Got the potatoes, onions and snap peas in the garden Tuesday between bouts of rain. I already had turnip and mustard greens, spinach, leaf lettuce, radishes, bunching onions and beets started in my little 4 by 22 foot raised bed, with the radishes planted between garlic I put in back in November. All of that is coming up now, as are some greens I basically just threw into a part of what was my corn patch last year. I had several packs of old turnip and mustard green seeds left from last year, so I scratched the surface of a little patch of too wet dirt in the old corn patch and just threw the seeds in. Lo and behold they are coming up strongly. I haven't grown greens before, just spinach and Swiss chard, but we do like them. It takes a pretty good pile of greens to make a "mess of greens" when cooked down, so perhaps we'll get enough from my scattered plantings.
A local Ace hardware store already has tomato plants available. I was talking with a clerk about how they'd probably mostly get frost bitten, since it usually makes sense around here in Mid-Missery to wait until after the first of May for tomatoes. She said they kept getting requests for them due to the warm spell we were having. A couple of weeks ago it hit 80. Two days later we had an inch of snow that lasted maybe three hours before melting. I'm planning to start my tomato seeds this weekend, along with some peppers. I checked with the nursery where I buy most of my plants and they said they'd have tomatoes and peppers at a more appropriate time. I'm planning on Black Krim and Park's Whoppers from them, and I'll start some Black and Black cherry tomatoes from seed. Last year we also had some Mountain Fresh that did better than the other varieties during a miserable, hot, dry spell, so I'll look for them again.
Stil to put in at appropriate times: tomatoes, peppers both sweet and hot, yellow and zuchini squash, okra, turnips, various cucumbers and maybe some winter squash. Seems like I'm forgetting something, but it'll come to me.
I got some raspberries and filberts from Miller Nurseries by UPS yesterday. Naturally it's raining and is supposed to rain for the next several days. If it's not coming down tomorrow morning, I'll probably put them in and use lots of dry potting mix and peat moss to mix with the soil so I can bed them in well. I know I'll have to fence the filberts against the deer, but I'm hoping the raspberries can protect themselves, since the deer seem to leave my thorny blackberries alone.
I'm jealous; both of the garden and of the rain. We're having perpetual cloudiness with a 10 to 50% chance of rain forecast for every day and every night and it's been that way for quite awhile, but no actual rain, so I'm watering the yard today. [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img]
It's not exactly raining at the moment, just misty. Supposed to rain somethime before noon. The forecast is for a chance of rain.....forever. What usually happens here is we'll have a wet early spring and everything will get going gangbusters, then we'll have lots of brown stuff when the hot and dry summer gets going. We've lived on our acreage about six years now and have really had only one really good garden season and one or two that weren't tooooo bad.
Gotta fence question, and since it's going around my garden I figure this is as good a place as any.
I'm planning to turn my entire 60 x 60 garden area into raised beds so I can work less at weeding and tilling and such as I get older. At present, I put up a temporary fence around the garden so I can use my tractor and KK tiller to work the dirt. Putting up and taking down the fence is a pain, so I plan a permannent fence for the raised bed garden which will develop over the next year or so. The fence is for deer, but since I will be using concrete blocks for the raised beds and will have "visual barriers" inside the fence to discourage jumpers, I plan to use only 54" welded wire for the fence. I was thinking of 4x4 as supports for the wire. The local HD has lanscape timbers on sale, and though I wouldn't use them for posts, I figured they might be good for top rails between the 4x4 posts. With 8 foot spacing, the top rail would help keep the fencing tight and also stiffen the fence. I'd also use pieces of the landscape timbers for diagonal bracing at the corners. I'm thinking to toenail the timbers to the posts, rather than put them on top. Does that sound like a reasonable design? Any other better way to do this relatively inexpensively? Right now the timbers are less than $2 @. The fence will be about 200', with a shed on one end that will fill most of that side. I want a decent look, but it doesn't have to be fancy. Don't want chain link.
Chuck, I really don't know how well, or maybe I should say how long, that will work. I've used lanscape timbers for a number of things, but my experience has been that they tend to warp and rot pretty quickly out in the weather. I used them for the legs on my work benches, and indoors they last just fine, but not outdoors. Personally, I'd probably be looking at steel T-posts instead.
Here's my little plot. 12 tomato, 8 squash, 4 zuchini, 4 eggplant, 4 okra, with a few salad greens scattered around in there. Been too busy to put out much but I've worked hard on my soil and its starting to pay off.
We had so much yellow squash last year we made relish and pickles out of them. Real good. More or less the same pickling recipe as for bread and butter pickles. Goes great with beans and on sandwiches and such. We also just froze bags of sliced squash mainly for use in casseroles, but it fries up pretty good that way, too.
Chuck, we never pickled any squash ourselves, but we sure did eat some that our nearest neighbor pickled; squash & onion together, and it was delicious.
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