Spring 2008

Well it's the third day of spring and I planted the first seeds. Peas and spinach. It's full steam ahead. I'm hoping that there will be no trouble from the landlord as he is really doesn't come around very often and might not even notice that there even is a garden until the leaves start to turn.

I have the garden (gardens) planned out on paper. As disorganized as I may be I am organized about things like that. I have very little soil preparation to do as all the tilling was done last year. I will work some of the compost that has been brewing over the winter and some organic fertilizer into the soil as well. For now the peas and spinach will have to do without it as I didn't have the time and I didn't think that these crops really needed a lot of fertilizer. It's still pretty early too, peas make good green manure and I'll work the stalks into the soil when I'm done with them in late May / June.

Today's planting were the following: Oregon Giant snow peas. A whole row. Half rows of sugar snap Little Marvel, Progress #9, Wando and Agway seeds marked simply as Sugar Snap. The spinach is Olympia and Bloomsdale.

I have already started on a new plot for the squash. I'm putting it in a space removed from the main garden by 25' - 30' as squash takes up a lot of space. This spot is more or less a horseradish grove. Unfortunately it's not good horseradish. It has no kick to it. None at all. The roots are yellowish, not the snowy white of good horseradish. I'm sure it is horseradish too as aside from the yellow roots it looks and behaves exactly like every picture and description I can find and it also has the notorious characteristic of spreading all over the place. I just found one growing in the main garden. I uprooted and cleared out dozens of plants in the course of tilling the roughly 20' X 6' plot. It made a respectable pile of plants and it really is a shame that it has no kick as that amount of horseradish would last me the rest of my life were I to grate it and can it.

Soon the potatoes will go in. I have quite a bit left over from last year that should make excellent seed spuds.
















The "Horseradish grove" squash bed.















The bleak looking main garden.















Peas were planted here.

No garden in 2008 - Maybe

I may not be able to plant a garden in 2008. Want to guess why? Yes that's right, the landlord. I heard from the next door neighbor, Kirk, that the landlord told him that he thinks our garden is a "Tax Liability" What the hell does that mean? It's got me pissed off. I hate this guy like Nixon hated Woodward and Bernstein. It looks like this bastard will tell us that we can't have a garden this year. I seem to remember him saying something to Kathy last summer to the effect of "I don't know if we are going to do a garden next year." What do you mean we? All you do around here is charge rent and complain. His latest act of idiocy is to send out letters complaining of debris. Get this: The debris that seems to be in contention is stuff that was laying around when Kathy moved in. We stacked it up and Kathy even told him about and suggested that he send some of his illegal Mexican workers around to pick it up. He didn't. Now he is threatening to charge to pick it up. The place was a mess and quite frankly I don't think it would pass a building inspection. She should have demand to see the Certificate of Occupancy. This whole trash and debris thing comes from the people who build a gigantic, ostentatious house next door and put it up for sale. It won't sell but that is because they built it in "The Slums of New Egypt." Most of the houses in this neighborhood are tiny, crackerboxes are poorly maintained and are rented out to the landlords aforementioned illegal aliens. Yes, he owns pretty much the whole neighborhood.The people who built the McMansion actually seem to live in it from time to time. I can guess that they have another house in Philadelphia or someplace. They sure won't be accused of being friendly. They may either be afraid of the neighbors or are just unfriendly jerks. Most likely the latter. In any case they complained that they can't sell their white elephant because of the disheveled state of the neighboring yards. The other house next to them looks like Fred Sanford's place but it's privately owned, not rented. Good for them. Also, as anyone over 10 and who isn't mentally retarded knows the housing market is crap right now too. In any case I plan to do a lot of container gardening and plant some spices that can be harvested early. We are actively looking for another place so we can tell Jerko Landlord what a jerk his and what he can do with his tax liability and his piece of crap house. That's all for now. Stay tuned.

Pictures from mid to late summer

A small fraction of the tomato crop.




























Dwarf corn ears.















Sunflowers in the front yard. Kathy planted these. The Sunflowers I planted in peat pots and transplanted did not do well at all.















Some of the large tomato plants with diatomaceous earth sprinkled about for slug control.






























A view from the east















Cali, the garden kitty. She sort of came with the place. Just turned up and acted friendly (and perpetually hungry) I had no rodent problem in the garden aside from the groundhog which outweighed her considerably.














The bean trellis














View from the north with spinach beds to the left and snow pea beds to the right in the foreground.














