Before I could order seeds, I had to see what I had on hand.

We have a five gallon bucket with a tight fitting lid that stores our pre-moistened seed starting medium.

Just about every seed company out there has helpful information on their online site. I learned about the Johnny’s Seed spreadsheet from this newsletter published by the National Garden Bureau. It has links to the seed starting information provided by member seed companies. It wouldn’t surprise me if you found some conflicting information if you compared advice from all the various firms. Growing plants isn’t an exact science, and it also varies depending on climate. That’s why I was particularly happy to find the spreadsheet at Johnny’s, whose climate is pretty similar to my own.

The leeks are in the back. In the foreground are columbine seeds that will chill out on the porch.

How about you? Have any of you cold climate gardeners started seeds indoors yet?

Peas in July! Yes, we are harvesting the last of our peas this week. When you garden in a cold climate, you may grow the same vegetables as those in warmer areas, but you don’t follow the same schedule. I thought I’d run through our pea time line to give you an idea of how it’s different here. And I just want to say that I don’t grow the vegetables around here. This is a compilation of the collective pea-growing wisdom of Purdyville.

When and How to Sow

The standard advice is to plant peas as soon as the soil can be “worked,” or prepared. That means it has to be completely thawed. However, pea seed will rot in “prolonged cold wet weather,” according to Johnny’s seed catalog and countless other sources. And our garden has clay soil and a tendency to drain poorly, not just because of the clay soil but also because the water table is quite high in places. So both soil temperature and soil moisture have to be taken into account. It’s a delicate balance: if you sow peas too early, they may rot, and if you wait until you’re sure the soil is dry, they may run into hot weather near harvest time and produce poorly or not at all.

Rot-Preventing Strategies

Some gardeners buy treated seed to guard against rotting in cold soils, but we prefer to use a combination of other strategies. We’ve learned over the course of several years’ observation, that when the peepers start peeping, it’s time to plant peas. This year, they didn’t start until April 15th, though in other years they have been earlier. (We usually make note of their first “song” in our garden journal.)

This area of the garden is always the last to dry out, so my husband created a raised bed to grow peas.

We soak our pea seed before planting it, but are careful not to soak it too much. This is 8 ounces of Lincoln seed and 8 ounces of Progress #9

Use Inoculant

After we drain the water from the soaked peas, but before we sow them, we treat them with inoculant. Inoculant is rhizobia bacteria that help the pea roots take up, or fix nitrogen, and according to Denckla, increases yields from 50% to 100%. It looks like black powder. You sprinkle it over the damp pea seed and toss to coat.

Types of Peas

There are two kinds of shell peas, that is, the kind of pea that you take out of the pod (shell) to eat: vine and bush. Supposedly you don’t need to provide a support for bush peas, just plant two rows close together and let them support each other. What we have found is that all this means is you will have to bend over more, so we provide support for bush peas.

Every year we cobble together some support for the pea plants. It varies depending on what we have on hand.

Here's a closeup of this year's pea support, brought to you by tomato cages and plastic pipe. Peas were in full flower by June 16th, two months after they were sown.

It is a good idea to grow more than one variety, whether you grow bush or vine, because one variety’s ideal weather could be another’s nemesis, or a certain variety may be more chewed up by insects. In other words, diversity protects you from catastrophe.

When to Harvest

Plants with pods at different stages of maturity on July 2nd, 78 days after seeds were sown.

By July 5th, our pea harvest was at its peak.

Peas taste best raw when they are slightly immature.

For eating raw, these peas are past their prime.

If the pods look pale green, they are really overmature, but you should pick them anyway. If you don’t, it will signal to the plant that it’s job is done, and it doesn’t need to make anymore flowers or pods. Eventually the heat will do that, but you don’t want it to happen any sooner than it has to. Because, you want to be eating peas in July!

Notes

*We actually have The Organic Gardener’s Home Reference: A Plant-By-Plant Guide to Growing Fresh, Healthy Food, which is the previous edition of this book.

