Despite threatening to alternately cook and drown us, the weather stayed bearably hot and dry, so I got some time in the garden today. Everything that had survived so far was doing well, probably due to having been very well watered for the last week - it's June and we've had over a week of cool grey and rain, unlike May where we hit 100F and had weeks of highs in the high 80s. Ah, the wonders of climate change.

Anyway, the potatoes are doing well, to the point I had to start mounding some of them already. The few corn that had sprouted are doing well, and a couple of the ones I planted last weekend from the fresh pack have started to come up. The turnips are doing well, if above ground (they were planted to the suggested depth, they've just pushed to the surface). One of the garlic died, but I carefully excavated one of the others to see if it was ready yet (it's not) and it looks in good shape.

We're getting quite a few peas from the few plants that survived. Quite a few on our scale is still only half a pound total so far, but it's more than I was expecting given only a couple of plants made it.

The spinach is doing well, and my SO even ate some of it. (Unlike the peas, that took some persuading, the peas I have to fight for, and they certainly never make it as far as a cook pot).

Only two of the onions survived, but I don't think it's too late to plant some more. The second batch of lettuce is doing better than the first (40% germination rate rather than 10%. As I only planted 10... maybe the soil isn't right for them or something, as the packet claims 90% germination). As the one lettuce we did get was quite tasty (small but sweet), I filled in the gaps with new seeds.

Several things that have been trying to survive in pots made it into the garden. Hopefully they wont cook or drown this week. (We are forcast more rain and heat). That includes some ornamentals (sweet peas, black eyed susans, ornamental grass, sunflowers), the two tomato plants that made it, a couple of pepper plants and several cucumbers.

I also got the black solar mulch paper down on the thistle patch after weeding it. (Those are one of the few things which are not going in the compost). It looks much better than the pieces of cardboard that worked as a proof of concept (does it keep the thistles down). How well it work work long term I'm not sure, as the thistles have extensive roots (to the point they are woody in places) but hopefully it will do less to spread them than trying to dig them up.

There's still a lot left to do, and it's too late in the season for some of it, but a day in the garden was a welcome change from another weekend in the office.

A whopping 3oz of lettuce.

It was very briefly tasty.

The rest of the garden isn't doing so well. There's finally pods on the few peas that survived. Perhaps a 1/4 of the corn germinated (they were old seeds, so that's perhaps not surprising). A couple of the onions are growing, as are three turnips. The garlic is turning brown (I'm not sure if it's supposed to - it's had plenty of rain, but it's been hot the last week or so). The potatoes are sprouting, but not yet enough to need another soil layer. Most of the transplants (onions, cucumber, zuchini, brocolli) died on transplanting, and as tasty as the lettuce is, I've had about a 20% germination rate (that or something is eating it before I get to see it).

I got lots of little things done, didn't have enough energy to tackle the big things.

Plantings:

• Three rows of corn
• About a dozen potatoes
• Five ollas (plus threein the trenches between the potatoes, that are still "above" ground).
• Six replacement lettuce (the original didn't come up)
• transplanted two zuchini and a melon
• Two dozen sunflowers (in pots)
• The remaining zinnia from a packet (not sure how many)... only half a dozen packets to go (they were free with the paint we got for the house for some unknown reason)
• A dozen flowering sweet pea (ornamental, not edible)
• Ten parsnips (in toilet roll tubes).
• Half a dozen replacement onions (the originals didn't survive my random watering due to the day job).

Also chopped down more thistles, weeded the corn bed before digging in the manure and planting, Hopefully it's not too late for planting.

And pictures! Here's the "assorted things" beds outside the kitchen last weekend. Clockwise from the front left, we have a turnip which started to gorw a bit too much to eat happily flowering, the enthusiastic garlic is behind that, down the right side we have the struggling peas - none of them seem to be doing well this year, in front of them we have turnips from seed and coming back to the left we have spinich under the oh-so-decorative bottomless plastic juice bottles (which function remarkably well as mini-greenhouses and bug/slug/rabbit prevention).

