Planting Vegetables - My First True Garden Experience

Until this spring, my experience in the garden consisted of clearing out the weedy overgrowth that I inherited from the previous owner.  But now that it's been cleared out, there's room for me to plant some things and hope they grow.  And considering my lack of gardening experience, that's about the extent of my gardening skill.

I was hoping to give my green beans, carrots, and sunflowers a good start, and so I bought a seed starter kit.  When my parents were in town for a weekend to help out around the yard, I let my mom plant the seeds and cover them with plastic, which, I had read, helps to give them a good start.  I kept them upstairs in the loft, on a table by the window where they got plenty of light.  Within a couple of weeks or so, the plants had sprouted up.

Then it became a matter of deciding when to move them outside.  The first step was to weed the planter boxes in the garden to make room for them.  Once they were clear, as above, it was a matter of following the weather.  By the time I had finished clearing the planter boxes, there was a forecast of a very cold night, with potential for frost.  I held off on planting the starter plants.  It was a good thing, too, because there wound up being a frost.  But then I was busy with work and other obligations.  I didn't have time to mow the lawn, much less plant anything in the garden.  I had time over Memorial Day weekend, but another cold night was in the forecast on Sunday night.  I held off, and it's probably a good thing, because my weather station recorded a low of 31 degrees early in the morning.  So finally, on Memorial Day, I moved the plants outside.

First, I dug a hole:

I filled the hole with some water:

I removed the bottom of the seed starter containers, then I placed the container with seeds in the hole:

Finally, I secured the container in place by filling the hole and covering it with topsoil.  Now, it's up to me to keep the plants watered and weeded so that they'll grow!

Some New Tools

Though winter is refusing to go away - another 2" or so of snow fell last night - before long, it will start to warm up, and I'll have a lot of work to do in the yard.  And now I have more equipment with which to that work.  My parents got me a couple of gifts for my birthday, including a bucket to wheel around the yard.  My grandfather passed away a couple of months ago, and he's handed down to me some of the tools with which he lovingly tended his own yards and gardens over the years.  This includes some leaf-blowing equipment that will be really helpful next fall, a hose on a cart that he had for decades, a tool that will be great for chopping ice on the sidewalk in winter, a big rake thingy to break up the soil in the garden, a pair of loppers to trim smaller branches, and a long pole with a sharp end - whatever it's called - to take care of higher, longer branches.  As you can tell, I'm not really up to speed on the names of all these things, but I know they'll all come in handy.

Looking Ahead Week: The Garden

When I moved into my house in August, the garden was lush with vegetation.  The problem, though, was that this vegetation was growing out of control.  The near end of the garden, especially, was a thick growth dominated by thorny raspberry plants.  Before I could plant anything in the garden this year, I had to clear out the raspberries, the weeds, and their roots and underground runners.  Although the thickest growth was at the near end of the garden, the far end had plenty of vegetation to clear as well:

After a few hours of work, the fringe of the garden was clear, and a couple of shrubs or short trees were revealed:

And after several more hours of work, the garden was cleared of most of those annoying plants.  It wasn't anywhere near ready for planting, but it was slowly getting there:

Since I'm still learning the ropes of gardening, and since there's lots of space in the garden, I'm planning to plant the garden in stages.   There are two long planter rows that run nearly the full length of the garden: these are my objective for this year.

I cleared out the plants (mostly grass and small weeds) late in the fall, and I plan to fill one with flowers and one with vegetables after temperatures have warmed up later this spring.  I have a mixture of full-sun and shade flowers to try out this year, and we'll see which grow the best in the part-sun, part-shade environment of the garden.  I've also bought some carrots and green beans - vegetables that I actually eat - to try out in the garden.  I plan to start them indoors and hope that they sprout and get a good start before I transplant them to the garden.  The seedlings will be easier to manage that way.

As for the rest of the garden - well, I think I have enough on my hands for now, between the two garden planter boxes, the wildflower area, cleaning up the branches and junk from the yard, and still leaving some time to enjoy my spring and summer.  In the coming weeks, I look forward to seeing the snow melt, the grass grow, the wildflowers pop up, the leaves turn the trees green, and all of the annual wonders of spring.

