Garden Season

[hrj]

 I feel like I'm scrambling to get garden-ready at this point. Too many weekends have been either rainy (not that there's anything wrong with that!) or out-of-town. But I've cleared out the remnants of last year's plants and picked up 20 cubic feet of combo steer manure and compost to amend/top off the raised beds. (It's amazing how much compression all that new garden soil gets in the first couple years.) No new beds set up this year but some re-analysis of what to plant. Tomatoes in the same three beds as last year. Cucumbers, definitely. I think I'm not going to bother with squashes or melons this year since they're so heartbreaking. Eggplant again, since they worked well last year. Onions, but first I have to set up some squirrel cages. And then I'll have room for experimenting with some new stuff. My experiments so far over the past half dozen years suggest that tomatoes, cucumbers, and various onion family items are the most consistent bang for my buck in terms of providing close to my entire supply of an item. (Ok, I cheat on the tomatoes a bit at the beginning of the season.)

And I've achieved my ambition of setting up a hammock in the big shade mulberry, though I need to adjust the fastenings a bit to get the most comfortable catenary curve. Now all I need is some sort of side table on a swing arm attached to the trunk...

Comments

[ritaxis]

I have never been able to grow cucumbers satisfactorily since I have lived in this house, especially disappointing after I grew such lovely ones at the house I lived in 42 years ago...

The last 2 years have been tomato disappointments also, but I hope for better this year. I won't begin to plant them till I get back from the trip (late May) which is about when it gets really warm here anyway. My biggest success has been greens, some of which I've successfully naturalized, which I appreciate this week as I don't want to bring any new groceries into the house before the trip if I can help it!

I can almost picture your mulberry hammock. I do hope you'll do your garden party again this year!

[hrj]

I want to do the garden party again -- ideally, I'd like to make it an annual thing. Though I need to just give up on the idea of avoiding conflicts with other people's events.

[beanolc]

This! I have finally learned that when I'm hosting an event it needs to be based around the best schedule for my household not around someone else's (no matter how much I may want his or her company).

[hrj]

Yeah.Especially given how many different social communities I overlap. There will never be a perfect weekend. I really should go off and look at my calendar and pick a day right now.

[kareina]

The hammock sounds lovely, as would the side table on a swing arm. However, having seen mulberry trees when they are dropping fruit, I imagine that there are some weeks each year when it won't be a very nice place to rest, unless you (and or the birds) are very good at keeping the berries picked before they are heavy enough to drop.

[hrj]

Mulberries have separate male and female trees. The ones sold as shade mulberries are normally male (as mine is). I've been thinking about maybe getting a female tree, but I don't know if they come in semi-dwarf, which is all I have room for. (Unless I take out the chokecherry in the back corner and put it there.)

[kareina]

It never occurred to me that trees have gender in that sense. I know all kinds of details about how new minerals grow from old ones, but the mating habits of trees I don't know much about (other than it involves seeds +/- fruit, depending on the tree). I am actually kind of disappointed to learn that your mulberry tree doesn't actually grow mulberries--those things are seriously yummy (and seriously messy, but I am ok with that, given how nice they taste). Sadly they don't grow this far north, though I have seen one, in full berry (yum!), in Visby (and had the stain on my under tunic to prove it).

[hrj]

The classic case of distinct tree genders is the ginko, where only the male trees are used for landscaping purposes because of the strong and (to many) unpleasant odor of the fruits. And it isn't uncommon for plants (such as the cucurbit family) to have distinct male and female flowers--which usually bloom at different times on a particular plant to help ensure cross-polination. I'm sure there's some technical term for each of these phenomena but I"m a zoologist, not a botonist.

[queenoftheskies]

That all sounds so wonderful!

And delicious, too!

[hrj]

I think it's going to be a very good garden year, given how much rain we've had, going late into the spring. (We've still been getting occasional showers this past week.) The fruit trees especially should be happy.

[norfolkian]

Your garden plans sound exciting! I have raised beds too. I have the same problem with gardening - when you only have the weekend to do it and the weather is bad or you are busy with other things, it can be hard to get it done.

[hrj]

Yeah, I've had to set up some personal rules. The biggest one (and therefore the most often broken) is that I can't buy more plants at a time than I can get in the ground before I go to sleep. Or at worst, before the end of the weekend. As the summer gets a more advanced, I'll have daylight hours after getting home from work. But there's so much that needs to be done NOW rather than later.