Crippling Country Frost
May 30, 2008
The last few nights have dipped down to + 3°C and two days ago I got an email about the satellite garden. Apparently there had been ground frost and I should come out for an assessment. Here’s what greeted me:
Complete death of a Black Eel zucchini. Truly, if you were to look up “severe frost damage” this would be the picture. Everywhere I looked there was frost damage:
There were some survivors. The Peaches and Cream corn made it through okay:
As well as some of the frost-hardy veggies like Laurentian rutabaga:
Melody spinach:
Watermelon radish:
Detroit Dark Red beets, White Globe turnip and Cylindra beets:
And the Norland potatoes:
Almost everything else was a write-off: Citron watermelon, Moon & Stars watermelon, Black Eel zucchini, Smart Pickle cucumber, Jack O’Lantern pumpkin, Boothby’s Blonde cucumber, Bottlegourd squash and Canada Crookneck squash. All the curcubits.
So I decided to start some new seeds and fast-track them by pre-sprouting on my heating mat. They’ve all germinated in the last two days and I’ll keep them inside where it’s warm once they’re potted up to get them growing quickly.
This is my one ray of hope for tasty watermelon this summer. I just hope I don’t flub it up. Again. Gah.
The New Garden
May 12, 2008
I decided to help put in a new vegetable garden at my in-law’s house this year. I came up with a design of six 4′ x 15′ beds with mulched pathways in the shape of an “H”. Then we found a good, sunny location in the backyard and staked it out with twine:
We started calling around and found a good price on some blended garden mix of topsoil, composted manure and black peat from a local landscaping company.
Using a yard calculator from Earth Depot I was able to figure out we would need almost 10 cubic yards of garden soil to create a 16′ x 32′ x 6″ deep bed. We also needed some extra to fill in along the driveway. In the end, we got 15 cubic yards as a full load on a tandem truck at a cost of $346.50 with taxes and delivery included. Here’s a shot of all that dirt:
I was tasked with getting cardboard and found an amazing source from IKEA by dumpster diving in their Customer Cardboard Recycling bin and going into the warehouse and collecting empty boxes. At first I felt a little conspicuous searching up and down the aisles until I asked a staff person if it was okay that I take the cardboard. His reply was, “Definitely! Cardboard’s free”. IKEA cardboard is great as there is no dyes or paints on it and it has a minimum of tape and plastic. Also, you can usually luck out with a few huge pieces which are great for covering large surface areas.
Once we got all the cardboard together, we started to lay it down and wet it with water from a hose. Then we dumped the soil on top using a lawn tractor and trailer.
It took two of us about two minutes to fill up the trailer before heading over to the garden site. The pile slowly started to go down:
There was a good rhythm to it: load up the trailer, move it to the site, spread and level it, lay down more cardboard, water it, get more soil, repeat. Here you can see that we’re just over half-way:
We quickly ran out of our cardboard stash:
The next day I got more cardboard to finish off the rest of the garden. We also mixed in some extra sheep manure/leaf compost that we got on sale from a local farm store, spacing out the bags at regular intervals to help spread it evenly.
We let it sit for a week so it could settle in a bit and then we started creating the pathways. Instead of doing the “H” in the initial design, we decided that two pathways would be enough. After four hours of work we finally had the garden finished and planted with rutabaga, carrots (under the white board), beets, radishes and spinach:
I watered the areas where I had planted seeds:
It even has its very own sign – a tribute to a lone rabbit spotted earlier in the day:
In the upcoming weeks I’ll be planting 2 types of corn, 4 types of watermelon, 2 types of squash, 3 types of cucumber, 2 types of potatoes, asparagus and bush beans. Hooray!
Expanding the Flower Beds
August 21, 2007
I managed to expand one of my flower beds by 4 feet over a period of three days this weekend, using the sheet mulching technique I mentioned earlier.
DAY 1 – ROCK REMOVAL
We pretty much took a whole day just to remove the existing rock wall, piling them up in the middle of the backyard. Some of these rocks were buried quite deep into the soil, perhaps as a form of weed barrier. This was all that was done on Day 1 – it was hard work.
