Mystery plant revealed

So the mystery plant in the garden reached immense size last week.



Right before I left for the weekend, I noticed that it had little broccoli-like florets on it. Ah-hah! I thought. I've grown a mutant broccoli plant.



When I came back it had bolted and the florets had bloomed.



I stared at it for a while and decided it had to go. It was shading out everything else in the garden, and I don't think broccoli leaves are good to eat, and it obviously hadn't formed proper heads. Maybe my homemade compost had mutating powers?

But when I pulled it I discovered it was a Turnip of Unusual Size.



Almost three pounds of turnip!



I have no idea if a bolted extremely large turnip is good to eat. I suppose I'll give it a shot - if it's awful, the chickens will probably nom it down.

Vinca

I planted some vinca in a weird little part-shade area beside the house. It's the east side, shaded in early morning by the property fence and in the afternoon by the house itself.

I ripped out all the weeds


Dug out the sandy soil about 4" deep


Amended it with my half-done compost and shoveled the sandy soil back on top


Laid a dripline and spaced the plants right on the drip holes


And mulched with waste hay.


I think they'll be happy there. They don't grow very tall, but they spread nicely (at least the non-variegated ones do - that's why I bought more of them.) The dripline and the low plants means I won't be watering the side of the house and causing problems down the line. They never need mowing or pruning - all they want is shade and some water.

Solstice planting, or, Home Depot wins again

Over the weekend, I'd talked to the G&AWS about gardening. I suspect it's ridiculously easy to grow stuff in the Bay Area. Maybe your tomatoes and peppers don't get enough sunny days to really mature. Boo hoo. AWS has a wee Meyer lemon tree! on her patio! Super jealous.

I haven't really planted much here because anything but the hardiest of plants needs water, and that means drip irrigation, and I haven't put one in because they're expensive or something. Also they require commitment - I would really have to figure out where I want to plant stuff and have a plan and follow through with it.

Oh well, it can't hurt to look, right? I went to Home Depot, just to see how expensive drip systems are. Turns out there's a decent starter kit for $20. No controller, of course, but all the lines and fittings you'd need for a couple of flower beds. In a daze, I put the starter kit in my cart and walked slowly over to the garden section.

I spent a full hour looking carefully at every. single. sun-loving. plant. Eventually, I bought a red climbing rose to go on the chain link fence, and a couple of little daylilies to hang out near it. And a lavender, because I've always wanted one, and a sage, because everything tastes better with sage. AND a half-flat of marigolds. AAAND a cucumber and a cantaloupe. (I still don't know what the Mystery Plant is, but this way I'm hedging my bets.)

My total bill was substantially more than $20.

Here's the rose fence. (Laura inspired me!) I figure I should give the poor thing a couple days to settle in before I unhook it from its poles and train it onto the fence.


Lavender and sage:


I uprooted the volunteer cheatgrass that thrives in the drip from the faucet and planted some marigolds there.


I put a bunch of marigolds in the halfhearted garden bed.


One of those damn banties escaped while I was gone and did some serious damage to my seedlings. I spent the morning reinforcing my chicken fence. (The other banty is setting on a huge clutch of eggs in the Dogloo!) Anyway, she's hopefully contained now!

Yes, I am mulching with sundried hay. Maybe it has weed seeds and I'll regret this, but I don't mind a little weeding. :)

Now, all I have to do is dig up the buried water line, put a new FF hydrant in, and install the drip irrigation. Oh, and find homes for the remaining 15 marigolds. Maybe I didn't really need a half-flat. :o

Spring fever

I gardened!

It's probably dumb, because we have yet another series of rain or snow storms coming in this week, but oh well - if I lose $2 worth of seeds, I'll live.

My friend M has a silver poplar in her front yard. It sends up tons of little suckers every year. She usually cuts them out and throws them away, but last fall I asked her to save them for me. Today seemed like a good day to plant them, so I went over and we dug them up and I took them home.

I'm putting them in the DMZ, the area between the perimeter fence and the horse-safe hotwire fence. It's about 10' wide so there's plenty of room for the little saplings to spread out. (The internet assures me that silver poplars aren't poisonous to horses.) They grow very fast, and they seem pretty hardy, so hopefully I'll have a decorative forest in not too many years.

I dug each little treeling a hole, filled the hole mostly full with compost, then shoved the tree in and covered it with soil. I hope the compost holds water a little better so these guys can go a little longer between waterings.