Next we have before and after pictures of the corn bed. At least I know the manure mix is fertile with all the weeds that sprouted. The little markers are exactly where the corn seeds are, so I can try not to accidentally pull them up when weeding.

Finally we have the potato trenches with the ollas, the third trench is half buried because I forgot that I'd gradually added soil as I mounded the potatoes up last year so when I redug the trenches I didn't actually have enough room. Fortunately as I planted the potatoes the initial mounds were enough to free up room in the third trench.

I finally had a day in the garden without rain or being called into the office.

So I got one of the big ollas dug in and transplants put in around it. The onions were in bad shape (they don't seem to like being sprouted in small pots with varying amounts of water), so I'm not sure how many will survive. I'll probably plant more seeds in the spots next weekend. There's a couple of brocolli, but all but one of the lettuce failed to come up.

I dug out the potato trenches and put the Ollas for those in place. The potatoes go in next weekend with their little mounds next to the giant ollas. The mounds will gradually grow as the potatoes do, but the ollas dominate the trench at the moment.

The ones for the corn rows are just sitting in place, as I have to redig that patch. It got a layer of manure earlier in the year so now has a lovely patch of weeds green manure growing there waiting to be dug in when I bury the ollas. Hopefully between more water and the manue we'll get better corn than the mealy stuff we got last year.

Assuming I have any energy left after next weekend's digging and planting, I have all the wildflower patches to dig and sow.

 No updates recently, my day job has been eating weekends as well as evenings so I've gotten almost no gardenning done. :-(

Anyway, I got home after 11 hours at the office to discover FedEx had left me a big box! Even more, it was labeled 1 of 2. So I have a pile of huge ollas to install this weekend. :-)

planting for last weekend

Flowers

• Zinnia
• Marigold
• Bee balm
• Alyssum
• Echinacea
• sweet pea

Vegetables

• Melon
• zucchini
• sage
• turnip
• sugar snap peas
• shell peas
• pepper
• carrots
• white cauliflower
• cucumber
• orange cauliflower
• beef tomatos
• yellow onion
• brocolli
• spinach
• lettuce

The carrots pots got knocked over by a cat, so they are probably a lost cause. I'll put more in this weekend. I did get another of the beds against the back wall done though, and put extra peas in the 10x4 bed. The rest was in small quanities, but made up for the missed weeks (eg. 4 or 6 of something instead of 2).

It's raining, soil temperature is back down to 50F and we're forcast for frost this week. The cold doesn't seem to be bothering the peas or garlic though, and the indoor plants are mostly germinating.

But better than none.

I added a trunk load (10 buckets) of well aged horse manure to the garden (corn bed by the back fence, raised bed from last year, and two 'on hold' for the 3x3 bed I'm still prepping). It's amazing how little space that covers. I need probably another five times that amount - but the farm I got it from is an hour drive round trip so I'm not doing that any time soon. (The pile they have is stunning - it's larger that my house!)

I'm behind on my seed starting again, but what I have planted seems to be germinating fine, including the peas outside.

Soil temperature today is 60F, even after my gardenning was interupted by a torrential downpour and hailstorm. Definitely another few weeks to "last frost"...

Well, I decided to double dig the next bed on the list (a 3x3 along the back wall of the house) as I was thinking of putting some of the deeper rooted plants there. The carrots didn't do well in the bed they were in last year and I have parsnips this year as well.

So what I discovered is that the first six to nine inches of soil is the usual stuff (dirt mixed with small stones, plastic, roofing material, nails, japanese beetle grubs...). Below that however is rocks. Well stones anyway. Everything from five to nine inches across, in addition to the usual pebbles.

From the 3x3 foot bed, six inches depth (the 9-15 inch range), I "harvested" about five gallons of rock.

At least the larger ones can be added to the border around the wildflower bed.

I stopped after an uneven 18 inches (the ground slopes towards the house) and ran half of the extracted soil through the filter. I've still to finish up the bed - it needs another six inches of soil and then a couple of inches of compost. That's next weekend's project, assuming I get enough time away from my day job.

