Garden Remodel and Mint Invasion

The peas are in the ground! Finally! I don’t know that I’ve ever planted them this late. (the picture of the planted peas was just dirt, so I took a picture of crocuses instead.)  This year’s garden is going to be a haphazard affair, it seems. We’ve got a construction project going which has forced me to relocate my strawberries, another chore I took care of this weekend. They wouldn’t all fit in the temporary bed I prepared for them, so some of them went in pallets. I’ve never tried this, but am hoping it works.

The driveway is being expanded and repaved- a project that has been overdue for at least ten years. New terraces and swales are being cut into our hillside to fix drainage issues. In the end, I’ll have two new huge garden beds! Well, since I’m losing one (the strawberries) in the process, it’s only a net gain of one bed. But as long as I’m still sending the garden to lawn ratio up, that’s all that matters.

This is the garden that's going -(I built that wall myself ten years ago by the way)

I’m a little nervous about one aspect of the garden remodel. In the bed where the strawberries used to reside there is mint. And when I say there is mint, I mean the entire bed is overrun, underrun, completely overtaken by mint. The strawberries have generally been able to hold their own in the battle for control, but the mint has always been on the winning end and I have to ally myself with the strawberries by mid summer and ruthlessly pull out any and all mint I can find. That still leaves plenty by fall when I cut it and dry it to make mint tea. My concern is this – when the old bed is bulldozed and the new beds are terraced into the same hillside, will the mint be EVERYWHERE?

My Black Thumb

Just to be sure you aren't under the illusion that my thumb is greener than the next person, I’d like to confess the gardening disasters that have already befallen me (or it might be more appropriate to say the gardening disasters I have already created) this spring. This growing season is shaping up to be my worst ever, unless you include the year I had a sick newborn and planted only potatoes because they would require nothing of me.

The first disaster started back in the fall in our brand new terrace garden. We filled the hillside bed with dirt harvested from our paddock – rich with ten years worth of natural fertilizer.

And then I planted a cover crop of rye grass. The plan (as I understood it from skimming an Organic Gardening article), was that the grass would run its course and die out by spring and then we would knock it down to serve as a natural mulch for our tomatoes. Brilliant! No more purchased mulch, plastic or otherwise, since the last two seasons we’ve gotten the early blight and the late blight. This was to be the year of the tomatoes!

 The grass grew beautifully all winter. The problem is that the northeast has experienced the warmest winter on record (at least my records) and that grass is still growing and growing and is so thick and tall that the kids hide in it for Capture the Flag. Now what? So much for my grand plan.

There is a second part to the tomato disaster. This year I made my own growing medium. I blogged about the beautiful mix I concocted. I started eight different varieties of tomatoes, plus four sweet peppers and four hot peppers in the growing mix.

Wow! The germination rate was through the roof! My growing mix was amazing – every single seed I planted sprouted, plus some appeared to have duplicated themselves because some of the pots had 8 seedlings fighting for light. I patted myself on the back and thinned my seedlings.

A few days later, I noticed there were even more seeds sprouting. The problem was, every single seed that was sprouting was a tomato. Even the peppers. Tomato seedlings have hairy stems – you can’t mistake them for anything but a tomato. How was it all my seeds were tomatoes?

When I checked the buckets of growing mix, yet to be used, there were hundreds of tomatoes sprouting there too. Obviously my compost was full of tomato seeds, and God knows what kind of tomatoes at that. Were they seeds from the organic cherry tomatoes I buy for my oldest to snack on all winter? Were they seeds from the first tomatoes we harvested last year, before we knew we had the blight and happily threw discarded tomato pulp in the compost? Or were they seeds that I had just planted? No way to know.

So here I am with plenty of tomato seedlings, only I’m terrified to plant them for fear of the blight, plus I have no earthly idea what kind of tomatoes they are.

And the disasters just keep coming…..

Since we were having trouble containing the chickens, I decided to sprout my peas before planting them. That bought us a few extra days to secure the chicken fence and clip every wing. The peas were slow to sprout and the day they were ready, I was leaving town for my little brother’s retirement celebration (I’m not that old! He’s an air force pilot who retired after 22 years).

With no time to plant, I thought I would stall them; I put them in the fridge to wait until I got back three days later. I did wonder if this might kill them, but I figured they were peas and the temperature wasn’t freezing so they would survive.

Wrong. Those lovely sprouted peas I planted promptly when I returned produced only 3 viable plants (out of probably 100 seeds). So today I replanted my snap and snow peas and berated myself the entire time.

And the fun continues…

Meanwhile, the lettuce I planted several weeks ago was still not appearing, same for the carrots, spinach, and onions. I figured this was mostly due to my negligent watering habits, but could also be blamed on the fact that the only rain we had in the past two weeks was a huge downpour the day after I planted all those tiny fragile seeds. For a week, I watered diligently. No dice, just a couple onion tips.