Johnny’s Seeds has good seed starting and growing information for all their seeds. You have to click on a particular variety to see it, under the tab Growing Information.

Fedco Seeds has a chart summarizing the most pertinent seed starting and growing information.

This is a lettuce seedling, not a tomato seedling. But at least it's a seedling. Photo 2007 by Talitha Purdy

I live in area between Syracuse and Ithaca… near Cortland. I have tomato seeds–many different varieties. When should I start the seedlings to grow in peat pots inside the house? Is it too early? While I am at it…what else should I be starting? Thanks a bunch.

My name’s Talitha, and I’ve been growing vegetables for our family for the past several years, so my mom asked me to answer your questions.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a very quick answer for your question, because it depends on so many different things. I know where Cortland is, generally speaking, but even knowing your general location really isn’t enough, because micro-climates can differ so much. For example—I normally get one last frost in the last week of May or the first week of June–but people just 1 1/2 miles away don’t get cold enough for this last frost! This is because we live in a deep valley, and the hills on either side of us really funnel the cold air right at us. People at the end of the of the street are out of the valley, and they don’t have such extreme cold.

The Standard Advice

So the standard advice is to start your tomatoes inside about 6 weeks before your last frost date. For me, that would be starting them around the last week of April. You will have to count back from whenever you think you get your last frost.

Because tomatoes dislike cold so much, it has been recommended not to plant them outside until 2-4 weeks after your last frost. If I did that, I wouldn’t be planting them out until the middle of June or the beginning of July!!

Pros and Cons of Wall o’ Waters

Wall o’ Waters work quite well for mitigating situations like this, and you may find it is a good solution for you. For me, my garden is on a hill, and Wall o’ Waters need level ground to keep from collapsing. Because my last frost date comes so late and my growing season is so short, I start my tomatoes around the first of April, and pot them on many times. By the time I plant them out, they’re in gallon sized containers and have thick stems and are quite bushy. I could, I suppose, plant them out and cover them for that last sneaky frost (there are often weeks before that last one where it doesn’t frost at all), but since tomatoes don’t like cold and I don’t like worrying about losing all my tomatoes, it doesn’t seem as good an option to me.

It really depends

So with tomatoes it really depends on your last frost date, your micro-climate, how many times you would like to pot them on, and how much season-extending you would like to do. On the year I used Wall o’ Waters (with much effort, as I had to level every single spot), I planted my tomato plants into the ground in the middle of April!!! The Wall o’ Waters were quite effective at keeping them alive, but I can’t say I really noticed a significantly earlier yield for all my trouble.

Using Wall o’ Waters

My guess is that your last frost date is typically in the middle of May. If you had level ground and the inclination to use them, I’d plant your tomatoes outside, with Wall ‘o Waters, at the beginning of May. I’d take the Wall o’ Waters off about 2 weeks after your last frost date (I’m guessing around the end of May), after the nights have moderated and don’t get so chilly. That would mean starting your tomatoes inside around the end of March.

Using Peat Pots

However, I also notice that you were planning on starting your tomatoes in peat pots. Peat pots are meant to allow the roots to grow through the pot; they are not meant for potting on. If you want to grow your tomatoes in peat pots instead of potting them on to bigger pots, I don’t think I would start the tomatoes any more than 3-4 weeks before the last frost date. Otherwise, your tomatoes will get too big for your pots.

Start these seeds first

As for your other seeds, the first ones to start would be broccoli, leeks and cabbage. Leeks can be started the very first of all, as you want them to be strong seedlings by the time you plant them out—so you can start them two months or more before your last frost date, maybe around early March (or even earlier). Broccoli and cabbage can be started 8-9 weeks before your last frost date. Those are cold weather crops, so if they have been properly hardened off, they can be planted out before the last frost.

