more, more, more

i went up to the garden, and unexpectedly ran into aaron. I just had to get out of the house.
i had no real plans going up there.

more cicadas
the cicadas are full blast. there is a non stop whine in the air loud enough that you have to raise your voice when outside. i did exactly what i remember doing when i was 12 the last time they were around. i sprayed water into the trees with the jet-nozzle attachment, rousing hndred at a time. then i'd try to hit them again in the air. somehow, it just wasn't as fun as it was as when i was 12.

more water
aarn watered with the watering can today, but he encouraged me to follow up with the hose and really give the beds a good. soak. i usppose it will take a lot of water to really saturate the beds-- both peat and vermiculite can hold way more water than ordinary soil.

more square foot beds
i noticed that we had a bunch of scrap lumber. There's some old fence board, which i'll use to construct a small bed (3x3) for our culinary herbs. they had there own permanent bed, but for some reason, we lost the thyme, sage, and rosemary over the winter. i wish i new what killed it. [shrug]. so intead of sticking the herbs back into the clay and having to deal with so much weeding, we'll just construct a new bed with all of our left overs.

more sprouts
i imagine by monday we will se quite a number of sprouts, but it looks like we got alot more radish, carrot, cucumber, beet.

more bulbs
a few years ago, i thought it would be cool to plant bulbs everywhere around the honors house property, having them pop up randomly. I don't like the idea anymore, so I dug up a few of the naked lilies (also called naked ladies) and placed them in our bulb patch. they might not emerge this year as they were obviously distrurbed. I suppose i planted about one dozen, spaced about 3" apart.

more snakeskin
i saw some snakeskin hanging in a large shrub in the back of the house as i was leaving. The big snake is still around.

radish sprouts

i should have checked the blog, but i too watered 4 cans full -- 1 for each square, 2 for the zig-zag.
oh well, hard to water too much.

i noted some radish sprouts-- hopefully. at this early stage, could be weed seed from the manure. hard to tell from the cotyledons. most plants first leaves look pretty similar.

Process vs. product

Since we don't have any good pics of the product yet, here's a few of the process of square foot gardening:

the finished frame


jim filling in the raised bed frame with compost (600 pounds of it!)


the beds before marking off the squares with clothesline


...and after the planting

Everything is in

Drove up to Highland Garden Center a little bit ago to buy the "Santa Grape" tomato plants and some geraniums for the two blank squares in the lower left bed. I didn't see Santa Grape, but I recalled that we were looking for some Roma (or other paste) tomatoes, and they were in, so I bought them. Unfortunately, they came in a six pack, so four are still unused. Maybe Jim and I can fulfill our long-standing dream of planting the remainder along the railroad tracks in Covington to help feed the hobos.

The geraniums are an F1 variety with bright reddish-pink blooms. I planted two to a sqaure, and didn't have to overbuy.

That's probably about all I'll do today. I did water the garden around noon. It seems as though three full watering cans worth of water gives the garden a pretty good soak (unlike in the past, when we'd turn on the sprinkler for two hours, use hundreds of gallons, most of which was lost to the surrounding grass, the weeds that slowly encroached, or to evaporation). The watering took about 6 minutes; the planting described above took about the same.

Jim and I will probably get together on Sunday to work on the weed barrier and possibly begin work on the trellis frames.

Ready to grow

We got the rest of the seeds/seedlings in by 7:15. Here's what we got:

In the lower left 4 X 4' box:

(2) red bell peppers
(2) yellow bell peppers
(1) green bell pepper
(1) hot banana pepper
(2) cayenne peppers
(2) habanero peppers

...and in the zig zag, starting from the top left and working right:

(10) tomato plants: (1) cherry; (1) yellow; (2) red pear; (2) cherokke purple; (1) jet star--hybrid; and (3) brandywine (many thanks to Jim for noticing they had these!)
(2) cucmubers
(2) cantaloupe
(2) watermelon
(1) pumpkin
(16) snow peas
(16) sugar snap peas
(16) super snappy peas
(16) kentucky wonder beans
(8) brittle wax beans
(8) pencil pod beans
(16) asparagus yard long beans

I'll check the expected first harvest dates for these later--I'm wiped.

I'll take a large salad to go

Jim has just stepped out to Highland Garden Center to pick up some tomato and pepper plants and some onion sets. So far today we've completed demarcating the square foot beds with clothesline and carpet nails and got the upper right 4 X 4' box planted with salad veggies.

(For future reference, all of my talk about the bed locations will be from the viewpoint of looking at the garden from the back deck of the Honors House--we'll post an updated map and some pics soon.)

What we planted:

1 sq. ft. of radish (crimson giant) (harvest June 17)
1 sq. ft. of radish (sparkler) (harvest June 13)
3 sq. ft. of carrot (danvers) (harvest July 28)
3 sq. ft. of beets (a dark red variety) (harvest July 18)
2 sq. ft. of spinach (harvest June 28)
2 sq. ft. of bibb lettuce (harvest June 28)
2 sq. ft. of black seeded simpson (harvest July 03)
2 sq. ft. of a looseleaf blend (harvest July 03)

I've also been shooting some of the process on mini-DV, and I may edit it together and throw a short film up on the server and link to it here.

