today i braved to constant drizzle and atmepted some project. got covered in mud -- my shoes were so bad i had to hose them off with a power nozzle to remove the muck. bought 4 bags of compost and a big bag of canadian peat at loews for $14. Put in all the garden labels i made last night. some critter, per usual, dug up a couple of pepper plants which i replaced, and then i put in 2 more, for a total of 8 bells. replaced two sunflowers which failed to thrive-- unfortunately it will break the pattern we established with the colors, but better to have the plants there than not. couldn't plant any new seeds. weeded a bit, but too muddy to do much good.

how i got 500 5 inch plastic plant labels for $3.

We use lots of labels because we plant such a wide vairety of plants. because our garden is on educational grounds, we like folks to know at a glance whats growing in the soil.

since we mostly grow from seed, we don't have a handy label. i went to the highland garden center looking for plant labels. you could get a pack of 75 for $3.99, or pay eight cents each. Eight cents each sounds cheap, but when i realized we'd probably need 100 over a years time, that would be $10. They had permanent labels made of copper for $5 each...

So i was on gardenweb the other day and people mentioned using old venetian blinds to make labels. I thought i had some-- it turns out i either pitched them or donated them to salvation army or goodwill.

so i went to Kmart and bought the cheapest vinyl venetian blinds -- only $3 for room darkening ones with the thicker plastic. It took me only 20 minutes to cut them into labels with pointy ends-- i discovered my scissors could handle 10 or so slats at a time. Each slat made 4 labels each about 5 inches long each. I just eyeballed them, but they are longer than a standard garden label by about an inch and just as wide, and perhaps even studier. The sharpie marker marks on them well, and it doesnt smear off (as it tends to on many plastics). Definitely a cheap-o gardening trick to remember for seasonal labels (of course we'd want something nice for perrrenial patches....)

Aaron and I did some serious work. We put in the tomatoes and peppers. This year the strategy involved thus:

1) digging a trench to about six inches deep (one garden shovel deep). Four by 16 foot. Removing the top soil.
2) linining the bottom of the trench with about 1/4 inch of peat moss.
3) marking off every 18 inches where we would plant the tomatoes & 12 inches for the peppers.
4) using a pinch of sunflower stalk ash in every planting area (an experiment based on the article on sunflowers from botanical.com)
5) using a tablespoon of espoma fertilizer dusted about each tomato and pepper.
6) mixing up a wheelbarrow full of 50% canadian peat and 50% homemade compost (rotting since november). And about a cup of bonemeal mixed in the full whellbarrow as well.
7) building up the peat/compost mix to a mound 6-8 inch mound surrounding each plants up to the first true leaves
8) filling the trench back up with the remaining top soil, making sure the plants got covered to first true leaves

(i ought to be blamed for the ridiculous strategy)

after that, we watered the plants with a dilution of compost leachate (basically compost tea).
i trimmed up the herbs.

after leaving the garden, i went to highland garden center and picked up some seeds -- got bush type zuchini and winter squash.

im going to work on getting some plastic plant labels this evening.... i'll be at the garden early tomorrow morning!

oh the tomatos are planted like this:
Top row towards woods, left to right (facing the woods).
Northern lights, principe bhorghese, carmello, barber paste, brandywine, omar's lebanese.
Bottom row close to house, left to right (facing the woods):
Brandywine, yellow pear, carmello, barber paster, brandywine, omar's lebanese.

there's two hot peppers- one jalapeno, one cayenne. two banana peppers. six sweets.

Here's an update on the wildflowers:
Slow Growth. It's never gotten much below 68 in here, but not much above 72, and i believe soil temp is important to young seedlings. And the soil is a little cooler than the house it seems. The ligths have been staying on 16-20 hours per day. Not much has gotten its first true leaves, so i'm not yet ready to transplant to the garden.

I'm anxious about the tomatoes. I want to get them planted as soon as possible, peppers too. Last weekend was rotten weather for gardening, rain, floods, and storms the whole time.

I wonder if we've gotten any straw delivered to the garden yet?

Its been such a wet spring, i wonder if we need to be concerned about slugs. They haven't been a problem these last few years, but were a real pain, consuming whole pepper plants, on our st. clair street garden.

i just heard thunder.

Didn't do much today. Re-seeded the beans and peas where the germination was low, specifically with the yard long beans, snow peas and sugar snap peas. Weeded a little in the coneflower patch. A new theory: I had weeded out a lot of the obviously unwanted seedlings, like milkweed and dandelion and others identifiable as weeds (i.e., anything that wasn't coneflower). But there were still about 4 different types of plants I was unsure of that I left in, and then I noticed something. Around the seed heads I planted along the borders there were clusters of a new type of seedling, and I can only assume that those are the coneflower. They're scattered around the inside of the plot as well. So it looks like it really took a full four weeks for them to germinate, but we should have a pretty good looking patch in about a month or so. I found a weed in the strawberry patch (which already needs tending) that looked like some of the ones I was avoiding, so I pulled one out to compare with the weeds in the butterfly garden. A match. So I've begun pulling those as well. It would be nice to have a reference to help identify the coneflower sprouts from the rest, but it looks like the deductive method will have to do.