I love getting my hands into the dirt and working with God to make beauty come out of small seeds and transplants. I share the experiences of an ordinary gardener with photos and words.
This past week has seen temperatures rise into the triple digits on more than one day, and high nineties on most of the rest. I have watered faithfully each morning. Sunday morning, against all moon planting advice, I planted one of my green pepper seedlings. Monday morning I planted the other two.
On Sunday my first group of radishes in the ground by the Patty Pan Squash was overtaking the radishes in the raised beds in size. When I went out to water this morning, they had all disappeared and were replaced by a large gopher mound. The good news is that the other Patty Pan seeds had sprouted. It appears that a cople of nasturtiums are in the process of sprouting, as well. We'll see when morning comes.
Vegetables planted in the two oldest raised beds are still struggling and not growing much. I gave them some more fish emulsion to encourage them. The two weakest zucchini plants are on the right on either side of the wire cage in the middle. The two strongest in this bed are in the corners on the left. You can see the difference in size, though all were planted at the same time. The eggplant sits squarely in the middle of this picture, and it appears no bigger than when I first planted it.
The gophers have rejected my bubble gum and throw it out of the holes. I have put it back and plugged the holes from my end.
This morning I watered everything that needed it and planted some more seeds as companions for the vegetables. These included some nasturtiums, dill, basil, and Pastel Carpet Alyssum. These are not only supposed to help the vegetables by attracting beneficial insects and repelling or attracting the pests away, but they also make the garden look beautiful. The dill seed is eight years old, so we'll just have to see what happens.
I suppose gardeners are always seeing in their mind's eye how the garden will look, not just how it looks at the moment. That vision of tomato vines loaded with plump red and orange tomatoes, squash and cucumbers and sweet peppers growing large enough to eat, all surrounded by colorful flowers -- that what keeps us watering, weeding, and and hovering over our gardens as often as possible.
This afternoon I took a tour of my vegetable garden, as well as the orchard and the flower and herb gardens, video camera in hand. Over the next few days I'll be sharing some of the videos with you. Today we will look at the raised beds and the container gardens, with special attention to new growth. Let's start with the container garden and the vines. I would like to correct one error in the video. I accidentally called a coreopsis flower a calendula in that first group of three container herbs.
The raised bed tour is much shorter, since there are only three of them and you've already seen them in still pictures earlier.
When all other things are equal, I try to plant by the moon. My husband is razzing me about this. He's a scientist and thinks it's all based on superstition. Because the people I talk to in nurseries and at farmers market are divided on the issue, I have tried to stay on the safe side. If there's nothing to it, I haven't lost anything. But to humor my husband without risking too much, I decided to plant the remaining three lemon cucumbers in a six-pack tonight (Actually May 22, since I'm writing this after midnight), not a great day for moon planting. These three plants were in dire need of planting, and were already beginning to yellow, so I felt they would gain more by being set into more nutritious soil than they would lose by being planted on the wrong day. Time will tell.
When I was at Farmers market this morning, one of my favorite vendors who supplies many of my tomato and pepper seedlings, Ralph Johnson, confirmed something I'd read about getting rid of gophers. He says he killed eight large ones by putting bubble gum down the gopher holes. I immediately went out to buy some, and put it in a lot of holes this evening. Time will tell whether this experiment will work.
Today my first borage seeds have sprouted and so did a couple of radish seeds. I knew if they are to remain, I would have to protect them from the hungry blue jay (See picture)who has been supervising my planting from the top of the fence. I contrived a way to prop an old screen door over the largest seed bed, and I propped a couple of flat gopher cages over the radishes about to sprout in the raised beds. I'm hoping these measures will insure that we will actually get some radishes this year.
