If my counting is correct, we got in 280 tomato plants and 300 brassicas this weekend. We still have eggplants, peppers, and okra transplants to put in. The southeast corner of the garden tilled up the nicest, so after the hard work digging holes and planting tomatoes, we planted a lot of seeds: onion sets, lima beans, and various squashes and cucumbers.

Lisa came on Monday to help us again, and the work goes by so much quicker with a third person. Unfortunately, she is moving back to Duluth this week!

I leave for a workshop in Utah on Thursday, and I’ll be gone until June 11th. So hopefully Chris will have time to keep this website updated… I want to see pictures while I’m away! It’s up to him now to finish the transplants and decide if any more seeds will be going in. Oh, and figure out where to get a lot of compst and mulch!

Today we are hoping for rain. The forecast says 70%… but that really doesn’t mean much any more.

When we got out to the garden this morning, the guy who had plowed was out there with his tractor tilling for us. The ground is much more workable than it was before, and we’re lucky to have him helping us out a bit.

Unfortunately, someone came by and ate a lot of the corn and squash seeds we had planted… and we can’t really tell what got eaten – there are just empty shells where pumpkin seeds once were, or pieces of corn with the germ eaten laying all around. SO… I think we’re going to have to add some more seeds back in, and maybe add more rows to the three sisters.

Our transplants are sick of their small homes and are more than ready to go in the ground. The tomatoes are starting to yellow – I’m thinking they may have gotten sunburned. But they seem really healthy, so hopefully they’ll come around.

Today we planted 200 more brassicas and the 20 Great White tomatoes. It’s a long weekend, so we’ll be out there Sunday and Monday – hopefully spending long days out there and getting the rest of our transplants in. We had a new friend helping us today – it was a pretty good time for all!

We haven’t gotten any rain for two weeks, which is really frustrating. We have been watering the transplants, but we can’t stretch the hose any farther into the garden. MAYBE it will rain Tuesay… we’ll see.

These last four days have been frustrating, exciting, skeptical, frantic, depressing, energetic, and hopeful.

I told Chris that when we were done with this year he would be prepared to write a new book entitled something like So you want to grow vegetables on an acre of land, and decided to do this in the spring? Of course we didn’t think of this giant project in the fall, which puts us in an interesting situation. The ground would have been much easier to work if we had plowed last year, planted a few green manure crops and tilled them under, planted a winter crop, and then reworked it all again this spring.

But, we are complete novices and stuck with what we have – about a thousand seedlings that need to go in the ground.

The problem is that the soil is thick clay – when it dries it forms huge clumps and even the best tiller can’t break it up. We’ve found that the best time to till is actually when the soil is wet – contrary to most advice about working soil. The clay needs to absorb enough moisture to break up, but not so much that it’s just a sticky mess. Ideally, we’d be adding a lot of compost and peat to the soil, but since we don’t own the land, don’t know how long we’ll be working there, and don’t have a ton of money to throw around, we’re just working with what we have. We’ll be amending with compost and organic fertilizers eventually but right now we just need to get things in the ground!

Saturday we started our three sisters planting and got about 40 hills of squash and 40 hills of beans/corn in. Sunday we put in 50 broccoli transplants, and Monday 50 cauliflower. Chris spent today working the soil but incredible winds made for a tough day.

We’re hoping for rain tonight but the skies have started to clear up. If it does rain, the moisture will make the soil more workable so we can get more plants in this week. If not… well, we slave it out and do with it what we can! Our expectations have been lowered a bit, but even if we only get our transplants in we’ll have an incredible amount of food at the end of the summer.

That’s about a third – maybe even less than a third – of our seedlings. They have become family, and I hope they all make it into the ground. (Except for the okra in the very front left corner – Puck snapped it in half while running too close… oops!). I always forget the camera when we go to Morning Sky Greenery, but I’ll try to remember to bring it tomorrow.

We started hardening off the tomatoes, peppers, okra, eggplant, and brassicas. They spent about 1 1/2 hours out in the sun and wind – sheltered as much as we could shelter them. Now we increase their time outside every day, and hopefully get the brassicas in the ground next week and the tomatoes by Memorial Day.

Very unfortunately, the hand tiller that we had planned on borrowing for the summer needs to be repaired. So I reserved the biggest tiller that our local hardware store has for rent, and tomorrow Chris is going to spend the entire day – 8 to 5 – tilling as much as he can possibly till. An acre is A LOT of land to hand-till in one day, and the tiller is also fairly expensive to rent… and since it runs on gas, there’s an added expense.

I hope Chris can survive the day! Unfortunately I have other work to do, and quite honestly I don’t think I can manage a tiller of that size very easily. But the land has been broken, so it won’t be as tough as it was when we tilled up the back yard for our home garden. The immediate plan is that enough of the garden will get tilled for our three sisters planting (corn, beans, and squash/melons): our weekend project!

