I know, another gardening post.  I promise, I’ll get back to posts about something besides my garden and my broken leg.  But here’s one more garden blog post before that.

We have hit a warm spell. so things are starting to grow like crazy.  Most trees have completely leafed out, finally, although there are some that are still looking like March.  None of the fruit trees have bloomed, however, due to the long and cold spring.  This is unfortunate.  This means I won’t have apples this year.  The lettuce seed I planted two months ago has finally grown enough that it may be edible in another week or two, depending on how much moisture I give that garden.  If I’m careful and cover them once it gets too hot, we could have lettuce all the way into August.

My big plot at the community garden is coming along nicely.  The sixteen cabbages continue to do well, even the two I thought I had lost.  After the big straw-turning-to-hay debacle, I think I have most of the grass under control.  I scooped off all of the mulch and laid down a double layer of newspaper, then moved the mulch back on top.  After a week, there is no grass growing through.  Grass is growing freely everywhere else, as well as other weeds, but not where I put the newspapers.  I will be employing the newspaper method elsewhere in the garden shortly.

Apparently, there was dill in the garden before I got it.  The tilling just spread the seed around, and I have some very nice dill seedlings coming up.  I transplanted two to where I wanted them (in between the squash and pumpkins) and am giving away the rest of the seedlings in a week or two when they get big enough to transplant. I love fresh dill, but I’m going to try to keep it from reseeding willy-nilly later in the summer.  Although, if I have to pull up weedy dills, they sure do smell good while I’m doing it!

Yes, those are rocks in there, with the mulch and the dirt and the weeds and the dill seedlings.  It’s a messy garden space.  It will be better as I work with it.

The squash and pumpkins weren’t all that happy to be put into the garden, but they will recover.  They look puny, and most of the blooms dropped off, but that’s okay.  They weren’t really big enough to be blooming like that.  They’ll still produce, I’m not worried.

Only about a tenth of the turnip and beet seeds came up, and there is no sign of the parsnips yet.  I will reseed more turnip and beets, and keep watering the parsnips, and wait.  I also planted corn seed yesterday, and both of the big tomato plants I bought on sale last week.  One is an Early Girl, the other a Sweet 100 Cherry.  I want to add at least two more tomato plants.  I had thought about doing heirlooms, as one of my plot neighbors has seedlings, but his are too small yet, and if I’m putting them in this late, they may not ever bloom.  So I may just buy a couple of tomato plants at the garden center and see how they do.  I also want to do some eggplant.  I can also put in pea and  bean seeds this week.  I will buy fencing this coming weekend to support them, and the tomatoes and pumpkins.  After that, I may be done planting.  It may be all I can put in.

I am helping to work on an additional plot with my neighbor.  One of the regulars in the garden doesn’t have time to work on his plot, so she and I are going to put a lot of squash and pumpkins in it.  I am seeding the squash now in my window.  It is winter squash, so if it goes in a bit late it will be okay.  We also dug a few “unknown” squash plants that were sprouting from one of the compost bins.  We’ll see what they are!  It will be a surprise!

I’m trying to leverage the cost of all the work, plus the cost of the garden and plants, against what we get in yield.  I do want to grow things that will help alleviate our grocery bill.  We don’t eat all that many tomatoes, so I don’t want to grow 15 tomato plants and watch them go to waste.  We will eat cabbage, and we will eat a few eggplant.  I love root veggies so we will eat a lot of those, and I love squash.  I’ll be trying to keep an eye on the cost to value ratio as I go along this summer.  Yes, I enjoy working in the garden, and sitting in the evening as the sun goes down while I water my plot in small pieces (we are not allowed to use overhead watering there) is my “zen” time, I still need to know this is doing more than taking up my time.  I already have plenty of things in my life that do that!

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 26th, 2013 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.