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.

The Gentleman Farmer

Memorial Day is coming up fast. Here in eastern Mass, that means planting day is just around the corner. You don't want to put your seedlings out until the danger of frost is definitely past, and here that's not until the end of May. I've occasionally seen snow here in mid-April, fer crissakes. But even before the seedlings go out, there's plenty to do.

There are lots of signs that spring is finally on its way. The first harbinger of warmer days ahead: Slime mold!

What's that I spy?

Every fall I rake up a ton of leaves, run over them with the lawnmower and then dump them in a little pen for storage so that when lawn-mowing time comes I can mix the clippings with the chopped up leaves for a fine (and truly delicious) compost. At some point every April, when the pile of leaves is still wet from rain but the weather has gotten up into the 40's and 50's for a day or two, a small patch of pale yellow goop will appear on the leaves and rapidly grow for about three days, then dry out and die off as suddenly as it appeared. I'm pretty sure that what I'm seeing is slime mold. To be more precise, I believe that what is inhabiting my leaf pile is Fuligo septica, the Dog Vomit Slime Mold.


Why, it's my old friend Dog Vomit!

Slime mold is fascinating stuff. It isn't really mold or any kind of fungus, apparently. Although it reproduces like a fungus by producing fruiting bodies that send out spores, it's really sort of like a giant amoeba that just cruises around looking for something to eat, and then surrounds and ingests whatever tasty morsel it happens upon. Apparently a lot of people are afraid of slime mold. I can see why. Look out! Here come Dog Vomit! Maybe we can outrun it!

A lot of wildlife starts showing up about the same time. Most notably, the turkeys will appear. For a few years we had quite a few that would go parading through our yard a couple of times a day. More recently there have been a number of coyotes showing up, and since then we've seen far fewer turkeys each year. The interesting thing is that this is all happening around eight miles from downtown Boston.

The turkeys are kind of amusing. The males put on quite a show on my lawn every spring, parading around with their wings and tails all fluffed up. All they would need is a polyester suit and a string of puka shells around their neck to be largely indistinguishable from some people I knew in high school. The downside of having the turkeys around is that they like to roost in some trees not far from my bedroom window, and as soon as it gets light in the morning they're making a huge racket with their "gobble gobble gobble" call.


Your place or mine?

 

Baby, don't you want a man like me?

Another annual rite of spring is the ceremonial first mowing of the lawn. I do not enjoy mowing the lawn, because I have a big one. All told it's about a quarter of an acre, which is a fair amount of lawn to be pushing a mower over. Since I compost all those clippings, the mowing time is increased because the bag-thingy that catches the clippings fills up fast and then I have to haul it over to the compost pile and mix the clippings with the leaves from my leaf pile (you can read about that exciting process here).

All told, it takes me roughly three hours to do the whole job. My neighbors, an older couple whose lawn is contiguous with mine (I don't think either of us knows exactly where the property line is), have a gardening service that comes and shaves their lawn down to stubble once a week. I manage to do mine about once every two or three weeks, so by the time I do get mine mowed, the contrast between the two is pretty stark.


Guess which side is mine.

I've never thought seriously about hiring a lawn service to come mow it for me. My kids will tell you it's because I'm a notorious tightwad. Actually, I am perfectly willing to pay good money for the level of quality I want in a good or service. I pay extra for quality tools, for example, because I know they will probably last a lifetime and will be more accurate and dependable than the cheap version from the bargain bin. (Also, I just really like nice tools.) And I don't mind paying someone to cut my hair or fix my roof or provide some other service for which I lack the the skills or the necessary equipment. But the idea of having someone come to mow my lawn or clean my house or some other such homekeeping chore that I'm perfectly capable of doing myself seems kind of decadent and pretentious, regardless of how tedious the task in question may be. I'd venture to say that there would be a lot more humility in the world if there was a law that everyone has to do his own laundry and clean his own toilet.