The rest of the day will be spent planting onion sets, tomatoes and peppers. More later.

soil's in!!

aaron and i spent one warm day outside mixing up the bed's 1/3 sphagnum peat 1/3 vermiculite 1/3 compost & manure. we had a few dfferent brands. We put in espoma "plant tone" organic fertilizer and bonemeal as well. they look terrific.
tomorrow the grid goes in, and if we have time, so do the plants.

the soil mix is amazingly light.

...and the rest!

Here's the list of the seeds we have that are not at Jim's.

Basil
Coriander
Fennel
Mustard
Parsley
Andy’s Mystery Beans
Asparagus Yard Long Beans (heirloom var. straight from the Shakers of Kentucky)
Pole Bean (Kentucky Wonder)
Snow Peas
Super Snappy Peas
Sugar Snap Peas
Spinach
Loose-leaf Lettuce (blend)
Broccoli
Cabbage
Radish (crimson giant)
Radish (scarlet globe)
Collards
Bib Lettuce
TOMATOES
Brandywine
Carmello
Northern Lights
Omar’s Lebanese
Principe Borgia
Reisenstraub
Yellow Pear Tomato
Huge Bell Pepper
Black-eyed Susan
Butterfly Weed
Coreopsis
Iris Seed
Mammoth Sunflower

Along with the sunflower patch idea, there's a flower I've been seeing all over the fields in Indiana right now, that I'm thinking is used as a ground cover or possibly a nitrogen-fixer for the soil. Tall-ish, yellow flowers, not goldenrod. If we could find out what those are we could mix them in with some sunflowers and make a nice sunny looking patch.

Master Gardener !

Maybe this can be my first post-graduation project. Or maybe I could get started on it this summmer....
Master Gardener

gardening celebrities

Under an extensive set of coincidental serendipities, my parents will get to meet Mel Bartholmew (Square Foot Gardening Originator) next saturday in San Luis Obispo, CA the tiny college-farm town where they now live. Of all places in the US for Mel to visit, he picks little ole SLO.

At least they have a 2x3 square foot bed in thier back yard that i built for them last year, so they can honestly claim they are Square Footees.

should a honors class not be...

we need also to be concerned with the herb patch.

my solution: cover densely with sunflower seeds. its an annual that grows fast enough to out-compete weeds. if you have another annual that grows fast, let me know...

but weeds just won't do!

more seeds

aaron and i listed what we had today. here's what i have at home:

*Bean, brittle wax heirloom
bean, kentucky wonder
bean, pencil pod black wax
beet, detroit red
broccoli, waltham 29
cabbage, copenhagen market
*Canteloupe, Charantais heirloom
carrot, danvers 126
collards, georgia
cucumber, straight 8
kale, blue curled vates
lettuce, black seeded simpson
pumpkin, early sugar
radish, sparkler
*Watermelon, Blacktail mountain heirloom

i'm most excited about the watermelon and canteloupe.

* from seedsavers. ther rest were cheapies from walgreens, 6 for $1.

We're gonna need a bigger boat

Belle and I were looking at the enrollment numbers today, and there is a chance that Andy's garden and writing class may not go this year. The class doesn't start for another three weeks, so we could still get enough students in to make it, but we should probably have a contingency plan in the event that we have more land than we know what to do with (unlike some aggressor nations I could mention).

In the event the class gets cancelled, we would probably do well to simply broadcast grass seed on that side, cover with straw, and let it go until next year. We have plenty to do in the coming weeks without having to weed or mow a big blank patch of nothing.

In either case, our plans are going forward. The only change I've made to the garden plan was to rotate the design 90 degrees clockwise, which makes slightly better use of the space we have (and will look a little nicer next to Andy's side). I've shifted the boxes so that they are more or less exactly where they should be, and measured out a perimeter around the beds measuring two feet wide, which will be our mulch border. Anything tilled beyond that point will get sown with grass seed.

Sometime soon--today or tomorrow maybe?--we need to start purchasing our soil amendments and the rest of the materials, including the conduit (or PVC, whichever we ultimately choose) and the clothes line. I'd like to have Jim come and inspect the garden configuration, and if he's cool with it, we need to stake our supports around the beds to keep them in place. Mostly, I'm just excited to be trying a new method, and want to get some plants in the ground!

oh no...

i've recently found out about a gardening craft:
Hypertufa
funny word.
it's basically concrete with lighter substrates such as perlite, vermiculite, or peat moss used to make containers and pseudorocks.
another hypertufa link.

can we post images?

apparently so. blogger is a lot more flexible since google bought Pyra. Cool.

The image above was created using a square foot garden layout tool which alas only works in Microsoft's Internet Exploiter.

After creating yer layout, [alt] + [printscreen], open MS Paint or Adobe Photoshop. Paste image from clipboard, and crop (no pun intended) your image. Viola.

Not a bad tool. By the way, this isn't what we're planting, i just wanted to let aaron know my design ideas.