Cindy’s Blog

Here is the most fantastic garden tool for those who don’t want to kill all the earthworms using a rototiller. My lovely broadfork. It makes turning soil a hundred times easier than a regular garden fork. It aerates soil 12 inches deep and doesn’t hurt your back at all. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

The broadfork in action

Here is The Farm with cover crop in its full glory. The fences are five feet tall, so you can see that that cover crop reached about four feet tall at its highest point.

Before

The cover crop was chopped down in layers in an attempt to keep the pieces as small as possible so I would stand a chance of actually turning them in. Tremendously exhausting. It’s impossible to cut the cover crop into small enough pieces to make it is easy to work into the soil. You can’t “turn” soil with a broadfork. You can only loosen it and in the process allow amendments you’ve sprinkled on top to fall down. If you succumb to the urge to turn the soil with the broadfork your arms will burn with soreness. The entire process is an amazing forearm workout. It took three long sessions to finish the entire 400 sq ft area.

You could knock it out with an expensive rototiller in half an hour, but then all your earthworms would be pulverized and your soil will be so finely chopped that it will compact more completely with the first rain.

After!

The East 80 is actually the largest section of this agricultural operation, even though you can barely see it in these photos.

Last year’s agricultural haul:

35 zucchini
18 watermelons
13 brandywine tomatoes
5 santa claus melons
11 cucumbers
5 cantelopes
1 34-pound Big Max pumpkin - a loser in the family pumpkin competition
1/2 cup dried beans - a late-planted afterthought crop
several buckets full of cherry tomatoes

Accounting:

$27 - soil amendments
$13 - seeds, tomato plants
Total . . . . . . . . . $40

2011 was a terrible tomato year where the brandywines refused to ripen until the end of the summer. Probably a dozen pumpkins formed, grew to baseball size or larger, then lost their will to live and shriveled. The sole survivor was on a vine that crawled up a rose plant and grew three feet off the ground. This year I’m planting fewer watermelons, more beans and lettuce.

Gratuitous pic of a feral cat sleeping inside a semi-abandoned car in Sacramento. I SO want to adopt her.

Its exhausting work taking out that annoyingly thick-stemmed cover crop. Today I fixed our heavy duty weed whacker and had a go at it. Its clearly going to take multiple sessions to cut it all down. Maybe I need a sickle. Or a combination of tools.

However, I noticed that the thick stemmed element of the cover crop mix is covered with ladybugs and ladybug larvae in various stages of development.

OK, black flies too, but … ladybugs. So now I have an excuse to not cut down any more foliage. Whew! A breather.

Neighbors, thank me now for nurturing the ladybugs that will flee my yard and do their work in yours. I hear that they don’t stay in the yard where they were formed even though I’ve generously supplied them with aphid-filled rose bushes. They need only travel a few feet to feast.

I have enough space cleared to plant the pumpkin and zucchini starts my brother gave me. That’s enough for now.

Early last Fall I planted an organic soil builder cover crop mix. Right before planting, I worked in an entire truckload of horse manure. The backyard smelled quite fragrant for weeks. Behold the result of this effort:

That was in February. Here it is today, much taller but a bit dried out.

The second pic was taken from a similar viewpoint. You can see that it is almost as tall as the 5′ tall fence.

I’ve been debating what to do about the garden because:

1) Until it started drying out, the cover crop looked lush and beautiful.
2) I have carpal tunnel or something similar, so the thought of working 400 sq ft of soil concerns me and I don’t want to rototill it.
3) I’m not sure I have the wrist strength with my gimpy right wrist, to use the weed whacker, which would be the only relatively easy way to chop down the cover crop.
4) I’ve dilly dallied about this for so long that my window of opportunity is closing for many crops.

Yesterday and today I started the process of cutting down some of this backyard forest. The tallest element of the mix has super thick stems. I haven’t tried our heavy industrial strength weed whacker on it yet. That will probably happen tomorrow.

The reason for my extreme discouragement right now is that I started to loosen some of the soil with a garden fork today and it doesn’t crumble like I had hoped. Every year I pour more and more goodies into my soil - compost, manures of different kinds. I was told that after a few years soil becomes very easy to turn. When is that ever going to happen? Exactly how many truckloads of manure does it take to transform my horrificly bad scraped-off-the-bottom-of-the-lake soil into something good?

I achieved mixed results with my annual attempt at a vegetable garden this year. The tomatoes were a disaster. Even though I germinated them inside in the sunniest warmest spot in the house, they were leggy and starting to look bad by the time I planted them outside. Then they all promptly died. Even the seeds that I then planted directly in the ground didn’t thrive. It was absolutely a ridiculous tomato year.

Zucchini did all right. Spinach did quite well. I’m definitely expanding my spinach crop next year. Santa Claus melon productivity was a pleasant surprise. Flowers were ok - in just one area.

