The Crop Is In

So, Memorial Day weekend is winding down, and with it my spring planting extravaganza.

From Saturday until today I've been out digging up beds and working compost into them, transplanting the various things I started around the end of March and sowing the various items that get planted as seed directly. I'm tired now.


Off to a Good Start



View from the Garden Gate

I did take some time out on Saturday to watch my daughter run a couple of events at the state track meet, for which her high school team had qualified in various events. La Principessa is an avid runner and has the good fortune to be on a high school team which is one of the better ones in Massachusetts. As a result she ends up running not only in the regular season events, but often enough in the state-level meets as well.

LP takes after her father in a lot of ways, but an urge to run around a track is not one of them. I went to high school in a small town in the North Valley in California. When we came back to school each year in late August or early September (I forget which, exactly) the daytime temperatures were still usually in the upper nineties or sometimes even the lower hundreds. And what was the first unit we did each year in PE? Track. So there we'd be, running in circles in the heat on this dusty dirt track, and I found it utterly unfathomable that anyone would want to do that voluntarily. That's still the association that I have with running in general. I prefer to walk, thank you.

But I digress… At any rate, after days of toil I'm glad to say that everything is planted. Now it's a matter of watering, weeding and waiting. And trying to foil the plans of wildlife of all sizes. My arch-nemesis for now is the flea beetle, a little black beetle about the size of a pinhead that likes to eat little holes in the leaves of my eggplant, peppers and tomatoes, so many that it can stress the plant to the point that it withers and dies. I can see that my jalapeños have also been getting munched on by what I suspect to be Japanese beetles. For both I've sprayed rotenone-pyrethrin spray, which is supposed to be an organic compound approved for organic gardening.

Bigger things I have to watch out for are squirrels and robins. You wouldn't normally think of either one as a typical garden pest, but they cause me some headaches. The squirrels are a problem because they see from the disturbed soil that someone or something has been digging in the soil, so they start digging indiscriminately in search of whatever hidden treasure might be buried there and in the process make a mess of things. The robins are a nuisance because they go hopping through the beds in search of worms and in the process may break off bits of the leaves and stems of cabbage or broccoli seedlings, which at this stage can still be a little brittle. The defense against both is to protect whatever we've planted by surrounding it with a little wall of sticks that we've stuck into the ground. It looks sort of weird but so far it's generally worked.


Gonna Grow Me Some Sticks

So now I look forward to following the progress of my little farm from now until harvest time, and of course enjoying the fruits (or vegetables) of my labors. I'll be sure to bore you, dear reader, with regular updates.