Cold Weather Greens

The next batch of seedlings to be started are the cold weather greens, like lettuce, spinach and chard. These can also take light frost if properly hardened off, but they grow faster than broccoli and cabbage, so they can be started about four weeks before last frost date. These can also be sown straight into the ground as soon as it can be worked, but that doesn’t work as well for me. First of all, I have a better and more reliable germination rate starting inside, and can use a lot less seed. Second of all, although my ground might be technically unfrozen, it is still very, very sodden, and seeds that are kept too wet for too long rot instead of sprout. So I start my greens inside instead of out. Peas, however, I have always planted in the ground as soon as I possibly can, but I try to make sure they are in a well-drained or elevated area, especially if we are having a very rainy spring.

Heat loving vegetables

Squash and cucumbers need only be started a few weeks before last frost date, or if you please, straight into the ground after any chance of frost. Although they appreciate a long growing season, they grow so fast it is unfeasible to start them very much ahead of time.

I hope that helps. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask!

Even young children take gardening seriously and want to succeed. (Photo by Cadence Purdy)

I prefer to regard children as apprentice gardeners, gradually acquiring more skills as the years go by, working their way up (at their own pace and interest level) to journeyman and eventually master gardener. As much as possible, I like to let them choose their own projects, plan the execution of them, and solve their own problems. Here are three books, supposedly for adults, that do just that.

The Veggie Gardener’s Answer Book by Barbara J. Ellis serves apprentice gardeners well in several ways. It is small enough to be manageable in young hands, with a wipe-clean cover that can take visits to the garden without falling apart. The question-and-answer format makes it easy to zero in on a topic of burning interest or flip open to a random page and still grasp what’s being discussed. And it asks–and answers–lots of questions, everything from what are the easiest crops to grow to how can I make weeding go faster to how do I cope with a garden that got out of control? The first part of the book covers general gardening techniques and the second part gives advice on specific crops. There’s also a glossary, a bibliography, and a handy chart to help you determine how much to plant out of that generous seed packet. It truly is a “knowledegable gardening friend,” as the introduction suggests, a friend who doesn’t talk down to you, because the book was written for adults.

Wherever there’s plants, you know there’s going to be bugs, and Good Bug, Bad Bug by Jessica Walliser helps the novice garden determine friend from foe. The spiral-bound format of this book makes it easy to flip through, but it’s the index that makes it really useful. Look up the plant that has the bug on it, and it will give you all the pages that have bugs that frequent that plant. (By doing so I learned that sawflies were gobbling up my rose’s leaves.)

The bugs are easily identified by the photographs. Each bug gets a two-page spread that describes the damage it does and suggests preventive actions, live biological controls, organic product controls, and additional information when available. For example, adult cutworm moths are a favorite food of bats, so a good way to reduce cutworms in your garden is to encourage bats. Similar information is provided for the good bugs: who they control, and how to attract and keep them. All remedies are organic, but I especially like that the emphasis is placed on providing natural enemies of the pest and controlling environmental factors, before resorting to sprays and powders. If the bug in question isn’t in this book, it’s time to call in the grownups.

Don’t Throw It, Grow It!: 68 windowsill plants from kitchen scrapsby Deborah Peterson and Millicent Selsam is a good remedy for boredom all year round, but especially in the northern winters when outdoor gardening is impossible. This book goes way beyond avocado pits and carrot tops, teaching you how to grow not only familiar vegetables, fruits, and nuts, but also branching into herbs and spices, and produce from Latin American and Asian cuisines. You could get an education just finding some of these. Oops. Did I say education? Fortunately, since this is a book for grownups, there is none of that didactic, it’s good-for-you tone that ruins many a juvenile trade book.

Grow enough of these groceries, and you’ll learn many seed germination and plant propagation techniques–and have fun doing it. Did you know fenugreek was a legume? Did you ever consider growing beets for a holiday centerpiece? Peterson tells some funny stories on herself as well; her spirit of experimentation is contagious. I can’t think of a better way to relieve the winter doldrums than to go shopping in the supermarket for a plant to grow. As the author advises: “Always buy two of each–one to grow and one to eat.”

