This post would be great to show your six-year-old son.

We received a few inches of snow today. It should all melt in a few days. Chris spent most of the day today outside shoveling dirt… I helped for a couple of hours, but I have a slight foot injury right now which prevented me from doing too much work.

Following is a fun little gallery of pictures of our compost delivery. We received three truck loads (30 cubic yards total; 10 fit in one truck). Click on a picture to enlarge.

I’ll try to snap some pictures of the snow tomorrow… when the sun turns back on.

Last year I put up a flimsy wood fence to add some definition to my garden’s border. It barely survived the summer, so I wanted to think of something different (and more permanent).

I have been reading a lot of garden blogs this spring, and saw pictures of some great beds formed from concrete blocks. I decided to give it a try, so this year I am putting in two beds lined with the blocks at the front of my garden.

These will be planted with perennial herbs and flowers (mostly transplanted from other areas in our yard). I am also going to try growing strawberries and basil in the holes.

… Also, this post is coming at you from my WordPress for Blackberry App! I can sit in the garden and blog now – woohoo!

Two weeks later we finished spreading the compost and tilling the garden.

Jessi’s half is on the left; Chris’s half is on the right. Let the games begin!

One long weekend, sunshine, and several shovels full of dirt turned the giant mounds of compost pictured in my last post into this:

We actually expanded the garden a bit this year, so the first step was renting a sod cutter, and removing more grass. Then we spread the compost, amended the dirt with lime, rock phosphate, and green sand … and Chris tilled! This is only half of the garden – there’s still another pile to be dealt with.

We got a second arbor, which I put up this weekend along with some sections of the fence. It’s getting there… I’m hoping to find time to dig out the rows in this half (“my garden”) this week and start planting next weekend. Chris already has one row in “his garden” planted.

I went on vacation and the garden became a bit… neglected. It was actually hard to tell where the weeds ended and the vegetables started. Unfortunately, just about zero three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) came up. I think it’s because of the soil – if the seeds did actually germinate, they probably died trying to push their way through the clumps of clay out to the sunshine. There are a few random melons and squash, and we’ll see if we can keep a few of them alive.

Last week we got a truck load of compost, which we shoveled onto most of the transplants. I don’t know if we’ll have a chance to pick up more, but a truckload really doesn’t go that far. Back to the weed issue. Here’s what we are doing about it:

The bale was just a bit taller than me. We picked it up on Tuesday evening, and just had it plopped into the back of my pickup. Fortunately, the tree it’s under is just crooked enough that I was able to simply drive my truck under it and the bale caught on the trunk and slid right out of the truck. It was pretty neat, and I wish that we had taken a video of it.

Today was a pretty long day. Many passes of the tiller followed by hand weeding finally got things looking a bit more normal.

We got most of the brassicas mulched and started on the tomatoes. Hopefully we’ll be able to spend some time out there tomorrow as well.

Our plants are quite a bit behind where we’d like them to be, but we’re going to focus on the broccoli, cauliflower, and tomatoes. Hopefully our summer squash will work out – if not we may still have time to plant some more this season.

Mostly it is difficult because we decided at a bad time (early spring) to do this. It took way too long to get the ground worked, and optimally a project like this would have been prepared for at least a year in advance. Also, because it isn’t our land, it’s hard to really get into it. It’s a 20 minute drive out, and almost seems pointless working with and amending the soil when we’re not going to be working with it for years to come. Experience, experience – that’s the key word this year.

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.

Here’s what an eggplant flower looks like. Our eggplants are loaded with flowers and buds; right now, they look like one of the most promising plants we put in! The potted eggplants grew much more quickly, but the ones in the front yard were quicker to flower – I’ll have to keep track and see which ones produce more.

Our summer squash and pumpkins have all been invaded by squash vine borers. I remember seeing the moths earlier this year around the pumpkins, and asking Chris what they were. We should have looked them up rather than assuming that they were some kind of harmless bug. Anyway, it’s pretty serious and every vine is infested. This morning we performed “surgery” on the plants by slitting open the stems and taking out the worms. We piled dirt over a lot of the stems, hoping that they will send off more roots.

I’m not too optimistic, and I’m sure most of them will die. Since it’s such a small garden, I don’t see any “survival of the fittest” pulling through. We’ll see.

Tip for next year: Apparently, buttercup squash are somewhat resistant to the borer. It takes many years of close watching, crop rotation, deep tilling, and removal of larvae before you can get rid of the problem – and that’s only if your neighbors aren’t growing squash as well. We could try a solid-stemmed zucchini (zucchetta rampicante) to see if that has better results. Otherwise… starting the summer squash really, really early inside and hoping they produce a lot before the larve hatch would guarantee at least some squash next year.

Part of the problem was that we trellised everything. I thought that trellising would mean greater yields, since we only have a city yard to work with. If the plants could have vined along the ground, they probably would have put down more roots!

Above: the first ripe roma tomato of the season. Unfortunately, it was afflicted with Blossom End Rot and so it ripened too quickly and wasn’t very good-tasting. This hot weather with no rain is likely what has caused the BER – we need to water more frequently to keep the soil evenly moist.

In other bad news, we had to pull up all of the buttercup squash plants today. They had worms boring up the stems from the roots – all of them. Very, very sad and upsetting. I hope the cucumbers don’t get attacked, and I am concerned about the rest of the vine plants. We definitely need to have our soil tested next year – something just isn’t right. It takes a few years, though, for land that’s never been gardened on to become really fertile.

This took some work. Lawn soil is very, very compacted. We tilled peat moss, organic top soil (because I dug it all up with the grass), and manure into the area, and then I made the beds all by myself. They are wider than the beds in the back, and I hope they will work well for vegetables!

My great aunt has been receiving packages of carrot seeds in the mail from one of those organizations that fight hunger in impoverished lands. She has been sending the carrot seeds to me, so we planted them in the back yesterday. I think she has finally started returning the carrots and telling them to teach the hungry people to plant their own seeds.

I also planted Shiraz Tall Top beets in the back, and a whole ton of yellow onion sets.