This is a bit odd. All of our okra seedlings are covered – very thickly – in these little clear gelly spheres. They seem like eggs, but the strange thing is that none of the other seedlings (including tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers, papaya, and eggplant) show any signs of the “eggs”.

Also, we haven’t seen any insects. And these have been inside since they were planted – we’re just moving them outside to harden them off for the first time today.

Here it is!

It’s amazing how much seeing something in a different light can completely change your perspective. Last week, I was staring and an open field of grass, imagining all of the wonderful food that would be appearing in a few months. Today we saw the garden tilled – and I got a real sense of how much work this was going to be, how much more we need to prepare before putting anything in the ground, and how incredibly giant our garden is.

It looks disked – perhaps plowed before. Clare said that the guy was out there from around 6 until after 11:00 in the evening working on it. We will have to go over it with a hand tiller before planting, so things will probably get planted in patches throughout the next two weeks. Paul (the guy who tilled) said that this year will be rough, but if we garden there again next year it will be in great condition and do really well.

Chris sent some soil to Midwest Labs for a soil sample, and we should be getting the results from that back on Monday. The Buckwheat Growers Association of Minnesota will be bringing us a couple of truckloads of compost too – once they have the results of our soil sample.

We may have to resort to laying weed mat in some areas – we’re thinking particularly the onions and carrots, as root crops handle weeds poorly, and they would be the most time consuming to keep weed-free. We can pile up good amounts of compost, and then mulch, around all of our transplants, which should help control the weeds quite a bit.

I got a phone call last night with the incredible news that our new till-guy was on his way out to prepare the garden! We met him out there Tuesday evening, and he had some good advice for us, and pointed out a low spot that will likely stay fairly wet. We haven’t gotten rain for a few days, so it was dry enough for him to till.

We’re planning to go out today – we haven’t seen it yet! Chris’s graduation ceremony and after-party are today, so the pictures will have to wait. But at least we’re moving forward!

I planted two flats of sunflowers (144 total) last week. We’re sending some of these home with our weekend guests, but a bunch of them will go into the garden as well. These are Skyscraper, Lemon Queen, and Autumn Beauty – I just got a dwarf variety in the mail the other day. I also broadcast basil seeds in three flats. Next year we’ll have more time to prepare earlier!

There hasn’t been time to properly plan or prepare for our big garden. I am graduating from college this weekend and need to study more yet. The other day I found a tray of peppers had been neglected and well over half ended up dying. No picture now – no time. So the new motto is, “Lower your expectations.” (I might yet switch it to “different strokes for different folks” which is also an important lesson for all of us.)

Looking at seed catalogs made me a little excitable and its always easy to talk myself into doing something unmanagable. I may have bought more seed than I needed to. Our plot still hasn’t been tilled. After lowering our expectations and reminding ourselves we have no idea what we are doing we can remain positive. The goal is still just to learn and to decide if this is something worth doing and maybe sell some stuff along the way.

We are going to get everthing plowed and disked and then tilled this weekend or early next week. I just got row covers in the mail to protect some of our crops from pests and warm others up. With this hot weather it might be too hot to put row covers on brassicas – I don’t know. I also got some groundcherries which are fruits in the nightshade family. There are 12 of them and they are supposed to taste a bit like pineapple.

Here’s a picture of our dining plant room. It rarely looks the same two days in a row, with all the repotting and shifting of plants from the greenhouse and back to the greenhouse.

We didn’t realize how impossible it was going to be to get someone to work only an acre of land. The farmers are too busy, and their equipment is too big for an acre. Most people just laugh and think we’re crazy. We have been playing a game of phone calls talking to people who can’t/won’t help us and then refer us to someone else who can’t help.

I called Midwest Wildlife today, and he said he would come by and look at our acre on Tuesday evening. Of course, he said that it’s getting to be too late, it’s going to take some time because it’s wet, and that this was something we should have done last fall. But we didn’t know we would be gardening on an acre until just under two months ago!

At the very least, we’ve learned some valuable lessons: prepare your land in the fall; don’t depend on outside help; buy farm equipment; plan WAY early. In a few years we’ll have our own farm equipment, and I’ll be posting signs saying that we’ll help anyone and everyone who’s in the position we are currently in!

This post has nothing to do with our vegetable garden.

But I am utterly obsessed with my papayas.

I figure these are about 10 months old now, and after a good transplanting today they are happy in their new home. I started with about 15 papaya plants at the end of last summer and ended up with four. Two are Solo Papayas and two are Maridol Papayas – though I don’t know which two are which!

I hope to start some new seeds this summer, but mostly I hope that these make it through another year. Also, I am hoping that they fruit. How neat to sell papayas at the food co-op with a “Minnesota Grown” sticker on them!