Cindy’s Blog

Among my garden accomplishments yesterday was the planting of eight tomato plants. Right before this, I worked two 2 cu ft bales of peat moss in. Peat moss looks like the tobacco inside cigarettes, but smells much better. It’s quite brown and makes the clay/compost/sand mixture I forked it into look gray by comparison.

I’ve learned that it’s just impossible without devoting your life to it to break up all the clumps of clay in our awful soil. Raking just moves them to the edges of the bed. Hours of work with a hoe and spading fork still leave numerous clumps behind. Sigh… I’ve given up on perfectly worked soil. The ag land all around us isn’t made clump free, I’m quite sure. The fields around us seem to do just fine.

Garrison would be happy to break them up for me if I could tolerate his aggressive, warrior-like methods with a hoe or pick-axe that involve flying clumps hitting the windows and fence and traveling into the neighbor’s yards.

I’m told that soils develop into what they are over hundreds of years. The best way to improve soil is to add huge amounts of organic material to it every year. Just imagine - after only a hundred years of yearly amending and digging I’ll have good soil.

Here are the freshly planted tomatoes. Note the white irises. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed white irises there before. I don’t think they’ve bloomed before - at least not white. I could have sworn they were purple last year.

Here’s the tally of what went into the ground yesterday:

Eight tomato plants (all heirlooms) including:
1 green zebra
1 costuluto genovese
1 mortgage lifter
3 red grapes - didn’t mean to get so many of those
2 amish paste - hmmm…

Carrot seeds - Why not. They were free in the mail.
Snowpea seeds
Cosmos seeds

Here’s one of our free-range bunnies, Fred. Almost a year ago Fred and his companion, Lucy, dug their way out of their bunny palace, a 5′ x 7′ enclosure, after the chicken wire under it was accidentally cut during cleaning. How they’re free range. We could fix this and certainly gardening possibilities would expand. But it’s so cute to see them out and about. I’m sure they’re happier this way. They can zip back to the safety of the enclosure in a tenth of a second. They love hanging out under the tomatoes. We’ve queried our neighbors and they say they don’t mind that they spend time on their lawns too. The buns are 7 years old. Dwarf rabbits live 9 years. Lettuce, carrots, spinach will have to wait.

The first year that I finally get serious about gardening and it … w o n ‘t … s t o p … r a i n i n g. Guess what the forcast is for tomorrow.

So far the 400 sq ft we’re devoting to veggies (not rectangular - it wraps around our pavers and has roses, irises and an apple ‘tree’) has been:

1. worked with a spading fork
2. covered with one cubic yard each of humus and sand
3. rototilled

has strawberries, one thornless blackberry and soy and red bean sprouts planted. It now awaits the addition of peat moss and another round of rototilling.

The gardener who ’tilled for us commented “You have really crappy soil”. We’ve never had anything else in every place we’ve lived. My vision is to eventually add enough compost and work it enough that it’s decent, perhaps even enviable. (I can dream.)

Along with the strawberries and blackberries I purchased 8 tomato plants, including one called “mortgage lifter”. I couldn’t resist a tomato with a name like that. As I put the last one they had on my cart I heard the salesperson recommend it to someone else as a wonderful, productive tomato. We shall see.

Here’s a shot of the whole yard.

… and another view - a morph of several pics to show the entire yard at once …