Perhaps they washed away. Perhaps they did. When I dug around to add more seeds, I found only a handful of lettuce plants getting started. Ugh. Replanted the lettuce and spinach this morning. The carrots are on their own. I never have good luck with them anyway and I’m going to assume the onion bulbs will get going once the gardener gets her act together and starts watering on a regular basis.

This would all be very depressing, except the great thing about gardening is that seeds are cheap. You can always try again tomorrow. In digging up the OG article that led me to plant the grass, I discovered that you can just knock down or mow the rye grass. I tried tromping it down, but it just bounced right back. I’m thinking we might have to use a scythe, that’ll be fun, won’t it honey?

And the tomatoes. I pulled out everything from eight of the starter pots and put fresh seeds in them, figuring all the volunteers who were going to volunteer had already done so. I’ll use my eight new plants as templates to decipher what is growing in all the other pots.

This is the goal. Someday.

I hope your gardening season is off to a better start than mine. I’ll let you know how the story ends.

NOTE: I'LL BE PRESENTING A WORKSHOP ENTITLED "CLEAN AND GREEN LIVING" AT THE MASON DIXON LIBRARY WEDNESDAY APRIL 18 AT 6:30 PM. WOULD LOVE TO SEE YOU THERE.

Get It Started!

I’m late getting my seeds started this year. The basic problem is I’m thinking too much. This is a common problem for me. Too much thinking/dwelling/considering and not enough doing.

Initially, I was so ready to get going with the garden that at the first sign of spring (75 degree weather in the middle of February!), I went out in search of soil. The problem is that my local gardening place wasn’t open yet for the season and the only thing Home Depot had was “Organic Choice” by Scott’s Miracle Gro. In my zest, I bought it, carted it home, and left it on my porch. Where it still sits because a) I became extremely skeptical that anything made by the Miracle Gro people could possibly be organic and b) even if it is, the Scott’s company is responsible for law suits against organic competitors, not to mention the poisoning of more lawns and gardens in America than anyone else.

Everyday as I walked past the big yellow bag, I felt guiltier and guiltier. This past week I realized that I’d spent so much time wallowing in my guilt and indecision that it’s less than 8 weeks away from Tomato planting time and I have yet to start a single seed. So I went to my computer and googled “Organic Choice by Scott’s” and low and behold it is actually certified by OMRI (Organic Material Research Institute). OMRI is the non-profit organization responsible for certifying gardening materials for certified organic growers. They keep a database on all the products they certify.

The skeptic in me wonders how a non-profit agency that is funded by donations, grants, and the fees it charges for the certification process could possibly keep tabs on the tens of thousands of products out there, but the trusting soul in me figures there’s really no other option but to go with it. Still. Scott’s is a pretty lousy company. If their product is so superior why is it they have to wage legal and financial war on small organic companies to eliminate the competition? I haven’t opened the bag.

My usual practice is to mix sphagnum peat moss and vermiculite with potting soil to start my seeds, but now that my potting soil is giving me such mental fits, I decided to try something different.

Seed starter is exactly what it says it is – a medium for starting seeds. Typically, it has very little nutrients in it because seeds don’t need nutrients to germinate. Once they have their first true leaves, however, they need some food. So that’s when it’s recommended that you transplant them to potting soil. I’m a lazy gardener in a hurry, so I combine the seed starter and the soil to begin with and skip the whole transplanting step, except for my tomatoes, the royalty of the garden. I do transplant my tomatoes to bigger pots somewhere along the line.

I searched OMRI for commercial seed starting mixtures that are certified, and found only one brand which isn’t available at my gardening store. I turned to OrganicGardening Magazine’s website (highly recommend this site to anyone with gardening questions or anyone just starting out gardening – super helpful articles). They recommended a home-made seed starter recipe of screened compost, vermiculite, perlite, and sphagnum peat moss. Their potting soil recipe was simply compost and vermiculite. I decided to split the difference and create something that has all four ingredients, but is heavy on the vermiculite and compost. We shall see.

In the interest of my own completely non-scientific research, I’m also going to mix vermiculite, compost and my own garden soil for some of the seeds.

It’s also time to start the peas. Because my hens are not completely finished tilling the garden for me, I decided to try germinating the peas myself in wet paper towels. This will give the girls a couple extra days, but keep my peas on schedule. I’ve never tried this, but have heard from old-timers that it works great.

Stay tuned for the Seedling Update and the Pea Report next month!

Have you started any plants yourself? The ground is warm enough for lettuce, spinach, and carrots, so scatter a few seeds. It’s also safe to put in your broccoli plants and cabbages. You don’t need a designated vegetable garden, just find an open piece of soil in one of your flower beds and have at it. No excuses for no garden. Plant something!