This is leek soup weather. Most of the trees have dropped their leaves, and the larch are enjoying their final glory before they drop their needles.

More northern gardeners should grow leeks. Leeks appreciate cool weather and are not intimidated by frost. As a matter of fact, their flavor is improved by frost, so there’s no rush to get them out of the ground. My husband dug our leeks earlier this week, well after we had several hard freezes (20F) and the leaves had dropped from most of the trees. And leeks are conducive to so many recipes that are best at this chilly time of year.

Most recipes advise using only the white part of the leek, but I usually trim them where the leaves start branching, as indicated by the dotted line.

Potato-Leek Chowder

3 large leeks
1 1/2 pounds potatoes — peeled and diced
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
3 cups chicken broth
pepper — to taste
salt — to taste
1 1/2 cups skim milk
3 tablespoons minced fresh parsley — (6 teaspoon dried)
3 ounces cheddar — grated

Cut the root end off the leeks. Cut the leaves off where they start to branch (see photo and caption). Slice lengthwise and then slice crosswise into 1/2″ pieces. Put these slices into a strainer or colander, and put the strainer into a large bowl. Fill the bowl with water. Lift the strainer up and down in the water to help clean the leeks. Leave them in the water while you peel the potatoes.

I use the French-fry cutting disk of my food processor to cut the potatoes instead of dicing them. It is much quicker, and the potatoes break down in the soup enough to fit on your spoon.

In non-stick large sauce pan, saute the potatoes and leeks in the butter for several minutes, stirring to prevent browning. Add broth, pepper and salt. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20-30 min, till potatoes are tender.

Add milk gradually. Heat gently but do not allow to boil. Stir in parsley and cheese. I have to say it looks more appetizing if you use an orange cheese instead of a pale yellow one, but it will taste great in either case.

Recipe from Jane Brody’s Good Food Book, p. 322, with adaptations.

We liked this soup so much that we started growing leeks just so we could make it. Of course there are lots of classic leek recipes, such as Cock-a-Leekie and Vichyssoise.

How to grow leeks

Leeks are the first vegetable planted in the garden and the last one harvested. We (meaning someone in our family, but probably not me) start them indoors in the second half of February. For your own northern garden, figure two months before your last spring frost. We sow them in individual small cells. Once they sprout, make sure they get fertilized regularly with a weak solution of your favorite indoor plant fertilizer. You want them to grow both long and sturdy inside, so you can plant them deeply in the garden.

Plant them in your vegetable garden as soon as the soil can be worked. Note that this is not the same thing as as soon as the soil has thawed. You want the soil to have dried out enough so you’re not making mud pies. For us that winds up being early to mid-May, a couple of weeks before our last frost.

Your leek bed should be fully prepared before you plant, because you are not going to be messing with this bed again until harvest. Pull your weeds, incorporate organic matter, and make sure the soil is pleasantly moist, but not soggy or gummy. Now put two inches of hay on top of your prepared bed. (Straw would be even better, but we never have that. We can get old hay pretty easily.)

This is our dibble. It is about 10 inches long.

The leeks are pretty much ignored until it’s time to harvest them. As I said, it’s one of the last things we do. You don’t have to dig them all at once. Just dig as many leeks as you think you need for your recipe, being careful not to slice into them. (We use a garden fork.) You do want to dig them all before the ground freezes solid. One time we forgot, and had to just about chisel them out of the ground. They were kind of slimy on the outside when they thawed, too, though the centers were still good.

If you have a root cellar or a pretty darn cold basement (the kind where you have to take precautions to keep your pipes from freezing), consider digging them all up and storing them down there. It’s a heck of a lot more pleasant to go down to the basement than to trudge through two inches of snow and a biting wind to fork them out of close-to-freezing earth. See the resources below for details.