Weekend Yardwork

With mild weather hanging around central New York this weekend, I found a little time to get out to the garden and clear out the "planter boxes".  They were full of grass and weeds, with a couple of goldenrod plants sprinkled in.  The plan, as of now, for the spring is to plant something - probably flowers - in these long, rectangular boxes, and then worry about the rest of the garden later.  The garden, as you can see, looks as if it was simply abandoned one day...the stool and small weeding box left in place.  You can see in the following photos how I cleared out the garden this weekend.  And what is that in the above photo with the red handle...a new tool, perhaps?  But more on that tomorrow...

What is this?

There's a mysterious box in my garden, and I have no idea what its purpose is.  The top and sides are made of wire screening, as you can see above.  Inside is a mound of dirt with some kind of moss-like plant growing on it (and a few other plants mixed in).  There are also a couple of pieces of wood in the box, as you can see below.

And here's a close-up of the plant...it looks moss-like from a distance, but maybe not so moss-like up close.  If you can tell me what type of plant this is, or what use I might have for the screen box, it would be much appreciated!

Clearing the Weedy Garden: A Photo Series

While I didn't get as much raking done as I wanted to this weekend, I did finish clearing out just about all of the plants from the side of the garden that needed it the most.  Here's a look at my progress, from the beginning of the clearing project through this weekend.

To begin with, the garden and the fringe outside the garden were overgrown with weeds.

I started at the edge of the fringe, and uncovered an entranceway to the garden.

I finished the fringe first, and left a couple of healthy-looking shrubs in place.

Next it was time to tackle the inside of the garden.  This was tricky, because along the edges, the weeds had grown right through the wire fencing.

I cleared out the pesky thorny plants first.  I didn't want to get pricked by thorns trying to get to the other plants; plus, the throny plants were the ones holding the whole thing together.

I uncovered a well-preserved piece of newspaper in the soil.  Unfortunarely, it crumbled every time I touched it, and I couldn't find a date or a point of reference to help me identify how long the garden has been out of use.

It doesn't show up too well in this picture, but this is the one and only hole in the garden that I've found to be dug by the groundhog.  There must have been something good here.

And, finally a couple of looks at the unfinished product, as of now.   The bigger plants in and next to the garden have been cleared out.  Not quite ready for planting anything yet, but slowly getting there...

Yard work plans 10/21

The good news: I spent a lot of time working in the yard yesterday.  The bad news: I spent most of that time avoiding raking.  The blurriness of this picture is pretty representative of the way I feel about raking.

In the morning, the leaves were still wet from Friday's rain, so rather than try to do anything in the yard, I drove about 10 minutes to the local nursery to check it out.  I came away with one plant and a book; more on that later this week.  After some lunch, I got outside and started moving the piles of leaves that I had raked last week and the week before to my various storage areas around the property.  I soon tired of this, though, and moved to the garden to continue clearing out the weeds.  I'll have a picture post from these efforts later this week.  I still wasn't ready to start raking, so I moved to the wildflower patch by the deer trail and began to remove the thorny plants.  I'd like to eventually add more variety to the wildflower areas in the yard, and getting rid of those pesky thorny plants is the first logical step, at least to my naive mind.  I'll have a couple of pictures of clearing the thorny plants later this week, too.  Finally, I brought the laptop outside so I could play some music and move some leaves.  I got the patio cleared, and just in time for one squirrel.

Just before writing this post this morning, I noticed a squirrel surveying the patio with a nut in his/her mouth (I'll assume it was male).  He looked at a couple of crevices between the stones before settling on one.  With me staring at him the whole time, he dug into the soil and deposited the nut into his hole, with only four feet and a glass door between us.

Squirrels are decidedly less skittish when they're trying to preserve their food for the long, harsh Upstate New York winter.

This squirrel was completely focusing on getting that nut in the ground, and he paid me no mind whatsoever.

Aftet the nut was securely buried, the squirrel covered the spot with leaves and began to scamper away.  Then he paused and turned around.  He gave the spot one last look, maybe as a reminder as to where it was, or maybe to re-assure himself that the nut was safe.

For today, I'll be outside with some tunes trying to get some raking done...

Gardening Logistics

Now that I’ve started this blog, I’m getting more interested in how to make a successful garden.  And it's probably not a surprise that it’s more complicated than I thought.  Many plants, like my eating habits, are finicky.  They need water.  They need sunlight.  They need shade.  They need nutrients.  They can’t be eaten by insects, birds, groundhogs, or deer.