The same area from the east.














One of the nicer 'maters. I think it's a "Supersteak."















The spinach beds. This crop was a total failure. I think it died from drought as I became indisposed and couldn't tend to watering during a hot, dry snap. It had sprouted quite well too.














Looking to the southwest with the egg plants to the right and diatomaceous earth all over the place.














The Jimson weed. You can see one of the pods in the center.














A close up of a pod. These split open when mature and scatter hundreds of little black seeds.














View from the south.














Spices. From left to right; Dill, cilantro (coriander), rosemary (not visible), sage, parsley.















String beans.

More '07 pictures

These picturess are from early to mid summer.














View from roughly the East. Front: Left to right, peppers, peas and beans, tomatoes, eggplants and potatoes. The back row isn't really visable so I won't list the crops here.














View from the north. The aforementioned back row is to the right with corn in the foreground, squash behind it, broccoli and cauliflower behind that and spaces at the rear.














The short lived snow peas climbing up a section of chicken wire. Oh, by the way, it's now politically incorrect to call it chicken wire. The proper term is "Poultry fencing."Go figure.














A pumpkin flower














A squash bud














A young pumpkin














Looking from the west at the far south end. Growth is starting to get luxurious at this point. The tomatoes are at the far left with the beans growing up the trellis and the peppers to the right. In the foreground grows three different kinds of basil; Lime basil, Genovese basil and Sweet Italian basil.














I found this plant growing at the base of the bed where the peppers were planted. It came up all by itself, a "weed," but it was so striking and vigorous that I let it grow. I cut it down just before we went away on vacation lest it's roots damage the peppers. Later, another grew in the broccoli / cauliflower beds and as the plants in that spot had died, likely from root maggots, I let that one grow to maturity just to see how it developed. It became large and resplendent, blooming with beautiful flowers. After some research it turned out to be the notorious Jimson weed; aka Devil's trumpet, Loco weed. etc. It's a hallucinogenic and can be fatal if one eats the seeds. It sure is pretty though. I harvested all the seed pods and destroyed them to keep from having a bumper crop of hallucinogens next year.














I have never seen corn do this before and I grew up next to a farm and did a lot of roaming around in corn fields. It seems to be growing kernels on the stalk just below the tassel. Did I miss some buried nuclear waste when I was cultivating?














Yours truly and a large yellow squash. Two weeks later these healthy squash plants were looking pathetic as the vine borers had gotten in and were chewing their life away. Still, we got quite a few nice big squashes.

2007

Hello. Welcome to the very first post. This is my garden. Well it’s our garden. I just own the plants. My girlfriend, Kathy, pays the rent and the landlord owns the land but he’s a jerk and wouldn’t know what to do with it anyhow. Jerk. He runs some kind of phony – baloney farm that covers the Earth with black plastic and grows potted plants. How stupid is that? The houses he rents out are total pieces of crap but that’s not why we are here. Gardening is why we are here.

Kathy's rented house is in a town that claims to be the geographic center of New Jersey. New Egypt. The back yard is pretty big and the soil is really excellent in most spots. I don't live in a house. I live in a loft in my shop like a bohemian artist so I jumped at the chance to plant a real garden in real soil. I have a small container garden in the shop which is nice but I'm not about to try growing corn or potatoes that way. Kathy moved into this place in the late summer of ’06. The hottest week in a long, long time, I might add. She also sprained her ankle in the process. I should also add that the aforementioned slumlord more or less forced her out of a reasonably priced apartment by jacking the rent way up and was totally unsympathetic to her ankle which she sprained on his property due to insufficient lighting, but that’s another story and we are her for gardening. A pox upon him!