Last summer I did pay my son a token amount to mow a few times when it was getting urgent but I just had too many other, equally urgent things to get done over the weekend. I wanted to do that again the weekend before last, when it was pretty clear that the time for mowing was upon us, but unfortunately The Young Master recently whacked his head pretty hard on the ground while playing goalie in a soccer game and ended up with a concussion, so he is now excused by doctor's orders from most physical and mental activity while he convalesces. I took him to see the doctor, who ordered that until the test he has to take weekly indicates that he is back to normal, TYM is to (doc's actual words) "avoid using his brain". You can imagine the spontaneous response this advice will elicit from the father of any fifteen-year-old boy, but before I could open my mouth, TYM already was saying, "Now my dad's going to say I never use it anyway." Knows me pretty well, he does.

I spent a lot of the weekend cleaning up the garden and getting it ready for next weekend's planting extravaganza. One of the things I had to do was to replace the wooden planks that contain the dirt for the raised beds. I had not originally planned to use raised beds, but the spot we selected for the garden was nearly impossible to dig up for gardening purposes. As I discovered when I tried, there are some fairly huge boulders buried in there. There's also a bunch of old asphalt chunks and other crap that was apparently dumped there as fill to level the whole area out when they started building on our section of the street in the early 1960's (I am told that our back yard was once a pond before they developed the area). You need something to hold in the dirt for raised beds, so after considering a bunch of alternatives, I chose to go with construction-grade 2x12's as the most cost-effective option. They last 5–6 years and then rot out and need to be replaced, so I had to replace a bunch of them this year.

A Sorry State Indeed



You never know what you're going to find when you start peeling the old boards off. When I was taking one of the box frames apart, a little vole came running out. I could see the little tunnel leading to its nest, which was now exposed. In the nest were eight or nine little baby voles. I hate voles in my garden. They dig in the beds and chew on my vegetables. I am not putting all that work into this in order to keep the local rodent population well fed. But being a live-and-let-live kind of guy, I collected the entire vole family (the adults are pretty slow and clumsy, so they aren't hard to catch) and carted them off to their new home in a little wooded area further down the street.



What's this?



One Big Happy Family

The Proud Mother

Once rid of unwanted guests, it's a messy but simple job to put the new boards in place.

Ready for Another Five Years

Of course you need something to put in the beds once they're ready. Besides voles, I mean. We have a total of eighteen beds; nine are 4' x 10' and nine are 4' x 8' in size. One of the 4' x 10' beds is always reserved for lettuce, the growing of which, for some reason, has become the job of My Favorite Wife. I am not sure how exactly we evolved this system by which she tends exactly one bed while I for some reason do all of the weeding, watering, fertilizing, cultivating and harvesting of the remaining seventeen, but that's how we do it. From early April she's out there fiddling with her lettuce. I guess it keeps her out of trouble. But the box frame is falling apart, I protest. I need to fix that first. Sorry, she says, it's planting time; figure out a way to fix it after I plant, but don't mess up my lettuce! Lettuce waits for no man.


Kopfsalat is das halbe Leben

I planted my seedlings around the end of March, as I've reported previously. This year I put my planting bench in the garage, My Favorite Wife having unreasonably banished it from the dining room, and I'm not so sure that was a successful experiment. It was still pretty cold in the garage in March and April, and I think that the seedlings grew far more slowly than they ever did in the warm house, so they're smaller than I would like for them to be by this time of year. In the meantime I've transplanted everything into bigger pots and put them on trays on our funky sun porch. On sunny days I take them out on the lawn for "hardening off", so that they can get used to the sun and wind and also just enjoy playing together outside, which is important for their social development.

Almost Ready

The final step before being ready to plant is to generally clean up everything. Replacing the rotting box frames is part of that. The rest is pulling out all the old leftover vegetation from last year, pulling up all the stakes and frames that are still stuck in the ground, and especially pulling up all the weeds that now populate all of the beds and the spaces in between; it's amazing how quickly they take over the whole place if left to their devices.


It doesn't look so bad from here…



…but from here it looks like work.

So as it turned out I spent the better part of last weekend repairing the box frames and generally cleaning up. It's not the most exciting way to spend a weekend, but it was definitely nice to spend a couple of warm spring days outside after being cooped up in my basement office for the whole previous week, not to mention the whole previous winter. But I'm ready to start this year's farming activities and for me that's pretty exciting.


Now, doesn't that look nice?





Out Like… a Lion?