Leek Resources

Leeks | DoItYourself.com – good overview for the home grower, including southern growing methods
Stocking the Root Cellar – general principles on cold storage, but not much on leeks
Commercial Leek Production – precise growing and harvesting instructions
Planting Leeks at Beside the Stream – another cold climate gardener’s planting method
Foiled Again by the Elusive Leek – Anne Raver can’t grow leeks, but she talks to experts who can.
Leek Recipes – a big long list.

The subtitle of Grow Organic: Over 250 Tips and Ideas for Growing Flowers, Veggies, Lawns and More by Doug Oster and Jessica Walliser reads “for first-timers and old-timers alike,” but I think it excels at helping veteran gardeners who have been using chemical fertilizers and pesticides to make the transition to an organic approach.

Friendly and Non-Judgmental

The writing style is friendly and non-judgmental. I’ve never heard the Sirius radio program “The Organic Gardeners,” which the two authors co-host, but I imagine they sound pretty much the way they read in their book. Botanical nomenclature is kept to a minimum, and unfamiliar terms are explained. Though the book starts out detailing the reasons why a switch to organic gardening is desirable, there’s no finger wagging or scolding. There’s also not a whiff of “granola-eating hippie speak” or “earth-mother spirituality,” which a lot of people mistakenly believe they have to embrace in order to garden organically. In other words, it appeals to the broadest possible audience. (And no slight intended to hippies or earth mothers!)

Reasonable Approach

The authors are reasonable in their approach. The two of them quit “cold-turkey,” but they don’t expect their readers to do the same. Instead they outline a multi-year approach that gradually weans the gardener off chemical solutions, but more importantly, focuses on the attitude changes that are necessary for organic gardening to succeed. Too many people think organic gardening just means “stop using chemicals,” but you also have to start building the soil, monitoring for pests, and, in general, thinking and observing more. For most people, I’m sure that’s the hardest part.

I like how Oster and Walliser play off each other. Each chapter has sidebars that highlight one or the other author’s approach or experience. It’s not quite “he says/she says,” but it brings home the idea that organic gardening is not a monolithic endeavor. I also enjoyed the charts in the vegetable and fruit chapters that showed Oster’s and Walliser’s favorites side by side. There’s not much overlap!

Suits Veteran Gardeners Best

While this is a great book for an experienced gardener who wants to switch to organic gardening, I have to say it’s the kind of book that would have driven me nuts as a beginner. Just as my son gets annoyed with recipes that say, “Cook until done,” I had issues with books that said “grow varieties that do well in your area” or “keep soil evenly moist.” To a certain extent, it can’t be helped, because experience is the best teacher. But because this book aims to be a general overview for the widest possible audience, it doesn’t go into the kind of detail that a beginning gardener would appreciate.

But if you have a friend or relative who gardens with Super Feed in one hand and Bug-B-Gone in the other, this is a good book to introduce them to a healthier and more sustainable kind of gardening, without putting them off.

Next: Interview with author Jessica Walliser

This looks like a bee visiting a corn poppy, but really it’s a fly. This comment explains.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve noticed there haven’t been as many bees flying around this year. If you’re the sort of person who gets nervous around bees, this might even seem like a good thing to you. But perhaps, like me, you notice your apple trees have scarcely any apples on them, and you know that the flowers weren’t damaged by a late frost. This is not a good thing. Multiplied by millions of fruit and almond trees in orchards all over the country, it becomes a very bad thing. They’re calling it Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Wild Guesses About the Cause of Colony Collapse Disorder

It’s called a disorder because no one knows why it’s happening. Especially in the beginning, there were a lot of wack-a-doo theories circulating around. When something bad happens and the explanation isn’t immediately evident, the human race tends to look around for something–or someone–to be the heavy. It’s easy to blame something equally invisible, like cell phone transmissions, or your favorite arch-enemy, like pesticides, when you don’t know what the heck is causing this scary business.