DAY 2 – PREPARATION & EXECUTION
I started out the day removing packing tape from all the boxes I scrounged from my work. I had been stressing over where I was going to find enough newspapers in time for the start of this project that I completely forgot about the new shipment of computers we had received. This part was slow, fiddly and awkward.
Before I could even start envisioning my new beds, I had to move the arbour and flagstones and clear them out of the way. The arbour was only dug into the ground about a foot so it was really easy to get it out. Moving it as one whole structure was really difficult. I found a lot of ants under the flagstones.
This is about half the pile of flagstones that came out of the pathway. Some of them were really heavy.
We repositioned the arbour so that it was aligned to the house, roughly in the middle of the house and the fence. We kept walking back and forth with this thing, trying to get the right “feeling” of where it should be. Things went a lot quicker when I was told that it didn’t have to be perfect.
I hadn’t fully committed to any design for the new bed, I just knew that I wanted it to be wider so that I would have room to play around with height and depth. I brought out a long extension cord and played around with an evenly-wavy and oddly-wavy pathway. Nothing really looked right and after a while I decided on a straight line on the right and a curved line on the left side. I brought out the whipper snipper and cut the grass as low as I could get it. I then watered it heavily, making about two or three passes to get it good and soaked. We started laying down a thin layer of used coffee grinds.
That layer got watered and then it was time to lay down the cardboard.
I had a stash of newspapers that I used to fill out the sides and underneath where the cardboard had slits. After we laid down the cardboard, we dug in some edging. I took some landscaping fabric, cut it in half length-wise and used it to cram down into the edging that we had made. I had read that you could cut up plastic rug covers but I decided to use the landscaping fabric.
About halfway through the day I realized that I should get some black earth and peat moss as the leaf compost was too fine a particulate and needed some more body to help it retain moisture. I picked up 12 bags of black earth and one large bag of peat moss for $37.80 CDN.
The backyard looked terrible.
I watered the cardboard and started to spread the leaf compost. The paper leaf and yard waste bags that I had used to transport the compost from the facility started to fall apart. We ended up with a lot of compost on the garage floor. The beds were coming along nicely.
Next came the rocks and I folded the landscaping fabric onto the compost and laid the rocks on top. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of pesky grass and weeds that try to grow around it.
This was the end of Day 2. I had worked pretty steadily from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM. It was looking good.
DAY 3 – FINISHING UP
The next day, after dragging myself out of bed, I started dumping the bags of black earth at regular intervals. There were big chunks that I had to break up.
After I spread that on top, I dumped shovelfuls of peat moss. This stuff was really fine and dusty.
I spread the peat most evenly and started to work the layers together with a garden rake, trying to fold the layers into each other to make a good mix. It was hard not to pull up the cardboard underneath so this part had to go slow.
We lined up the rest of the rocks along the edge and then stood back and looked at all our hard work. The beds are now 5.5 ft wide along the length of the side fence and also extend about five feet on the back fence. Here is the before shot:
And here is the after:
I now get to work on the beds beside the edge of the deck, along the side of the house and at the front of the house. I’m out of cardboard, used coffee grinds, peat moss and black earth and only have 3 bags left of leaf compost. The total cost for this project was $61.80 and countless hours of manual labour prior and during the project.
Digging Up An Iris Bed
August 3, 2007
I helped out my garden buddy, Berni from La Vie En Rose Gardens, last weekend by digging up one of her bearded iris beds to transfer them to Ottawa. It had been sadly neglected by the garden host and there were many weeds, iris borers and soft rot. I jumped at the chance of helping her out so that I could learn from an expert about these beautiful flowers as well as receiving a generous amount of new rhizomes.
We started out the day at 8 AM. I brought my long-handled shovel and a short spade, finding out later that a garden fork would have been better as it does less damage to the rhizomes and roots. We were dismayed at what greeted us:
Weeds! Four-foot high weeds! Before we could even start the project we had to pull all these weeds so that we wouldn’t trample any precious plants underfoot. Here’s a close-up of what we were dealing with:
You can see the pointy sheaths of the bearded irises nestled in amongst the weeds. Bearded irises like good air circulation and can get smothered under weeds which leads to fungus and rot. We started weeding. This (bottom right) was just one of the many piles of weeds we made that day:
You can see the bearded irises now, some with extensive leaf damage due to the excessive weeds. All were labelled, some with pretty funky names like Klingon Princess and Sargent Preston.
