Progress in the Planting World

For the last few weeks, I've been absorbed largely with preparing for the Oregon Glass Guild's 9th annual Glass Gallery show at the Oregon Convention Center. The show was this last weekend, and my next scheduled show isn't until November, so I have a nice wide chunk of time where there are no pressing crafting deadlines. Convenient, now that spring is sproinging and I'm ready to start planting at least some of my year's crops!

My husband has been hard at work putting together our raised beds and filling them with a combination of a compost underlayment and a three-way mix fill (three-way being 1/3 compost, 1/3 topsoil, and 1/3 sand.) As he's filling the second of the three tiered beds I have designed, I'm busy following behind planting what he's filled.

One problem that faces some folks in areas such as mine, where the weather can be unseasonably cool right into June, is overeagerness. Someone told a gal on one of my gardening mailing lists that she could plant tomatoes starting April 1; another told the same gal she could plant them starting April 30th. She split the difference and was going to plant around April 15th, until a bunch of folks told her that was far too early for our area. The issue isn't so much whether or not we'll get a hard freeze, or even snow, as it is the ground hasn't warmed up yet. Tomatoes (and many of our other summer crops) are tropical in nature, and really need the ground to be 55 degrees bare minimum, with 75-85 being ideal. That doesn't happen around here until June or so.

One reason I use raised beds, even where the soil is fairly decent, is to allow me to extend the growing season a bit. They warm up earlier in the spring, and they are easier to attach row covers and cloches to than the flat ground. I also like raised beds because I can sit on the edge and work towards the middle, and they are never so wide (by design) that I can't reach into at least the middle if not farther, so I never have to get into the beds. And with paths between instead of bare dirt, I battle far fewer weeds, and have an easy place to put my tools and wheel barrow and such. I've been asked if it's necessary to use raised beds, and of course it isn't. It isn't even necessary to rototill or amend your soil; you can use a lasagna layering method, or just strip off the sod and hope. Your results of course will vary on a number of things, including what you plant, the character of your native soil, how you fertilize and water, and even the lay of your land. Raised beds just bring more of the variables within your control.

Today I planted two lavenders, a rosemary, and a feverfew in the center Herb bed. I also acquired a pineapple sage for that bed, though she won't be planted outside until June, and I have some chives and oregano as well. In the middle tier I planted Walla Walla sweet onions, white onions, red onions, 20 asparagus crowns, and three rhubarb plants with room for a fourth. I have room in that bed reserved for strawberries, beans, peas, carrots, radishes, and lettuce. The outside bed will be corn, squash, cucumbers, cauliflower, tomatoes, celery, and perhaps a few other things.

While I was at it, I also planted two new columbine plants and a winter Daphne as well as three ferns and a hardy fuschia for the hummingbirds. I've started my Orphan Plant section too, with three healthy Ivy plants and three small cedar trees.

Wisdom from the Neighbors

We have an older couple living next door to us. They've been here 40 years, which is long enough to have seen this town go from a wide spot in the road to...well, a wider spot in the road. But it's on its way to becoming a fairly large town in its own right, and if the City Council has its way, it'll be down right urban. (I suspect if the locals have their way, it won't. People don't move here for the Night Life and the urban amenities, they move here for the elbow room and the scenery.)

At any rate, I got to talking to the lady, Pat, over the fence this morning. She was watching my husband and I put out ground cloth for the base of our soon-to-be giant garden plot, and commenting that it reminded her of what she and her husband did 40 years ago. We talked about the wildlife she sees in their yard at night (mainly opossums and racoons, with other occasional visitors), and about my chickens, and about the Mason Bees I'm hoping to raise to pollinate the garden.

She then asked me, "Well, you know what the old timers will tell you, right?" Well, no...what will they tell me? "Don't plant your garden while there's still snow on Silver Star." First off, I didn't even know that mountain over to our East had a name. Well, the one directly to our east is more of a large hill, and it's Tukes Mountain, which I knew. But the one a little farther south and then east, which is often covered with snow, is apparently Silver Star Mountain. I looked it up on Google maps. Learn something new every day!

Pat told me that when she first moved out here, she got that advice, and didn't heed it. She'd never had problems with a garden before, so she just did her thing. And she didn't have much of a yield that summer, though nothing actually died. She thinks it's because it got so cold in the spring that the plants just got sapped of energy and never really recovered. I've had similar experiences with tomatoes, only in reverse; I was extremely busy and didn't get mine planted until mid June one year, and my mother in law had planted hers about 2 months before, yet by mid August my plants were outproducing hers. Every year I have to remind myself not to get too gung-ho about planting early or as soon as the weather seems nice, because we almost invariably have some late frosts and cold evenings through mid-April at least, and often through the end of April. Our last "frost danger" day isn't until almost the end of May!

The other thing Pat told me was that until the Oak and Walnut trees bud out, we're still in winter and in danger of frost. She said she has neighbors who don't have walnut trees who come over and take a look at hers to see if it's budded yet. I might have to do the same thing!

More Spring Fever

Yesterday I got Todd to put up the small greenhouse I purchased at Bi-Mart. It's made of metal tubing and connectors, with wire shelving, covered with a plasticky translucent green tarp thingy, so it's portable, lightweight, and inexpensive (I think I paid $70 for it.) It's got enough shelving space for 14 trays of plants, and I can walk in and easily stand up in the center. It's a "one-butt greenhouse", kind of like a "one-butt kitchen", but Evie and I have enough room to work if we're focused on the same thing. I pulled a small bench/storage thingy over near it, and I'm going to be doing potting there until we get the barn style garden shed built.

So since that was finished and up, today I went to Wilco with the intention of getting potting soil and a few more trays for my greenhouse. That store is dangerous...it's a farm supply store. There are a few kinds of stores that are always deadly to my pocket book: craft/bead stores, hardware/home stores, bookstores, and Wilco. Today was no exception.

I purchased a thermometer for the greenhouse and mounted it inside. I need to be sure it's going to be warm enough in there for seedlings before I get started; really, I'm several weeks ahead of the curve for planting where I live, but the stores are all so enticing with the seed displays and the new plants! But if I can keep the greenhouse warm enough, it won't matter if I'm early, and the plants will be all the bigger by the time I transplant. Some seeds I will be direct-sowing either singly or using seed tape (carrots, radishes, lettuce) so they'll get planted later anyway.

They had baby chickies at Wilco! I am so tempted to buy some more. They had a whole pile of Buff Orpington babies, which are a soft puffy yellow and decidedly "standard chick, generic, one each" looking. They also had a big vat of Aracauna chicks, and they were tempting too. They grow into rather ugly chickens, IMHO, but they lay colored eggs, which would be fun. I decided to wait until next spring, as about that time my girls should be deciding it's time to molt, and new chicks will reach laying age about the time my girls are starting to slow down. If I wind up with 10 all full-bore laying, I'm going to get buried in eggs. I could just hang up a sign on the fence advertising eggs, I suppose. Found out that if I am an egg producer selling eggs directly from the same premises where they are produced,

I also bought some more trays and some inserts. I couldn't decide between the paper pots which you can plant with the seedlings, or the little plastic inserts. I chose some of both, along with some pop-up peat pots for Evie's entertainment. I'll figure out what works best for next year.