't wait to flow up into those veggies, and the poor little transplants just LOVE it when they get out of those tight little packs into some good soil of their own - man! do they take off!

Anyway, I must take some pix soon. All the best to other contrary rustics.

Tenon

Poppies in the Rain

One of the joys of gardening is those little moments when you see something new each day - like poppies in the rain. if I can get this to work, here is a shot I took this am.

The Contrary Rustic

The big spill and other gardening follies

Contrary rustics can get altogether too fanatical at times. Eager to try out some old seed and save a few bucks yet mindful of my wife's yearly complaints about filling our tiny bathroom with seedlings, I decided to scale down a bit and only start a few smallish flats of seedlings instead of the eight to twelve of past years. It is all too easy to get carried away and overplant as I think I like the starting out part and magical emergence of weird and wonderfully different tiny little bits of green seemingly like TRUE MAGIC from those itty bitty eensy teensy seeds and dirt. So I thought I would work from those smallish mini flat fibre type plant thing ma jiggies instead of cell packs and full flats. Keep just enough to "fill a pipeline" and move them along first from the heat of composting toilet, safely esconced in plastic bags to keep the cats somewhat at bay, to a hanging overhead plant light as PHASE TWO once they germanate for a few weeks, to outside in hot bed as PHASE THREE and then on to planting at last.

Well, as they say about the best laid plans of mice and men etc...don't always work out that way. My biggest problem is our beloved (?) but darn cats. Buffy and Kit-Ten as my wife calls her, just don't mix too well with seedlings. Nor does our goofy year old lab Lucy. Basically they love digging and eating anything I so carefully plant, seeds, green, whatever. Buffy so neatly chews off those green ends you can imagine she thinks she is a Parisienne sophisticate nibbling on aparagus shoots in a cafe or something. So this year ye old contrary rustic thinks he has a brilliant brainwave. Why not keep lights, plants and all totally out of cat and dog reach by hanging EVERYTHING oh so high from the ceiling, far enough away from all leaping and sitting spots so the little devils cannot possibly get their seedlng fix short of leaping straight up 6 feet from the floor - impossible me thinks...

So old dumbo here thinks up an economic solution is to hang the grow lights on chains, then HANG the flat support by ropes directly below with nothing whatsoever resting on floor or wall. And cleverly rigs up plywood, ropes and aluminum foil etc reflectors etc to do so. Then carefully transplants 6 miniflats worth of veggies and flowers sprouted for a week over the old composing toilet warm spot, ever so gently and rests those in turn in plastic flats to catch drips etc and turns on the whole stage two of lights. Kazam! my own perfect little pussy-proof incubator setup. Well there they rest for a day, perking up quickly under the added light of two new grow lamps, just about eye level, happy as clams. Cats staring enviously from the floor at fresh dainty new shoots they can't get at - Aha! foiled at last damned beasts!

One little problem though. Said contrary rustic gets too impatient and having read a few more gardening pages decides the plants are not at the optimum 3-4" away and hence should adjust his tent guy line type hanging lines suspending the trays. So late that night while son and wife contently watch the boob tube I attempt to trim and raise these lines and am about half way through his Herculean feat when S:AM! BAM! the whole shebang suddenly pitches sickenling and all six flats plummet to ground, and assorted computer printer, chair, desk and whatnot beside this computer. In one second it is all over. About five hours of work destroyed and dirt and seedlings everywhere - a real good spread, even down in the slot by the paper on the printer. Cats and dog and wife watch bemusedly while Contrary Rustic freaks out and cusses most angrily. David remarks that he would have been happy to hold it while I adjusted it, but a bit late on that one methinks.

So needing someone to blame beside my idiotic self, I get mad at the cats for forcing me to such acrobatic suspension feats in the first place. But of course I feel pretty foolish. David gracefully helps me try to scoop up various cucumber, corn, sunflower, bean and pea sprouts etc into vaguely the right box. Some succeed as one or two almost land dead upside down while others are hopelessly broken smashed and scattered. After that sticky dirty operation, much vacuuming of carpet and printers ensues, under the sarcastic comments of the rustic's patient wife.

Well, eventually it wasn't a total disaster. After a week some of those bent and tortured little seedlings mustered strength and grew more under those lights, never to be adjusted in height again by the way. So far, no second disasters, and no cat raiding afterall. But all in all if I didn't fear the cats and Lucretia McEvil the dog putting seedlings flat on the floor seems a much safer approach. Ah well, maybe next year.....

I am behind on this blog but on May 24th I did manage to get all transplanted and nine square foot gardens started ok, and with the aid of some transplants from a nursery, even had my first tiny trimmings of a salad last week! When I have time to read instructions, might even upload some pix sometime. And tell you of more gardening follies. Soon enough I hope to get onto some woodish topics.

My for now!

The Contrary Rustic...

