April 2011

Seeds outdoors: Now is the time to plant any of the cold weather varieties you did not get around to in March – salad mixes, chard, beets, Brassicas (cabbage, broccoli, collards, kale, caulis, etc.), even fava beans. Don’t forget to plant radishes where ever you have left over space.
Plant peas and pod peas when the soil warms a little – sprout them first so you get fewer misses.Seeds indoors: If you did not start your tomatoes yet, they will be a little late. Think about buying transplants.
Start your warm weather veggies — cucumbers, melons, gourds, pumpkins, summer squash, winter squash. If your soil warms quickly, wait a little and plant outdoors as they often grow as quickly when directly seeded in the garden
Start your tender annuals flowers like nasturtiumVegetable transplants: Time to put out your Brassica transplants: broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, etc. Keep setting seeds and transplanting into space as it becomes available.

Pest control: place floating row cover immediately over plants of cabbage family. Also, putting out larger transplants will mitigate flea beetle damage.

Roots: Buy mature asparagus plants and put them in a well dug perennial bed.
Potatoes like fresh fairly rich soil that is slightly acid. Put them in a trench and mound up as they grow.

Ornamentals: move volunteer perennials seedlings, cutback late summer blooming shrubs like buddleia and blue mist spirea, Russian sage, harden off shrubs and perennials purchased as container plants, prune winter kill from roses, prune lilacs by harvesting blooms and cut out dead stalks
 
Bountea Compost Tea:  You should be ready for your second or even third batch of the Bountea. Keep it simply with just the Humisoil and Bioactivator. If you are looking for fast leafy growth, add the M3 as instructed. Dilute 10 – 1 and apply to the leaves of all your seedlings as well as the soil.
  

Put in the coupon code SPRING11 at the end of your order to receive 10% discount!  This is only for readers of the newsletter.

This is a follow up article to Starting a Garden Again. That first gardening attempt was a disaster: the Brassicas turned a dark purple before perishing in the poor soil and harsh dry cold of winter.  Come February, I had given up on gardening at this house.

Then Lawrence invited me over to help dig his community plot.  As my shovel lifter his fluffy soil, I could feel the juices begin to flow.  There is something so basic about digging.  It took me back to the 1970’s, when I lived and worked on a tiny croft farm in the farthest southern tip of Ireland.  The neighbor boy, Michael Daly, taught me to dig lazy-beds for the potatoes.  It was backbreaking work but my body lear
ned to love it and has never forgotten.

The next day, I was out with the shovel attacking the 3 small beds in this garden.  The soil was dreadful – solid, heavy, inert – starved for organic matter.  If I had more motivation, I would have double dug the beds – loosened the subsoil and added compost.  As it was, I ordered a cubic yard of composted horse manure (very reasonably priced) and covered the beds with a 6″ layer.  Then out with the shovel again, mixing and loosening.  

To break up the crumb further, I gave it a going over with the tine-hoe and finished with some light raking.  Then two strong doses of Bountea, brewed with a good shot of M3 at the end.  The soil started to feel better – as if recuperating from a long illness.   

Soil tells you when it is happy and healthy.  It becomes loose and friable; it holds moisture and nutrients; it yearns to grow plants.  Stick your fingers three to four inches into the soil.  Lift it and feel its texture.  Like a loaf of fresh baked bread, it should be spongy, open, slightly moist and sticky – not gluey or gritty.  It is ready to plant when the soil feels fairly cool but not frigid – around 40F.

In the past, I grew everything from seed.  This time I chose the easier way and picked up a few plants at our local hardware store – onions, cabbage and broccoli.  Once those were in, the bug hit deep and I planted out some of the salad greens from the sunroom, followed by a few rows of peas, spinach and radishes.  A friend is holding 4 varieties of tomato for me, so with a few runner beans, I am about set for the year!

As this garden recuperates, so do I.  There is nothing more life enhancing than to work the soil, plant the seeds and watch the bounty grow.  Are you out there yet?

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