Researchers getting closer to the truth

Eventually people calm down and try to solve the mystery more systematically. That’s why I really appreciated the New Yorker article that C. L. Fornari, The Garden Lady, brought to my attention. In “Stung,” Elizabeth Kolbert traces the discovery of the problem, dispels the myths, and focuses on possible legitimate causes. Eventually she brings us to the office of scientist Ian Lipkin:

Lipkin had just sent off a paper on C.C.D. to a scientific journal. He was reluctant to discuss its contents, for fear of jeopardizing its acceptance, but he did indicate that it contained what he considered to be a breakthrough. One pathogen in particular was, in his words, “highly associated” with C.C.D.

Waiting for Lifkin

That article was published on August 6th. I wondered if Lifkin’s study had been published since then. I couldn’t find anything by googling for it, but I did find “As bees go missing, a $9.3B crisis lurks” by David Stipp. This covers a lot of the same ground as Kolbert’s article, but adds some new information as well. As you might expect from a Fortune magazine article, the economic ramifications of the problem are covered in more depth. Stipp also discusses other possible causes in addition to the ones that Kolbert suggested. But his article, published at the end of August, also mentions Lifkin’s apparently still unpublished study.

Identifying the disease doesn’t guarantee a cure

Reading both articles together, it soon becomes clear that there is no silver bullet. As Stipp summarizes entomologist Dewey Caron,

But merely showing that germs selectively turn up in cases of CCD, he cautions, won’t necessarily nail the culprit, for it will leave a key question unanswered: Are such microbes the main killers, or has something else stomped bees’ immune systems, making them vulnerable to the infections?

Also:

• Competition from imported honey causes commercial bee-keepers to change their bee husbandry practices, as does increased demand for pollination services.
• Many pesticides used for commercial agriculture and home lawn maintenance are known to be harmful to bees.
• Many native pollinators are also on the decline
• Good weather mitigated the reduced availability of bees, so crops of bee-dependent produce were still good. This kept prices low and legislators ignorant of the coming economic debacle.
• And as Craig Cramer of Ellis Hollow pointed out, lack of genetic diversity in honeybee breeding lines may also play a part.

Do your part: grow plants for pollinators

There are a lot of threads tangled together, and the whole ball of yarn won’t be unraveled for a while. Probably the smartest thing anyone can do is plant as many of the plants bees and other pollinators favor as they can.

We think this has helped our vegetable garden. Several people in the neighborhood used to keep bees, but they have all given it up, not because of Colony Collapse Disorder but because of other bee diseases or the infirmities of the bee keeper. Our tomatoes are setting fruit, while some other gardeners on the street aren’t having much success. We like to think Talitha’s practice of planting corn poppies, cosmos and other posies in amongst the vegetables attracts more pollinators to the vegetable patch. But if Daughter of the Soil is right, we’re probably fooling ourselves, at least in regards to tomatoes.

Update: Bee Virus Story Breaks

6 September 2007–the study that Lifkin referred to hit the news stands today. Here are three different versions, along with the person I have to thank for each:

• Genetic Survey Finds Association Between CCD and Virus thanks to Jo Ellen Meyers Sharp
• Virus implicated in bee decline thanks to my DH
• Scientists find clue in mystery of the vanishing bees thanks to Kim

Readers, I’d like your help in answering this email:

I live at 8800 ft. in the Rocky Mountains ( yes, we have had snow recently also) and want to garden. I did not get 1 tomato last summer because nights are cold.–although my flowers and herb pots did well. This year I have cut out 2 areas to do about a 300sqr.ft. garden.

Where can I get a comprehensive list of vegetables that thrive in the colder climate? At least then all I’d have to worry about is beating off the elk!

I certainly have not gardened at such a high altitude and I wonder if tomatoes and other hot weather crops are even possible at such a height without some sort of “helper” structure: wall o waters, cold frame, etc.