I pulled everything up in September, before powdery mildew had a chance to take hold. I also tilled in a truckload of horse manure generously donated by a friend.

Here’s the yield:

Zucchini - 27 I thought they’d never stop
Santa Claus melons - 6 plus many small melons
Spinach - many bunches (not counted or weighed)
Tomatoes - 0
Carrots - 0 Didn’t even have the courtesy of coming up.
Soybeans - so few thriving plants that I didn’t bother to harvest them.

How much did I spend for this yield?

compost, 2 yards + delivery - $107.66
seeds - $17.40
pH adjuster, gypsum - $29 (enough left for next year)
Sad total: $154.06

Sigh… Its not as bad as the author of My Empire of Dirt who spent $11,000 on his backyard garden and yielded 16 meals.

However, with the addition of a mountain of horse manure, plus the soil builder cover crop that is doing so well right now, I expect a better and much cheaper garden next year. I may just add a few bags of steer manure and that’s it.

My son’s neighbors have started a wonderful new hobby - gardening! Just like me, but they’ve chosen something else instead of squash and spinach.

Look how well its going so far. You can see the plants inside their attractive fencing. An array of new plants next to the more established greenery await transplantation. There are even more new plants tucked away behind the blue charger at the right.

This photo was taken a few weeks after the first one. You can see the garden is expanding. Look at the progress of the original plants. Lovely.

Here’s a close-up of some of the garden specimens.

A puppy just like this one is allowed to frolic among the greenery when the gardeners are away. Their puppy is unrestrained so he is free to play with anyone who decides to stop by and admire the garden.

This is a pic of my sister’s cat, William with a shrug I knit for him draped over his shoulders. It has nothing to do with the garden update below, but I’m too lazy to upload pics of my garden progress.

Spinach is coming up, but carrots stubbornly refuse to pop their little heads out of the ground.

Garrison did a very rough turning of the soil - government quality work. I went over about a quarter of the garden area a second time. Its exhausting work. There’s no end of of roots to cut as I do this. Stupid all-reaching wisteria.

I’m only about a fourth of the way through with this, but once I’m done, the rest of the summer will be easy.

Tomato and squash starts are growing in the upstairs bathroom - the warmest sunniest room in the house and the closest thing I have to a greenhouse.

I didn’t plant anything this year, unless you count the kale and broccoli I planted last Fall. But this wonderful cucumber plant appeared and is growing well anyway. I haven’t even watered it.

Its doing even better than last years cucumbers, which suffered from crowding by the overplanted soybeans. I have a garden this year after all.

Here’s the shell tank, finally finished.

The point of the V turned out to be quite low. I’m not sure why. The armholes are small. It would be more comfortable if they were larger, but they’re small on the model in the book the pattern came from too. Even so, I like it.

The wisteria is blooming. Here are some shots of it.

But the wisteria pics are really an excuse to try out a new technique I learned for rounding image corners.

Here’s our ridiculous ground cover, winter wheat and hairy vetch. The passages through it were made by the rabbit, Fred. He’s constructed his own maze so he can hide from hawks and eat at the same time. Its so cute.

Here’s the broccoli and kale crop. All that survived is the few plants that were protected inside fencing.

Here’s this year’s list of garden costs:

compost - $47.31
fertilizer - $7.00
seeds - $20.10
rebar/fencing - $31.87
winter cover crop seeds: $4.98
soil / peat pots - $4.98
TOTAL: $127.52

So much less than last year’s $375. But I underspent on fertilizer. I think that was a big part of the reason my pumpkins didn’t do better. Compost will probably cost more too because I’m going to give up on ordering it by the yard and will instead buy different types of bagged compost and manure. There will be no fencing costs next year. I already have fencing but the rabbits won’t be free range. I guarantee that.

Two of the rabbits escaped last week. They were out only for a few days, but it was long enough for them to take out almost all of my kale and broccoli.

Pumpkin season is over already. Here’s the biggest one. Only 11.4 pounds and 32 inches around. Look how square it is from above. So much for being an Atlantic Giant.

Here’s the rest of the backyard. The area closest to the camera is where I had the toughest time getting anything to grow, including the Atlantic ‘Giants’. Its also where the crimson clover cover crop was growing over the winter.

But at least the santa claus melons and canary melons are doing well. Look at ‘em spilling over onto the patio. Brandywines and volunteer tomatoes are crowded together behind the melons.

Here’s one of our first watermelons. So small, but so tasty.

It has a split in it like about half of the melons and tomatoes. What on earth is causing this?

And now for a shot of Jack’s man boobs. They’re visible since his fur hasn’t grown back in after a piece of a sponge ball was removed from his duodenum. A week and a half of not eating much caused him to lose a noticeable amount of weight, probably making his man boobs saggier than they were.

My cat has bigger breasts than I do! Should I knit him a manzierre?`