Well, I got through the compost pile, and even with the new sifter it took several hours. That was just for about ten cubic feet. If I ever get a larger pile, I need a better way of sifting.

The sifted material is currently piled on one of the beds. It's only a 3x3 bed though, so the pile is nearly two feet high! Once I get the other beds prepared, it'll get spread out. It's remarkable how much you need to cover even a small bed.

After I'd sifted last years pile, I rebuilt it using accumulated kitchen scraps, the incompletely composted bits from the sifting and a corner of the leaf pile. I remembered to put the wire mesh chimney in the middle, so hopefully it'll actually get warm this time.

I didn't get any planted last weekend. Not a disaster, it just means we won't get an early week of a couple of things. Given last years lack of success, that probably isn't a significant loss.

Soil temperature today is 50F.

Flowers

•   2x black eyed susan

Vegetables

•   2x - orange cauliflower
•   4x - (1 row) spinach
•   2x - tomato: brandywine
•   4x - tomato: cherry
•   2x - yellow onion
•   2x - red onion
•   2x - brocolli
•   4x - (1/2 row) sugar snap peas
•   6x - (1/2 row) shell peas

The spinach went outside next to the garlic, which is doing alright, though not great yet (each clove seems to have produced two leaves, that look a bit like onion leaves). As that's for salad greens, I'm intending planting one short row a week.

The schedule doesn't have the peas going in until April (2 weeks before last frost) but it's been relatively warm and they don't mind cold as much, so I figured I'd give them a try. Worse case is I lose a few seeds.

I planted all the cherry tomato seeds as it turns out I only had four in the packet (I should have checked). Then I dropped the pots. So I don't know if we'll get any at all. We'll see.

Germination rate from the week 1 (March 1st) planting is as follows:

• 0 - Forget-me-not
• 0 - black eyed susan
• 3 - lupine
• 3 - yellow onion
• 4 - red onion
• 2 - brocolli

The lupine are doing far better than they did last year when I followed the directions and planted them directly outdoors. We'll see how many sprouts we have by next weekend and perhaps I'll plant some more.

Daylight time changes plus cold lethargy are not conducive to getting much done in the garden.

I did however make up my first pass at a compost/soil sifter from some of the pile. It definitely needs some more work - I was making it out of scraps of wood I lying around, so the tray doesn't have sides yet. It worked fairly well for an experiment, for the soil anyway. The mesh is too small for the compost, so I need to make another tray with larger mesh.

So I got enough done to make up one of the 3x3 beds against the back wall of the house (it was growing weeds last year), so I've space to put the first batch of outside seeds once it's time for those to go out. That just leaves all the other beds to do, some of which are currently grass.

The weather is deceptive. It's a balmy 70F over the weekend, then we're back to 20F during the week, so it's not really time to put things outside, even if it feels like it today.

I'm a week late starting, but that's better than the month or more late I was last year. As we're forcast for a foot of snow today, that doesn't seem too bad. We're technically zone 7 here, unlike the rest of Pennsylvania, which is zone 6 - at least until the climate shifts are taken into account, and then it's anyone's guess.

"Last frost" is supposedly mid-April, which matches last year, which is all I have to go on in personal experience here. That puts me a month earlier than I thought last year (which means I was even later in practice).

So the first round of things listed as "6-8 weeks before last frost" are in little pots in the back room. I'm trying to stage things somewhat this year, so we don't get everything maturing at once. We'll see how that works out.

So today's plantings are:

Flowers

1. forget-me-nots (for the SO, to fill out the bed by the front door which is mostly bare). There's supposedly 100 seeds in the packet, but they are so small, there's no way to seperate them, so I've no idea how many we'll get.
2. Two black-eyed susan vines
3. Six lupine. Last year they didn't do very well, but I planted them directly as it was late. Hopefully they'll do better for being planted indoors first and having better soil, at least for the first few weeks of life.

Vegetables

1. Yellow Onion (x4)
2. Red Onion (x4)
3. Brocolli (x2). Last year the brocolli didn't do well. They were planted too late and bolted before they developed heads of any size. This year they'll go out earlier and have a layer of compost to go on the bed.