If you have experience to offer please do so in the comments. Also if you know of websites, books, and/or mail-order merchants that provide the information this gardener needs, let us all know.

And, of course, if you know a thing or two about dealing with elk, share that as well. Thanks in advance.

Denise Kemp writes:

My brother-in-law gave me an artichoke plant this spring that was given to him. He told me that I need to lift the plant in the fall but didn’t have any details on whether to take the leaves off or leave it in dirt or newspaper or what so I’m not sure what to do with it after I lift it. I live in Michigan in Zone 5. Do you know what to do with the plant after it’s lifted?

Anyone who knows the answer (or wants to offer an educated guess) please respond in the comments. Thanks in advance.

I, at long last, (so it seems,) have everything planted. It always seems I reach this state with less dignity and aplomb than I would like. Later winter and early spring are spent dreaming up all sorts of things that I’ll want to get done and complaining that I can’t do everything. Then, starting sometime around the beginning of May, my wishing starts to come back to haunt me. Things start to pile up and time feels as if it goes into some kind of warp as I hurtle down the roller-coaster of life. In short order I am practically running around like a maniac, going “I got to dig! I got to plant! I got to mulch! I got to mow! I got to prune!” . . . And much, much, more.

It’s not like I sit around all winter doing nothing, so of course the sudden flush of things that clamor for my time must compete with everything that I did before. This clash of priorities catches me right in the middle. I end up doing some things that really don’t need to be done, not doing some things that ought to be done, and generally getting flustered and disgusted with myself.

Let it be noted, however, that I did manage (even with all of my panic and disorder) to get everything into the ground. Not that this should really be a big feat, but for me it feels like one. The corn is planted. The squash is planted. The cucumbers are planted. I can compare this success to my past, or to my ideal of how things ought to be done. Compared to my ideal, I dug the garden and planted things in an atrocious manner. But compared to last year I’m doing good so far, so I’m feeling pretty pleased. Last year I planted my squash in extreme haste and I got my corn in even later than I did this year, and I didn’t dig the ground as well.

Work still needs to be done, most importantly mulching. You see, I have an uncommon method for gardening. There are probably as many methods of gardening as there are people who do it, but my particular technique centers around limited available time, and the fact that there are two aspects of gardening that I do not care for. The first is beating out sod, the second is weeding.

If you are not one of those people who beats the dirt out of the sod when you garden, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about, so I’ll explain. When removing sod to dig a garden a person can either turn the grass under, or slice the sod layer away and remove it to some other location to compost. Removing the sod entirely severely reduces the ability of the grass to grow back but it also removes the most fertile layer of earth. One solution is to beat all the good dirt out of the chunks of grass sod until only the bare roots are left, which is then discarded to compost. In abstract this is a brilliant idea, but in reality the amount of labor required for anything more than the teeniest garden is astronomical.

My father is not known for moderation, so throughout my childhood I was drafted (okay, sometimes I volunteered) for various gardening projects which (Dad being the frugal sort) almost always involved beating sod. Since our gardens were never small, this meant what seemed like an endless field of sod that needed to be beaten out. A job that looked like it would never be completed and, if memory serves me, might never have been.

All these long hours of beating sod in my childhood have left a permanent scar on my psyche and I have sworn off sod beating for the rest of my life. Beating the dirt out of a piece of sod is some of the most boring and futile labor invented. I would rather leave the sod in the garden than spend a minute of my time trying to make it give up the dirt that is clinging to its roots.

The second part of gardening I don’t like to do is weeding. I don’t loathe this so much as beating sod, but it is work that needs to be done over and over again, and I invariably don’t have the time to do it. I can either let some other task suffer while I chop up weeds that will grow back next week, or else I can not weed and instead feel extremely guilty as I watch weeds grow up and choke out my garden.

My gardening experience (and choices) would probably be much easier if I owned all sorts of mechanical equipment that would subtract most of the physical labor from digging and maintaining a garden. If I were rich and famous (or at least had a respectable income) I would have a rototiller and which would simply chop up the sod into oblivion. As it is, I dig my garden with a mattock.