There were some labels that didn’t have growth behind it where the bearded iris had died. R.I.P. Dotted Doll and Grandma’s Hat. After a couple of hours of intense weeding we started lifting the clumps of irises. Each iris has a main rhizome that creates lateral buds that grow into new shoots. One clump of iris will have one rhizome and as many as 15 – 20 new shoots. Once you separate the shoots, each new shoot has the potential to create a new main rhizome from which it will create more new shoots. Given the right conditions, iris can be very prolific.
Unfortunately bearded iris are prone to the iris borer, a nastly little bug that can cause extensive damage. Adult moths lay eggs in the iris bed in August/September of the previous year. In April/May, larvae tunnel into the leaves and eat their way down towards the soil. By mid-July they enter the rhizome and cause bacterial soft rot. Here’s a shot of the larvae:
Then they move from the rhizome into the soil where they pupate and hatch into adult moths, laying their eggs in the iris bed to start the process over again. We found a few of these larvae in the bed and, to fight against this infestation, all the rhizomes were to be soaked in a solution of 1 part bleach and 9 parts water.
We kept working, falling into a rhythym of setting the fork beside a clump, stepping down, angling the fork to lift up the clump, pulling up the clump, shaking the soil off, grabbing the tag and place it on the grass for processing. Set, step, angle, pull, shake, tag and place. There was a lot of clumps. You can kind of see the piles of iris in a row on the grass (also weedy!)
There were three other volunteers and two of them were busy processing all the lifted clumps of iris. They grabbed a clump, checked the list to see if it had been sold, not sold or donated. Using scissors they clipped leaves of the clump down to 4″ – 6″ high and shortened the roots to a fist-width. The stock number was written on a plastic bag with a Sharpie and the tidied-up clump was bagged and piled.
Things were going along smoothly with three people digging and two people bagging until the downpour. Hastily setting up a canopy we all stood underneath and weighed our options. We decided to keep going and, being a bit of a wuss, I grabbed my raincoat. I was soaked and covered in sweat-mingled mud. Of course, it wasn’t too long before we decided to break for lunch.
I was a bit self-concious sitting in the restaurant, the backs of my legs, feet and flip flops covered in mud, however, once the food came I didn’t care. I was starving. Getting up to head out, our wooden seats were stained gray by our wet butts! Thankfully it stopped raining. Back at the iris bed things were looking better as almost all the irises had been lifted:
Once lifted, all five of us were working on processing the irises by trimming the clumps, bagging and marking them. We loaded them all up in the van at 4 PM:
Looking back, the iris bed was finally empty.
It took five people and 26 combined hours to dig up this iris bed. It was a huge undertaking and we were rewarded with our own irises to take home. I took a few clumps and went home and had a two-hour nap.
When I had started the day I was tentative and timid about lifting these beautiful flowers. After 8 hours of working in the humidity, rain and mud I feel very confident about digging up and dividing irises.
Planting the Mojito Mint
June 20, 2007
Mint is a very invasive plant and, if not given strict orders, will soon get out of control in an open garden. I decided to plant the mint in a 1 gallon pot and then put that into the ground once the cool weather starts.
First, I picked up some Weed Stop Garden Fabric from Canadian Tire. I knew I didn’t need that much so I picked up the smallest package:
I got a 1 gallon pot that I picked up at the last Garden Web plant exchange:
Here’s my slightly-bruised Mojito Mint that really needed to be transplanted:
One bag of organic topsoil which I assumed would be okay for a potted mint:
I cut a strip of the garden fabric, eyeballing it to be able to fit both sides of the pot:
Crammed it into the pot and folded down the edges on the outside of the pot:
And filled it up with the topsoil and dug a hole for the mint:
Stuck the mint in and patted the soil down around the sides:
Then I took a pair of scissors and cut off the excess garden fabric along the sides:
And I was done. It’s now sitting on my deck enjoying the sun in its clearly-defined growing area. Once it starts getting cooler, I will find a nice, protected area to dig the pot into the ground so that it can overwinter and come back next year.
