Tuesday, October 28th, 1997
Wow, what a successful day in my garden! I have been working for the past few
days every day, trying to prepare my garden for the October two days before
the new moon planting which was to be October 29th. Only I wasn't going to be
home all day long on the 29th. So I started out today thinking I'd plant this
evening, one day early for a change. :) I cannot believe how prolific this nutgrass
is. It is horrible, horrible stuff. I'd much rather have bermuda grass to deal
with any time over nutgrass. I spent time sifting through the soil today, soil
I'd already gone through... and today I kept finding more and more and more
nutgrass roots. Awful stuff. I ended up working 3 or 4 hours in my garden.
Anyway, I got the soil all dug up and sifted through as best as I could do. If I had the energy and time I might have tried sifting the soil through 1/4" mesh! The area I prepared is 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. I discovered in my first garden that 4 feet across is really too wide for me to work comfortably in. I had planned to have wide paths in between beds this time, but the path today ended up being only a foot wide. I can deal with it. I needed the space more for the bed. I worked in blood meal, bone meal and 3 bags of composted steer manure. (Thanks, Stefani!!) I put 6 foot boards on each side and for the short ends I used these concrete things that I've had laying around in my way. That worked out real well. I'm glad I didn't get rid of those. I laid the soaker hose and used these great u shaped pieces of steel that Michelle let me have. So much easier to keep the hose in the position I want it to stay in. Speaking of soaker hose, I set up a Y-joint connector so that I could control the flow of water to the beds. The first bed is established and does not to be constantly moist, as the seeds do now in the second bed. I had enough extra end pieces that I'd bought last season that I was able to set up the soaker hose correctly. I'm excited about this, as last year I never did get the hoses in properly, or at least to my satisfaction.
I did get my seeds from Pinetree on Saturday and was pretty excited about planting some new kinds of seeds. I was thinking it might be a wise investment to set aside $10 a month to order new seeds. It's such incentive getting to plant new kinds of things! So this is what I planted this afternoon; Three kinds of spinach; Melody(H), Space(H) and the kind I normally plant, Bloomsdale Longstanding. (H=Hybrid) I planted three kinds of radishes and two kinds of carrots. I planted Cherry Belle radishes and intercropped Little Finger carrots, Easter Egg(H) radishes and intercropped Mokum(H) carrots, Pinetree assorted radishes alone. I planted broccoli and intercropped bunching onions in 3 sq.ft. I planted Tom Thumb lettuce, Pinetree assorted lettuces, gold beets, red beets, rhubarb swiss chard. I did also plant some marigolds along the edges of the bed.
Hopefully on Thursday I will have time to redig up one of my old beds along the fence and plant my Sweet Pea flower seeds that are soaking as I type this.