Vertical Gardening

Hours were spent last year cutting young ash trees to use for trellis supports.  Many more hours were spent patiently weaving twine back and forth between the supports into netting for pole beans.  Not this year.
This year I bought ready-made reusable nylon netting 5'x30' and tied it onto 8' rebar stakes.  Total investment was about $60 and 2 hours.  This is the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

The rebar was re-purposed from the hops field where Jim, Wu and I (mostly Jim and Wu) have spent the past week installing over fifty 24' poles to support the aerial cables.  Our task is now to install the cables and run rope down to each hop plant so that the bines will grow skyward.  The whole enterprise looks awfully strange from the road and I'm sure the neighbors and passing traffic are wondering what the hell we're doing.

Quite a few of the potatoes have now sprouted and the peas are generally 4"-6" tall.  I re-potted tomatoes and cabbages yesterday afternoon in my kitchen garden.  Speaking of the kitchen garden,  I did a bad thing about two weeks ago.  After cleverly bending conduit and stretching plastic over the entire raised bed to create a hoop house, I failed to anticipate how hot it could get on the inside with direct sunlight.  Within 24 hours I succeeded in killing all the lettuce that had so far sprouted, three-quarters of the peas, all of the onions I started back in March, and about half of the cabbage.  Boy did I feel stupid.  Fortunately it is early in the season and I just replanted everything.  Lesson learned.

Having lost all my onions I ordered 6 bunches (~360 seedlings) of Super Star onions from Berlin Seed.  About 30 of them are planted in my kitchen garden (4/23) and the rest are planted at the farm (4/18).  The onions at the farm were planted every other row and I plan to place rows of tomatoes interspersed with the onions.  Jim went to the Joint Vocational School (JVS) on Thursday and picked out the tomato and pepper plants he ordered back in January.  I hope to make a trip down to the Mt. Hope produce auction soon to buy cucumber, broccoli, and maybe a few other vegetables.  I wonder if they sell netting?

Beating the Rain

Every forecast I saw this morning called for rain by early afternoon.  Not only that, but after a week of temperatures in the 70's and 80's, a forecasted high of 50' by week's end is not exactly welcome news.  So this morning I coupled the disc to the Farmall and fitted-up a little over an acre in the east field.  Then I dropped off the disc and hitched the grain drill.  As this was the first time out this season, I greased all the fittings and checked it over thoroughly before filling it with Lacey barley (malting barley) and adjusting the seeding rate.  Two passes with the disc and one with the drill took about three hours.

By 5pm it still had not started raining so I decided to fit up another plot in the east field about 30' by 200'.  It was getting pretty dark by 7:30pm when the field was ready to plant but the rain hadn't started yet so I exchanged the Farmall for the two-wheeled tractor with the potato plow and prepped four rows 50' each.  I planted 200' of Kennebeck potatoes and finished hoeing the rows by 8:30pm.

Maybe it'll rain tomorrow.

Surprise, it's summer!

April Fool's Day brought a surprise end to spring with a record-breaking high of 83'.  April 2nd was more of the same.  The past week has been fantastic for working outdoors and I've taken advantage of it as much as possible.  Construction of the raised slab wood beds continued on Thursday evening.  And by the end of Friday the north beds were finished, about 4 weeks after I began.  Hopefully the southern beds won't take as long.

On Wednesday March 30th I planted 24 Rose Finn Apple fingerling potatoes in one of the raised beds.  This is approximately how much I planted last year which I then kept for seed.  Yesterday (4/3) Will and I worked up three 100' rows at the farm and planted it all in Rose Finn Apple potatoes (saved seed).  I used the Farmall to plow and then disc the area.  Will ran the rototiller up and down each row once.  Then I followed behind with the David Bradley 2-wheel tractor with the potato plow.  The wind started to blow just as we finished planting and a band of storms blew through the area for the rest of the afternoon.

The peas I planted two weeks ago just broke the surface yesterday, greens too.  Yesterday I bought another 3-shelf living room greenhouse from Drug Mart and last night I started 200 tomato plants.  So far I've begun:

50     Costoluto Firoentino

50     Roma

50     Rutgers

25     Black Plum

25     Small Red Cherry

With a heat mat on the 2nd shelf the soil is around 85'.  There is no more space in the living room for additional greenhouses so I'll probably rotate the plants from greenhouse #1 out of the living room and into a cold frame.  The warm temps are expected to continue throughout the week so hopefully I'll have plenty of opportunity.