Gearing Up
We’re gearing up for the busy garden chore season. Mr Chiots has been out tuning up all the small engines in the household. It’s amazing how many you need to have to keep things mowed, trimmed, cut, chipped, and generally tidy. A few of the engines needed some work, luckily the vintage riding mower fired right up.
You can read more about this great little tractor in this post. It won’t be long until it will be mowing a few acres every week.
Do have many engines to maintain for garden maintenance?
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Making Do
All of my bamboo stakes are getting old and breaking. Last year was pretty much the last year they were going to be able to hold up pea vines. I debated on buying some metal pea fences, my mom has been using the same ones for many years. But then I decided I’d rather use up what I already had on hand. I thinned saplings in the woodlot, something that needs done anyways.
As a result I ended up with a nice trellis built of saplings. It’s really a win/win. Two chores completely at once and I think it looks quite nice as well. One of these days I’ll build a fence from saplings, I love how natural they look. They really do settle right into the garden.
Do you build your own trellises?
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Changes
When we first arrived I laid out the little potager behind the house with diagonal walkways and a circular center bed. I really love this layout, especially with the way this garden orients towards the house and with the size. I’ve expanded the garden each year by about three or four feet on each side. It’s about twice as big as it was when I arrived 3 years ago. The result is now the walkways seem way too narrow.
I’ve added boxwoods on either side of the entrance path, knowing I’d expand the walkways to make them wider. Now comes the work of widening the walkways. I’m moving a few perennials that are too close to where the new pathways edges will be.
I don’t mind changing things in the garden, in fact that’s once of the things I love about gardening. Change is easy in the garden, plants can be dug up and moved and do quite well.
Eventually this garden will become a soft fruit garden. The four triangular beds will be filled with different types of strawberries, there will be hedges of blueberries around the outside edges. Raspberries will fill in the lower hillside and I might even get a dwarf cherry tree to plant in the middle of the circular bed.
Do you ever make changes in the garden? Do you enjoy it?
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Cold Tolerant Tomatoes
I’ve always grown a couple cold tolerant tomato plants for early fruit. They’re not nearly as good as a an heirloom on a hot summer day, but they’re better than grocery store tomatoes. This year I’m growing ‘Stupice’ and ‘Glacier’, both tolerant of temperatures down to about 40. I have read that some cold tolerant varieties will even set fruit when it’s this cold. Today I plan on moving a few to these lovely out into the low tunnel in the back garden, a few will be planted in pots to be put in a sheltered location by a rock wall. I’ll give a few away to local friends to try as well. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, my mom has always been trying to get an early tomato, one year she had one for the Fourth of July. We’ll see how early I can be enjoying a freshly harvested tomato on my BLT.
Another reason I love growing these varieties is to help maintain them. Years ago cold tolerant vegetables were selected and passed along to friends/neighbors in cold areas. We have lost some of that information and diversity. It’s wonderful that we live in a time when it’s easy to connect with so many people and these resilient varieties of fruits and vegetables are once again readily available to us.
Do you try to beat the season with cold tolerant varieties?
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Lotsa Lettuces
Yesterday I spent a little bit of time transplanting lettuce seedlings. They were a bit bigger than I’d like, but with all the rain and cold nights we’ve been having lately I couldn’t get them planted sooner.
Luckily it started raining as I was finishing up, so they’ll get watered in quite nicely.
These beauties were planted in alternating rows in the garden. I find that this helps me keep the varieties separated much more easily. I’m super excited about salad season and I think that I should be able to harvest a salad or two from my container lettuce this week. Guess it’s time to start making up a few batches of dressing.
What’s your favorite type of lettuce to grow?