I’ve lived in this house for just over two months, and I’ve seen quite a few sunrises, so I have a pretty good idea where the sun comes up in the morning.  And I’ve gotten home right around sunset fairly often, so I have a pretty good idea where the sun goes down in the evening.  But I really haven’t paid much attention to how much sunlight the garden gets (or doesn’t get) during the bulk of the day.  There are trees, my house, and my neighbor’s garage, all potentially standing between the sun and my future plants.  So one of these days, I need to figure out the sun’s trajectory across the sky and from that, whether I need to plant sun-loving plants or shady plants.  And it shouldn’t be too hard to do; after all, I am a meteorologist.

Another logistical hurdle I need to overcome is how to get water from my spigot to the garden.  Much like how the internet has been purported to be a series of tubes, I need a series of hoses to reach all the way from the spigot on the near side of the house to the garden behind the far side of the house.  I suppose it’s really not that complicated.  I have a hose of my own, and a hose was left in the garden when I got here, so I suppose I just need another hose or two and a few connectors, and I’ll be all set.  But still, that’s a lot of hoses!

I'm sure this is only the beginning.  I know virtually nothing about how to plant and maintain a garden.  Fortunately, I'll have all winter to research the things I need to know, and by the spring I'll be ready to go.

Yard Work 10/14

I was away most of the weekend, but I did manage to get out in the yard for about an hour on Sunday.  Plenty of leaves fell while I was away, so the obvious course of action would be to rake the leaves and either bag them or pile them in the foresty part of my property.  But I had a headache, and raking the leaves has quickly become my least favorite yard activity, so I decided not to follow the obvious course of action.

I still have piles of plants that I pulled out of the ground just sitting in the garden, so I filled a bag with some of those plants.  I had some room left in the bag, so I began to clear out the garden, pulling up some plants/weeds from a random spot along the edge of the garden to fill the rest of the bag.  As seems to be the case every time I pull out plants, I uncovered a surprise.  This time it was a white wood stake that had been left on the ground.  For now, I've moved it to my pile of eyesore - the junk that I've collected from the yard that I'm not sure when/how to get rid of.  (More on the pile of eyesore later this week.)  The stake may be useful, though, so I'm planning to hold onto it.

I'm not very organized about how I go about things right now, I just want to be productive in my time outside.  I still have a large pile of thorny plants to bag and all of those leaves to deal with, but I'll get to that next weekend. An early look at the weather forecast suggests that it may be a showery weekend, but it's still early, so we'll see how things develop as the week goes on.

Should I Grow Vegetables?

I don't know what I'll do with the garden once I get it cleared out and ready to plant, hopefully next spring.  Part of that is because I'm not much of a gardener, which is to say, I don't have much gardening experience.  But part of it, too, is that I associate gardens with vegetables.  I'm a picky eater - the pickiest eater I know - and I only like certain vegetables.  I like corn.  I like green beans and wax beans.  I like carrots.  I tolerate broccoli and peas.  But due to my, uh, discerning tastes, I don't use vegetables, like peppers or tomatoes, in my cooking.  This makes grocery shopping easy, but it makes it pretty unlikely that I'll turn the garden into a vegetable garden.  This doesn't mean, though, that I can't use a small plot within the garden for a few vegetables.  It would be nice to eat some of my own green beans!

Frost Advisory

I took a peek ahead to this weekend's weather today.  It looks likely that we'll see our first frost of the year - and a hard frost at that - on Friday night into Saturday.  Now, if I were a normal gardener, I'd be concerned with picking my vegetables and protecting my plants in advance.  But first of all, I'm not much of a gardener, and secondly, right now I don't have much of a garden, just a bunch of weeds, wildflowers, and grass.  So I won't have to worry about that frost damaging anything important.  And it's a good thing, too, because I'll be out of town this weekend and won't get to see the damage until I get back on Sunday.  With any luck, the frost will make clearing out the rest of the garden easier.

Clearing out some Thorny Plants

I had some valuable daylight time late this afternoon and the weather was nice, so I got out to the garden and cleared out the thorny plants.  As you can see, they made up a good chunk of the growth in the densely vegetated end of the garden.  Now that those plants are out of the way, it will be easy pickings to eventually go through and clear out the rest of the vegetation.  At some point, I'll have to go back and dig out the thorny plant roots, or they'll be growing back next year. 