As this was late summer it was too late for a garden then but I took note of the soil which I found to be fair to excellent. Of course I had to put in a garden in '07. I tried to be organic but there were way too many bugs and I had to break down and use the chemical pesticide Seven in an effort to keep up to all the various and plentiful insects that couldn't find anything better to eat than my garden plants or have total crop failure. I later discovered the organic pesticide BT (Bacillus Thuringiensis) which doesn't pack the wallop of Seven but seemed to work. I'll try really hard this season to avoid the Seven. The place is lousy with slugs too and the WMD for them was diatomaceous earth. It looks like white powder to us but on a slugs level it's like a pile of broken glass. I'm working on compost as well, no shortage of leaves and kitchen garbage, but I'd like to get some good manure. Preferably I'd like to get it from an organic farm that doesn't load their animals up with antibiotics and growth hormones. I've been a gardener for years but have rarely had the good fortune to have access to a decent plot of land. I was a fan of the original "Crockett's Victory Garden" and have most of Mr. C's books. There is a used book store (The Book Garden Rt. 537 New Egypt) with more books in one place than I have ever seen outside of a library and bought about a hundred pounds of gardening books there. I also like to listen to "You Bet Your Garden" on NPR, the host, Mike McGrath used to be the editor of "Organic Gardening Magazine." The web is a great help with various gardening web sites but still there is nothing like human interaction with real people either on the web or in person. I found a good family run nursery (Patterson Greenhouses) to buy plants (after I killed almost all of my seed grown peppers and egg plants) and Mr. Patterson is nice enough to let me pick his brain. He has been farmer all his life and looks like he started in the Coolidge administration.

Most of the plants were started in mid March indoors under lights in peat pots. This included plants that are not usually started this way like beans, peas and corn. The beans and peas got way too overgrown and were rather difficult to transplant. The methods I used were similar to "Square Foot Gardening" and I used raised beds most of the time. I worked peat - I have forgotten how many bales, at least 5 - and 5-10-5 fertilizer into the soil of a roughly 20' x 40' plot. I also "mined" some very rich soil from what appeared to be an old compost / trash pile I discovered in the farthest reaches of the property. As I said I set out trying to do this all organically. Well except for the 5-10-5 that is. I really wanted to avoid spraying poison on everything and loading the soil up with chemical salts. I probably should have skipped the 5-10-5. Not everything was grown in the main plot. Pumpkins and some of the potatoes were grown in two separate side plots. I grew way too many tomatoes; I estimate around a hundred pounds. This is despite the fact that slugs ate probably 25 pounds before I figured out how to control them. The potatoes were good but the crop was smallish and the spuds in the side plot had almost no yield at all. I later attributed this to too much shade. The broccoli was a total loss due to a couple of different kinds of caterpillars (cabbage loopers) and a fat, hungry groundhog. I'm growing all cabbage family plants in 5 gallon spackle buckets this year to keep them out of rodent reach and will probably cover them with screens to keep them away from egg dropping cabbage looper moths. The corn didn't do very well, it seemed dwarfed. I probably shouldn't have started it inside and transplanted it. It produced half sized ears with normal sized kernels and they were quite delicious but I'm not doing corn again next year as there is a lot of really excellent corn available in the summer from road side stands in this part of the country. Cheap too. The cauliflower was much the same as the broccoli but I managed to get a few decent heads. I found a bizarre bug that looked like a tiny beach umbrella with legs that I could not identify in any book or on the net eating the potato leaves. The BT seemed to take care of it. Most of the pepper plants that I grew from seed died when I transplanted them too early because of cold soil and the survivors and the store bought replacements caught some kind of crud that made the leaves get all crinkly like spinach and the fruits developed "woody" spots but there were some decent yields particularly if you cut around the woody spots. However, the Jalapeños were very successful and incredibly hot. It's too bad I don't like Jalapeños. The eggplants suffered the same cold soil problems and I lost most of them. I bought a couple of nice healthy replacements and they yielded some nice fruits. I don't really care for eggplant though so I'm not growing it this year. The squash and pumpkins came in like gangbusters and I got a few huge yellow squashes and several nice spaghetti squashes but the vines soon wilted as they became infested with vine borers. Once these little maggots get in it's all over. I got 2 small pumpkins before they wilted too from the same pest. The string beans ("Kentucky Wonder") were the most successful of the lot besides the `maters. I got around 50 pounds but the Limas and wax beans did not do well. I think it was transplant problems. I had one and only one cabbage. It got pretty big but the day before I was about to harvest it the groundhog ate it. I also grew a ton of spices, parsley, sage, coriander and 3 different kinds of basil. I also planted rosemary but it didn't do well. The oregano and marjoram didn't come up at all. In any case I learned many lessons. This year I will do many things differently. Brussel sprouts and artichoke are on the schedule. I think I'll get a trap and catch that groundhog too. Did I mention that my girlfriend's landlord runs some kind of half-assed farm? I think I'll release the groundhog over there.
















The soil, a shovel and me.















The soil, a rather poorly designed, rented roto-tiller and me doing everything I can to control it.














The main plot.

The cold frames.