Spring gardening

I'm slowly getting our garden going. Sure helps that Marge is at home and retired. We've been working on planting one of the smaller 24-by-48 high tunnels. We finished planting the tomatoes in it and now need to do a little mulch work. In the high tunnels we put down our dripper line and then the paper. We used a 3 foot wide paper we bought from a paint store last year and are using it this year. I saw the paper with my power saw into one foot wide rolls. Then we cover the paper with sawdust or wood chips. Sure seems to work. We did that last year so this year we just tilled the old sawdust right into the soil. A few years from now we'll be able to say whether it was a good idea or not. Seems like a good idea to me.

Couple things on tomatoes. Some time in June is when we notice the worms on our tomatoes. Some of them will be big green caterpillar bugs and some will be small no bigger than the lead in a pencil. So I'd spray with BT. This works great on worms but doesn't hurt anything else. A common name for BT is dipel dust. Also remember that as your tomato plant puts on tomatoes and they begin to grow make sure to add some kind of calcium to the root zone of your tomatoes. I fertilize my tomatoes about then with calcium nitrate. Ask at your local garden center or hardware store what they would recommend for blossom end rot.

Also been putting down plastic mulch in our outdoor hill garden. The mulch is three feet wide so we make two trenches about 5 inches deep about 24 inches apart. Then we push the edge of the three foot wide mulch down in the trench and cover with dirt. It makes a flat surface about 24 inches wide to plant in. And since we put down a dripper line under the plastic mulch we can water directly at the base of the transplants which we plant through the plastic mulch. A friend of ours saves all the cardboard she can and uses it to suppress the grass and weeds. That's a good idea.

By using some kind of weed barrier at least we don't have grass and weeds right up against the plants. Sure seems to help. But the area between the rows seems to be difficult to keep the grass and weeds out of it. It would be easy if we used a weed killer but I really hesitate using one. So we battle the grass and weeds all summer.

We are going to try something different this summer. We are going to scatter buckwheat seeds in the soil between the rows of plastic mulch in the outdoor hill garden. Hopefully this will cut down on the unwanted grass and weeds. Our plans are to then mow in between the rows with a mulching mower. May not work but the only way to really know is to try it. We are also going to try wheat seed. The wheat seed is pretty clean so don't believe it will add very much weed seed. One of our local feed stores has some bags of last year's wheat for a good price.

We tilled a couple rows in the new high tunnel so now have two rows ready to plant. Since the tunnel is 60 feet long each row is about 54 feet long. We leave about three feet along each end as a walkway. Also watered along one side so it should be ready to till and then start planting cucumbers. We already have cattle panels along both the long sides of the high tunnel. Our plan is to get the ground ready in the tunnel a row at a time.

One thing I've always done is to scatter a balanced fertilizer like 13-13-13 down each row which we are about to plant. I scatter the fertilizer about 18 to 20 inches wide directly where I plan on planting. I always till the fertilizer in before planting or transplanting. About all one needs to do then is give the seeds or plants some water and let the sun and nature do the rest.

Most everything we grow in the garden will need some fertilizer later on this summer. A friend of mine used to grow some awesome sweet corn and he always side dressed the corn when it was almost knee high with nitrogen. He would make a little trench along the side of the sweet corn and scatter a little nitrogen. Another crop that needs nitrogen is onions. I've always fertilized our onions with a balanced fertilizer but never with straight nitrogen.

Now that the weather has warmed up and we are getting more dry weather we may be able to get our potatoes and corn planted. We have been buying the small end of the potatoes at a local store so most of them can be planted without having to be cut up. Some of them we will have to cut in two but not many of them. I disked the ground several weeks ago so now all I have to do is till down each row and scatter the fertilizer and make a furrow for the potatoes. That will be pretty easy. I normally don't put down a dripper water line right now but let the potatoes get up and grow. The dripper line goes down after we have pulled the dirt up on the potatoes the first time or so.

We didn't plant any corn last year simply because we had too much other stuff going on. But when we went through the freezer we found several packages of sweet corn seed so we are going to plant it and see if it's any good. If it grows then good and if it doesn't then the seed is out of the freezer. I usually put down my dripper line as soon as the corn is up four or five inches. Corn seems to like a little moisture. Then when the corn is up a foot to two feet we will side dress with nitrogen.

During the winter a good cup of coffee just hits the spot on a cold day, but a good cup of coffee goes good even in the summer on a hot day. Some of you know I enjoy a good cup of coffee so here lately I've been drinking Guatemala Hoja Blanca Don Aurelia coffee beans. I roasted the green coffee beans a week ago or so and they are pretty good. If you are interested then do a search of the coffee beans and you will get a wealth of information, more than you want to know. But the coffee is pretty darn good.

Happy Gardening and Coffee-ing up. It's not a word but it needs to be.