The impatient gardener

Some of us contrary rustic types just can't wait for "real spring" as in the supposed May 24th last frost date. We have to be persnickety and smartass and cheat a little. Get the jump on summer, get our hands in the dirt after all that grey and snow and get those green little veggies coming up ASAP, pronto, NOW! faster-the-better. Every spring I get ichey palms and just want to get going and digging and composting and greening up the garden and lawn and environs. So I am going to share some of my little dirt secrets ;=) or at least experiments - I don't know if they will all work yet or not - the jury is still out.

The first is a great book - you may have heard of, by the infamous Mel Bartholomew - of Square Foot Gardening Fame. When I read this way back it was a light bulb going off - he made so much sense, and questioned just about every assumption of most row gardens. I tried it in three past houses, in various forms, and it worked - it really did produce tons of veggies in 20% of the space, with 20% of the water and 20% of the work of single row gardening. Well Mel has done it again - with his new book "All New Square Foot Gardening".

One big change is forgetting about years of soil conditioning and starting out with what he calls "Mel's Mix" which is his secret recipe for essentially making your own perfect soil. Davo and I spent an afternoon a week ago mixing, wetting and rolling about peat moss, vermiculite and five different types of compost in a tarp, and filled about half of my nine 4x4 ft plots. My trunk is full of more stuff to do a second batch tomorrow. The main things it gets you is an amazing moisture retention ability, incredible lightness and tilth, no weeds, and all the nutrients the plants need. My leeks which overwintered (barely) are starting to grow nicely after only one week in this stuff, and the new violas, pansies and transplants seemed to perk up within hours of being planted. Another big bonus is it is pretty much impossible to overwater because it acts like a sponge - when full it just drips out excess water. And super easy to dig.

Anyway, my little dirt secret one occured to me last week when we had a long cold, wet week and all my new seeds were in danger of rotting in the frigid soil. Water as you know has an amazing ability to retain heat. Having to get up to water seeds around 6 am before work I just couldn't bear the thought of dumping more ice cold well water on those new seeds so painstakingly planted. Mel suggested using sun warmed water, but what do you do if you are up before the sun and it isn't shining enough to warm an icycle, and you have to work? Well, I dragged out the old (ancient actually) campstove and an old mini propane canister and decided to use all that specific heat of water to warm up my frigid soil, in which no sane new seed would dare emerge, given any sense at all.

So call me crazy , but this Contrary Rustic decided it was worth the few cents of propane from the now-despised-in-campland propane mini cylinders to warm up my water (and my dirty cold hands) before watering every little dot of vermiculite encased seed ground. Actually it was amazing how nice warm water feels on cold gardening hands at 6 am - very nice change from holding a dripping icy achy cold hose. So I did this for a few cold mornings last week, and guess what, it worked! Tiny patches of green emerging, two weeks before last frost date! When you pour this tepid to luke warm water on your new transplanted violas, you can almost hear them thanking you and they seem to perk up and green up really quickly. By the time I leave for work the sun has poked out and the whole garden seems to be poised to burst into life. I don't know why it took me this long to realize something so obvious - but plants don't like ice cold showers first thing in the morning any more than we would. So treat your plants to a little luxury, and jump-start your soil temperature by watering with sun (or Propane) warmed water. It works!

Another Mel-inspired idea is a twist I call dirt secret number two. Mel advises to treat your garden like your kids - keep them warm at night, and don't send them out without a coat in the cold spring. So I have come up with a neat little way to quickly erect and disassemble cold covers, and shade covers. In the past I have tried many different ideas including bent chicken wire and plastic, row covers, individual cloches and so on and so forth. But these variously suffer from being either too heavy, too prickly - sharp wires, or too floppy in wind, and blowing away and so on and so forth. My secret for quickly assembled frames is magnets - glued and taped on dowels. Screwing a beer cap upside down in the corner of each 4'x4' square foot garden raised bed with a drywall screw provides a perfect little concave anchor for a four strut pyramid with four magets meeting on a stainless steel ball vertex. It takes about 30 seconds to put up, is strong enough to hold either fish net shade cover, 0r a tarp or plastic and can be removed even faster. A shorter ~2; dowel inserted in each corner with four more 4' dowels can make a more voluminous 8 cu ft greenhouse like structure. I used neodymium super-strength magnets glue gunned to the ends of 3/8" wood dowels and reinforced with coloured electricans
tape - and they work great. So now I have a flexible, but strong way to rig up many different types of covers, shades etc with no nails, screws or rope, twine or fasterners - all done with magnets! Fishnet makes a good shade cover for new transplants, to keep the harsh sun off. I need to get some 6 mil poly and some clothespins and then I can make my own mini portable greenhouse.

Well, that's all for tonight from the Contrary Rustic. Yes I know I am a bit insane about gardening, but nex to timberframing and woodwork what else could be better on a spring weekend? Sure beats office work. Next assignment - figure out how to keep my $%^&*( cats, dogs and birds from digging up my seeds. The fishnet should slow them down, but I need to get a whole lot more.. I am wondering about hot chile peppers to teach certain retarded digging dogs a lesson - that makes three holes dug up in one week - Sheesh! Not to mention eating my pansies on the front porch. Dogs and gardening don't seem to mix...

More next week I hope. Live long and prosper - keep your hands in the dirt.

The Contrary Rustic.