A mattock is similar to a pick, except with a much wider blade. You might have seen a picture of some poor African farmer digging his garden with a mattock. Yes, I live in the United States of America, but I dig my garden like a poor third world African . . . there is some equality in the world. A mattock is a good tool, a useful tool, the best you can have for digging up a lot of earth without something mechanical . . . but compared to a hefty rototiller or a plow it is slow going. Hard, too, if you’re out of shape.

The current strategy I used to garden is this: I first take out the DR. Brush Mower and knock it down to the lowest setting on the mowing deck and scalp away the grass and weeds where I am going to dig. Then, if I am planting corn, I take a mattock and dig up the entire area. I don’t remove the roots of the grass and weeds, I simply break everything up. Then I plant. And afterward I mulch everything heavily. This last step accomplishes three things. It fertilizes the garden, it keeps down the weeds (no weeding), and it helps the soil water retention a lot (no watering). Mulching in the short run is extra work, but in the long run it saves a lot of work. It is a secert of gardening. If there was only one thing I could tell someone they should do in their garden it is this–mulch.

The type of mulch can vary. My preference is some kind of manure mixture. In years past when we still had goats I would take the manure and hay mixture and fork it down between the rows. This worked great to hold in the water and keep down weeds. This year I’m going to use horse manure mixed with sawdust because someone a few streets over has a huge mountain of it they’re trying to get rid of. This is a little risky as sawdust can make the soil too acidic, but nothing ventured nothing gained. I don’t have many other options this year, anyhow.

Corn is very demanding of the soil and the ground around here is mostly clay. I have learned a trick that helps corn grow around here . . . it is technically dangerous for the wellbeing of the plant but I have managed to pull it off without harm. The trick is to spread raw chicken manure in the dirt of the corn rows, or else spread it on top of the corn rows before the corn sprouts. Chicken manure has a very high nitrogen content and it can burn plants. That warning given, I’ve found that spreading it judiciously over the rows or mixing it in the soil gives the corn a much appreciated spike of nitrogen and I consider it better than using some chemical mix.

This year I planted more corn than I did any other year, and I planted it all at once. Last year I planted more corn than the year before that, but tried two staggered plantings. It didn’t work out. I got the first planting in okay, but time got away from me and . . . well, the second planting never produced any harvestable corn. This year I decided that being clever would have to come some other time, and I dug and planted everything all at once.

The amount of digging was more than I wanted to do in one day. Technically, I could do it in six or eight hours, but by drafting Lachlan to help me I managed to get the initial digging completed in something like three hours. Good for me, but he will probably end up having psychological scars about using mattocks. After that I had to hoe out all the rows, plant the corn by hand, and cover the seeds back up. Every step in this process, exercises the lower back. Mattocking exercises a lot more than the lower back, but even after three hours of that I wasn’t feeling too bad. But then I had to spend more time hunched over hoeing out the rows, and even more time after that hunched over dropping the seeds into the rows. I am young, but I’m not invincible. By evening it was difficult to stand erect.

The corn is planted, but I still need to spread the chicken manure and then mulch. This will probably be a full Saturday of work, but with that the corn should be effectively taken care of until harvest time.

***

For the curious, we did get a frost the last day in May. So many warm days in May and then at the very end a cold snap. Both the apple trees and the lilacs were done blossoming so they weren’t hurt. Alas, but my grape vines were coming on with full vigor. The frost was, thankfully, light, so rather than being completely annihilated the grape vines were more like . . . seared.

I’m still not sure of the complete extent of the damage. Some vine portions wilted and leaves died but the real question is what is going to happen to all of the wonderful little grape clusters that were starting to come out. Everything had the appearance of being the first great harvest since I planted my vines and now . . . I might have lost it all. Time will tell.

I should count my blessings.