I have been pining for spring after all the cold weather and snow we had this winter. With the coming of March, things have started to take a turn for the better. We had some heavy rainstorms around the beginning of the month, but also some dry stretches with temperatures in the 40's and 50's (F). I've watched with pleasure as the giant piles of snow in my backyard and throughout the neighborhood have gradually disappeared until there is very little left.


Even a Very Faint Hint of Green Lawn


The seedlings I planted a couple of weeks ago are all pretty much up and growing too. Another sign that spring is coming! This weekend I'll plant a bunch more.

Progress

This past Sunday, March 20 was the equinox, the official beginning of spring (equinox… I've always really liked the sound of that word for some reason… equinox… equinox… equinox…). It wasn't exactly a warm day, mid-40's maybe, but it was sunny and dry. And then what did I wake up to the next morning? A snowstorm! Massachusetts, so cruel art thou. They say that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. Here it comes in like a lion and goes out like a very slightly smaller lion.


Supposedly There's A Lamb In There Somewhere



Seeds of Hope

Rising temperatures and thawing snow are clear signs that against all odds, spring may actually come to Massachusetts this year. But long before that happens, even as winter is only just getting seriously underway, there is another sign of a coming spring. Every January, just after the first of the year, my mailbox becomes clogged with seed catalogs.

I buy more or less the same stuff from the same three suppliers every year. I get tomatoes and peppers from a supplier that specializes in those things, I get lettuce and other greens from a second supplier, and everything else from a third. Obviously they share their mailing lists with other suppliers, because I always end up with catalogs from over a dozen others.

Looking out at my garden from my bedroom window at that time of year, spring still seems a long way off. All I see is a sea of white. This year, with record snowfall, that sea was deeper than ever, reaching almost to the top of the garden fence, which stands a little over four feet high.


2/2/11: I hope the groundhog was right…


Now that we are into March, and we've had some warmer days and a bunch of rain, the snow is starting to disappear, but it still looks pretty dreary outside. All the rain we've gotten in the last few days has melted away a lot of snow, but it doesn't all drain away quickly, so the ground in my back yard has a soggy, squishy character.


3/6/11: I can actually see the ground now



3/6/11: A little sun, and the glacier is receding further

With the snow gone I can also see all of the dead plant material, stakes and whatnot that I promise myself I will clear away every fall before the snow comes, but somehow never get around to doing. I will end up doing it before I plant in the late spring. I don't know that it really matters, objectively speaking, but it might be nice to start the gardening season with everything already looking nice and tidy.

But for now the gardening work is happening indoors. The seeds I ordered recently arrived, so on the weekend I started planting things that I have learned from experience to start planting about now: eggplant, peppers and cabbages. I get out the starter trays and fill the little compartments in the trays with moistend sterile seed starter mix. Then, using my trusty zircon-encrusted tweezers, I carefully poke one seed into each little compartment.


Mühsam ernährt sich das Eichhörnchen

The whole thing is a pretty tedious business and I tend to sort of space out as I'm doing it, especially if someone happens to come up and start talking to me while I'm in the middle of it. Hmm, did I just put a seed into that compartment, or did I put it in the other one? Yes? No? Guess I'll put another one in to be safe. Wait, did I already put two in there? And on and on… It's hard work, but somebody has to do it. I just try to think of it as a zen meditation sort of thing, something that will help me be at one with myself (whatever that means), but I'm still glad when it's done.

After the trays are filled I put them on my seed starting bench on electric mats that are supposed to keep them warm enough for the seeds to germinate. My seed starting bench is one of the many things I've whipped together quickly out of a bunch of scrap lumber for temporary use, but has then lasted for years and years afterward. My woodworking hobby and general deep-seated compulsion to be constantly building something or other ensures that there are always plenty of materials lying around from which something at least marginally useful can be constructed.

This year My Favorite Wife has decreed that this elegant piece of fine furniture is no longer welcome in the dining room, so I've found a spot for it in the garage. This will be an interesting experiment because this time of year the unheated garage still has an average temperature of about 45° F, so I am hoping that the heating mat will work well enough for the peppers and eggplant, which like warm soil, to germinate and not just rot in the damp soil.



Banished to the Garage



For the cabbages at least I know it's working, since the first seedlings (red and white varieties!) are sprouting, three days after I planted them. I find this tremendously exciting. But then I am not like you.



Newborn baby cabbages! Look closely. Aren't they darling?