I also took some time to clear out the fringe of the thorny plant patch.  I wish I had done this sooner; it would have made mowing the lawn less prickly!  Here's a "before picture":

And here's an "after" picture.  It may not look all that thinned out here, but it makes a huge difference when you see it in person.  I just trimmed the branches down; the only plants that I pulled out were right near the fringe.  What to do with the rest of the thorny plant patch is a question for another day.

The Garden

You know, there was something that always haunted me about the Garden of Eden story.  It was a setup.  The garden was put in place, and Adam was put in the garden.  He had no say over how it looked, what animals and plants it included, or what his role in it would be.  He simply had to tend the garden and avoid that one tree.  But what if, like me, he wasn’t much of a gardener?

Last weekend I began my own Garden of Eden story.  I cleared the brush away, like sweeping away the demons of my past...demons that goaded me into things I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing or saying when I was younger.  The thorny plant patch by the garden, like my life, wasn’t full of thorny plants, but it was the thorny plants that held it all together.  It can be awfully hard to let go of those things that link us to our past – habits, thoughts, beliefs – and move on to bigger and better things.  It can be easy to hold on to being unhappy, upset…miserable. 

For years I subscribed to the “if only” belief…if only this person and I get along better…if only I solve this stumbling block at work…if only the world becomes a happier place…then things will get better.  But these “if only” contingencies were like the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – illusions that kept me from making real progress.  All along, there were plenty of things to hold onto, plenty of things to be happy about…if only I was to look for them.

This is the problem with the Garden of Eden story.  There was no opportunity for growth.  In a perfect world, how does one become better?  We strive for perfection in our lives: more comfortable surroundings, better relationships, being more kind and caring, showing more love.  But for Adam and Eve, eating the apple led to not merely an awareness of good and evil…it led to the awareness that perfection is not a physical state, but a state of mind.  It’s possible to find perfection in an apple or a banana…in a simple meal with friends…in the satisfaction one finds from a job well done.  Growth comes not always from becoming better – behaving in a more loving way, for example – but from understanding our behaviors and how they affect others and ourselves.  Growth is a conscious – and sometimes unconscious – process of appreciating that which we have.  We aren’t striving toward a perfect life…we’re looking to see how the things in our lives reflect the perfection that we’re striving toward.

Every once in a while, something comes along to clear out the weeds.  Like the entrance to the garden that I uncovered in my backyard, a portal to happiness opens up in our lives.  In my life, embracing the yard work that I have to do has become such a portal.  Unlike Adam in the Garden, I can build my own garden into what I want.

Last Weekend

 

I haven't described in much detail what I did in the yard last weekend.  It was the first chance I've had to leave my own footprint on the yard.  I want to clean up the garden, so I started with the brush on the outside fringe of the garden.  It had become overgrown, and I was curious to see what I'd uncover.

The first thing I uncovered was the old entrance to the garden.  There were stones on either side of the entranceway and some small logs to mark a path of entry.  It's something I plan to keep, though I'll probably enhance it a bit with more logs and maybe more decorations.

As I dug in the ground, I unearthed rocks, bugs, worms, a nut (possibly buried by a squirrel), and some string buried by a previous owner.  I dug up the roots of plants to make sure they don't grow back next year.  

I left a few things in place: a couple of shrubs and a couple of flowering plants.  I figure that leaving them there, at least for another few weeks, won't hurt anything and will make it look better than bare soil.

As I uncovered the ground, I began to think about what I'll do with this area in the spring when it's time to plant.  There quite a few rocks in the ground, so it doesn't seem to make sense to put grass in and try to mow around all of those rocks.  I plan to leave the two shrubs in place and add a few more shrubs and flowering plants to make it a welcoming entrance area to the garden.  It should be a nice complement to the garden.  Now that that's been cleared out, I'm itching to get to the garden itself.

Imperfection

I really like the way the entrance to my garden looks, with all the brush cleared out.  

But in a way, I miss the way it used to be...ugly as it was.

Falling in love with a piece of property is like falling in love with a person.

You appreciate the imperfections more and more each and every day.