Once I had all of them in the ground, I lined my raised bed with plastic, then filled it with dirt. I alternated thin layers of compost and sand-dirt, then squatted down and really worked the layers together with my hands. I pulled out a bunch of non-compost crap (nails and sagebrush roots and bits of plastic) and a bunch of itty bitty grass shoots. Then I got really excited and planted some stuff - lettuce, spinach, radishes, broccoli, and turnips. I want to succession-plant the salad veggies anyway, so I did tiny plantings of them, and I planted a rather modest amount of broccoli and turnips. All told, I only used about 1/3 of the bed.

I don't appear to have any hand garden tools so I, uh, used a fork. A kitchen fork. It works quite well for making seed holes in fluffy prepared beds!

Then I stapled some black plastic over the whole shebang. It should keep my little seeds from freezing if it does freeze, keep the moisture in, and heat the soil if the sun ever comes back out. My earliest sprout date is 5 days from now, so I'll pull the plastic off of the bottom third later this week. Five days is Friday - but right now the low on Friday is forecast to be well below freezing. Saturday I'll be away at Rides of March, and there's no point in pulling the plastic when I get home Saturday night, so... maybe Sunday morning? I dunno what to do!

Fabulous garden

We always had a garden when I was a kid, and ever since I moved out I've wanted to have one again. This is my first chance! Not in fertile Mississippi soil, with seasons I instinctively understand and plenty of rain. Nope. Out here in Nevada, in a sandpit backyard, with the wild-west weather and the short growing season.

I'm actually not complaining about the sand. My friend four blocks downhill has 12" of silt on a caliche base - she'll have deep sucking mudpuddles til May. At least I've got well-drained sand, enriched with a little humus, and I do own a very large hair and manure producing machine. Sand + compost = great dirt!



I started seriously trying to figure out how to garden when we bought the house last August. I've been googling off and on ever since then, trying to figure out when you plant stuff here. Last night, I finally found it! If you are trying to garden in the Reno / Tahoe area of Nevada, here's the pdf you've been looking for: UNR's "Getting Started with a Vegetable Garden." (Theoretically) reliable frost-free dates! Growing season! When to plant what stuff!!

I was so excited to find that - and realize that I wasn't actually too late - that I ran out and built my first raised bed. Well, I might not have been quite so excited if it wasn't such a lovely day - it got into the 60s, my lovely sand has dried out, and it's light til almost 6 now.

Behold!


I've spent six months dithering about what to make the walls of the beds out of. I've priced out fir, redwood, railroad ties, and cinderblocks. I've agonized over sizing and height. And today I just went and raided the woodpile behind the barn and knocked together the biggest thing I could build.

They're 2x6" cedar boards that spent who knows how many years behind the barn. They used to be a deck - there's some paint and stain still visible on them, and the ends of the boards have nail holes. But they haven't quite given their all yet, and I think they should gracefully retire as garden beds. I screwed them to some 3x4" pallet boards that were also in the pile, and I leveled the bed. It's built into a slight slope. I cut the pallet boards with legs that extend about 6 more inches into the ground.

I wanted beds that were 3-4' wide, and the most efficient use of my boards turned out to be 43". I kind of wish I could've built real raised beds, maybe 2' off the ground, but this will do. I've got enough 2x6's to make one more bed, then I've got enough 3"x4" pallet boards to make one even shorter bed. I've also got a bunch of 1x12" shelving boards, but I don't know how long a 3/4" thick board will last. And I think three beds will be enough for my first year gardening. :)

Questions!
Is there an efficient way to mix compost with existing sand? Should I shovel out all the sand and then layer compost-sand-compost-sand and fork it all together, or is there a better way?

Has anybody tried that Square Foot Gardening thing? It seems really well suited to my situation - tiny beds, lots of soil amendment, irrigation is essential.

What should I plant? I know I want to put in a permanent herb garden - that's one reason I want three beds. Of course I will try tomatoes, but they're hard to grow out here. I must grow carrots to feed to the horse that provides the manure. I'm not going to try corn - not enough space, and I think the wind would demolish it. Definitely bush beans. Definitely squash and zucchini. Definitely radishes and baby lettuce. Maybe turnips. Maybe broccoli and cabbage, but I know they're all brassicas and I have to rotate them carefully.

If I manage to grow tomatoes, and the devil tomatoworms find me, I am going to make my friend come kill them. Tomato worms give me the heebie jeebies like nothing else. Maybe I will catch a chicken and make the chicken eat the worm.