It's definitely time for a gardening post! I took pictures on April 14th of early signs of spring, and included them in my previous post not long after that. The daffodils are nearly done blooming now, but the tulips are blooming. The rhubarb plant is huge, and the garlic has grown tall.
On April 16th the urge to plant some seeds got the better of me. My son had helped set up my little pop-up greenhouse on the deck, so I set up a folding table inside it, covered that with a tarp, and fetched some seed-starting mix, seeds, and containers. I knew it was going to get cold out there yet, but I thought I'd give it a try, anyway.
Sure enough, nighttime temperatures dropped below freezing for several nights afterwards, even dipping to 26 degrees early one morning. Yet on April 26 the first corn sprouts began to peep through the potting mix. Zucchini and slicing cukes showed up two days later, followed by yellow straightneck squash and Sweet Mama squash on May 3. Not all the seeds sprouted and grew, but enough did to fill my needs. I was just happy to see anything come up after such an early start in a not-very-warm greenhouse.
I started more seeds in the greenhouse on April 30, including more winter squash varieties and pickling cucumbers. Some of them were coming up already on May 6. Others are taking longer.
I'm trying to do things differently in the garden this year, to save my energy and to use less water. I'm not getting any younger, and the garden is 90% my responsibility now. My husband can till it, and maybe water it if I'm not home, but that's about all, due to his physical limitations. As much as I'd like to fill the entire garden like I used to, I no longer have three young children at home to help weed, harvest, and preserve the produce. It's sad, but I simply don't have the energy nowadays to grow and preserve a year's worth of vegetables. So I'm trying to downsize and make things easier for myself.
With that in mind, I am experimenting with growing potatoes in containers. An expert gardening friend/consultant sold me these big nursery pots for not much. A garden nursery owner advised me about potting soil and amendments to use, so on May 7 I mixed it all together and planted potatoes.
We don't have a separate water source for irrigation or agricultural purposes, so our water bill runs quite high during gardening season. In the past we have used various kinds of overhead sprinklers, including oscillating sprinklers, which are said to waste a great deal of water. But we have always used a soaker hose for the row of raspberries, and I thought it would be a good idea to try that with some other row crops.
My first attempt didn't go well. I strung out the soaker hose and arranged the gladiolus corms so the row matched the length of the hose. (It came out very nicely.) Then I dug the holes and planted the corms. Next, I hooked up the soaker hose to the water source to see how it would work. Water soon began to run under the weed barrier I had positioned next to the row. Uh-oh. So then I folded back the weed barrier and hoed dirt up all along the soaker hose on both sides, hoping to create a nice little trench for the water to stay in.
The problem is that our garden slopes very gently from the back (near the woods) to the front (where our yard is.) I took the above photo from the back of the garden, looking toward the front. Even after my attempt at creating a ditch of sorts, too much water was running down that little slope. It continued to leak over toward the raspberries. I even tried digging a trench so the water would make it all the way over to the raspberries where it would do some good, but just ended up with lakes. And I just noticed that my cat got into the photo. He had been drinking water where it puddled.
I related my tale of woe to my husband. He came up with an idea, and I came up with another. We're trying his idea first: move the main hose to the back side of the garden so the source is at the top of the slope, not at the bottom. We've always put it at the bottom because it's closer to the spigot.
My idea is to re-think the garden layout, and make the other rows perpendicular to the row of glads. It's too late to move the glads; they are already in place. But no other row crops have yet been planted. So that's another option. In past years, we have sometimes run the rows one way, and sometimes another, and it never mattered as long as we were using some type of overhead sprinklers. Now it might matter.
Stay tuned for another post next month, with further garden updates!