You know you’re thinking about it. Scheming on what you’ll plant in your garden once the frost is off the ground. Rethinking the layout of your furrows. Considering a rotation of crops—corm where the squash used to be—and maybe even tinkering with a new organic fertilizer mix a friend told you about.
So, don’t be coy. Let’s hear those plans. Let the ideas flow free, and tell us of your dreams for the loamy earth that is your garden.
I’ve never grown corm, but camellia sinensis is a pet project of mine, and more will be going in this spring if i can manage it. i’m looking to corner the market in time for societal collapse.
First I need to get me a couple big loads of tree trimmer’s wood chips from where they dump them down by the Pigeon River to spread as a mulch so my beds will be ready for planting. Then I need to clean a tiny 5x10 fallow area I want to bring into cultivation and cover that with wood chips. When the time comes, I’ll go through my seeds and see what I am in the mood to plant. There will be taters for sure.
Since someone may come along and go, No you can’t use wood chips. They will rob the soil of nitrogen. I’ll just refer them to this. Vegetable Gardens and Woodchip Mulch
Today is the day for starting the first seeds, just of fairly hardy stuff, mind you.
I’ll be putting seeds of various lettuce types, kale and broccoli into each of the dozen receptacles of an egg carton (paper type carton) and setting it in a baking dish of water. To entice them into sprouting, I’ll set these on a heating pad (could use a radiator).
when they come up in a week, I’ll put them into little plugs of dirt, which will reside in a heated box inside the unheated greenhouse.
We’ve got lots of composted manure ready for the coming growing season. Could be good.
In about a month I will prep a couple of long containers for a french lettuce mix 6 weeks to harvest…. I will probably rotate the plantings of the rows so they can be cut for most of the summer ... probably update the herb garden and add a box herb garden on the deck this year ... looking to add as many berry bushes as I can find or steal ...
I’m thinking of planting some stuff. No idea what, though. Something that will grow on its own without my help and still produce something I can give away, ideally. I also don’t really have a garden so much as a cleared kudzu patch in my back yard. Any ideas?
How’s your soil? Are you willing to water if it doesn’t rain? Got mulch?
Down south where you are the hot season vegies will most likely give you the best results. Try tomatoes, bush or pole beans, peppers and yellow squash. You might even have luck with eggplant.
Add organic matter (poop, compost, mulch on top) to the soil!!!!! I mean it!
How’s your soil? Are you willing to water if it doesn’t rain? Got mulch?
I have no idea about the soil. I don’t even know what I’d compare it to. It’s not loose and dark like you’d see in a movie or on Wikipedia next to the entry for “loamy.” It supports grass just fine, but it’s kind of rocky and has a lot of clay in it. It has an overall reddish cast to it.
Watering? I’d like to say yes, but realistically I’ll probably be neglectful until it all turned brown. Then again, the area I’d plant in is steeply downhill near a ditch, so it would tend to get some water.
Mulch? No. I have some straw that the guys who redid my basement wall put around the lawn to keep the mud off the paint. And I sometimes throw eggshells and banana peels and various leftovers I don’t want over the edge of the porch, which has created something not entirely unlike a small compost heap.
Maybe I’ll just toss out some wildflower seeds and see what happens instead.
Steve- there is a city-run center just around the corner from your hood that gives away mulch to residents. I dont know what it was called, but i recall it being off of West Henry(?). It;s visible from the road, probably a trash/recycling process center. Sunflowers do great down there. so do tomoatos, as long as your spot has good sun exposure.
