Seedlings everywhere

This spring has been very kind to the garden.  The combination of plenty of rain with warm sunny days mixed in has been fantastic for my seedlings, and it looks like the garden is off to a promising start.  Carrots, radishes, chard, lettuce (including mixed greens, mustard greens, and arugula), beets, snap peas and scallions have all emerged and look happy.  We have flea beetles again this year doing a number on the arugula, mustard greens, radish and broccoli seedlings.  Maybe next year I'll get a chance to give them some protective covering.  We also harvested our first rhubarb crop last week from the two larger plants.

Lettuce portion of mesclun mix 5-20

Snap peas 5-20

I've been surprised to find that while having a baby has made me a slightly more responsible gardener, in that I now weed almost every day while Mike is holding Landon.  I certainly didn't weed this much last year, and I hope that I can keep it up, as the beds do look much better.  For mother's day, Mike bought me a tiny pop up tent with mesh sides for Landon to occupy while I farm.  Now I just need to get the baby to tolerate being out of my arms for more than 30 seconds, and we'll be in business!

On my morning tour of the garden this morning I noticed that the potato plants have just begun to emerge.  My goal for this year is to preempt a potato bug infestation by scraping the eggs off of the plants, so this week I'll need to start monitoring the plants.  I'd love it if I didn't have to spend so much time this summer "harvesting" potato bug larvae.

Potato plant 5-20-2012

Emerging potato plant 5-20-2012

The tomato seedlings are looking very happy in their new pots.  Since the weather has consistently been so nice, I think I'll start hardening them off next week, and then plant them outside.  I'm hoping to get to the farmer's market next Saturday to pick up eggplant and pepper seedlings, and then finish the first round of planting next weekend.

Tomato seedlings 5-20

Whenever you read about planting mint, you can't miss the dire warnings to be very cautious in your placement of the plant as mint is a vigorous spreader, and nearly impossible to get rid of.  Well, not in my garden.  Last year I carefully planted my chocolate mint and spearmint plants in their own pots within the herb bed, and made sure to keep the runners out of the larger bed.  I'm not sure what happened, but my spearmint never came back.  So I continue my streak of failures with "easy" plants and will be picking up a new spearmint plant at the market.

A sad tale of two mints 5-20-2012

The dogs have been a bit neglected since Landon's arrival, so to occupy themselves they've begun a serious excavation project in the front yard, to Mike's dismay.  At first it was a hole, now it's so large that I think it's safe to say we have the beginnings of a tunnel.  We're a bit concerned about the possibility of a cave-in, but at least it keeps them busy and away from the chickens...

Bullet going in

Bullet coming out

Finally, the junior farmer is two months old today!  He's just starting to smile and coo, although both are hard won and haven't been captured on camera yet.  He's a very easygoing baby most of the time (except for at 4AM.  He's lucky he's so cute).  At two months old, his favorite things are eating, looking out the window, looking at his parents, looking at the penguin on the bar of his bouncy seat, more eating, and being held.  We continue to adore him.

Despite the lack of blogging, we are farming

Having a newborn makes gardening rather tricky, but we have managed to get our cold weather plants in the ground over the past month, and have started our tomato seedlings as well.  We've figured out that Landon is quite happy to be worn in a wrap, so Mike has been doing the bulk of the actual farming work, while I wear Landon and supervise.  I hope that once I can wear him on my back, I'll be getting my hands dirty more often.  At any rate, a quick run-down of our progress so far this season:

Around April 15, we started the tomato seedlings inside.  We let them go in their starter cells for much longer than we did last year (due to nothing other than parenting induced exhaustion), and just transferred them into larger pots last night.  Right now we have 24 seedlings, and I plan to plant 12 of them in the actual garden, sending the extras off to Taperman and anyone else in need of tomatoes.

Tomato seedlings 4-18

Tomato seedlings 5-6

Tomato seedlings 5-13

The weekend of April 29, we did our first cold weather plantings, getting arugula, mesclun greens, sugarsnax carrots, beets and scallions in the ground.  I had wanted to get more done, but this was my first attempt at leaving the baby inside with his dad while I farmed, and I just couldn't stay outside for longer than an hour.

The next weekend we tag teamed the planting, and got the potatoes, chard, half of the cabbage, broccoli, radishes, carnival blend and koruda carrots all planted.  We've had a nice warm spring with lots of rain, which I'm hoping will be good for the garden.  So far, it's been excellent for the weeds, so we've had to spend about equal time weeding and planting each weekend.  The chickens have been the happy recipients of the weeds, which is the only upside to their presence.

This past weekend we took Landon on his first trip to the farmer's market to pick up leek, shallot, more cabbage, and brussels sprouts seedlings.  We ran into one of his baby buddies from our prenatal group, and even though he slept through the entire outing, I think he enjoyed it.  At least, we enjoyed it!  Mike broke out the rototiller and cultivator attachment for the weed whacker to create some additional space on the northern side of the garden for the brussels sprouts and for sunflowers, and he planted all of the seedlings.  Landon and I supervised (again, Landon slept).  Now we just have the warm weather crops left - eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, bush and pole beans, squash, and zucchini.  I think I'll plant them Memorial Day weekend, and we'll be hitting up the farmer's market one more time before then to get some more seedlings, since we'll need to buy eggplant and pepper seedlings.

Easter egg radishes 5-14

Rhubarb 5-14

Sugar snap pea seedlings 5-14

I'm planning on starting cauliflower seedlings inside once the tomatoes move into the garden, to be planted in July for a fall harvest.  We'll also plant a second row of sugar snap peas for a fall harvest (hopefully this will be different than last year, when I said that we'd plant a second row of peas, but never actually did). 

The fruit trees have been blooming for the last two weeks and are just beautiful.  Right now the apple and crab apple trees are in full bloom.  So lovely.

Finally, the chickens.  They aren't a pretty group.  We've tried giving them extra protein in the form of sunflower seeds, and extra mental stimulation in the form of large seed blocks, but they are still pecking each other to the point of baldness.  I think we only have one or two girls who remain unpecked, and we've given up on trying to protect them from each other.  They're laying very well, producing 12-15 eggs a day, but they certainly aren't much to look at right now. 

The farm is constructed!

Although we didn't have a tractor this weekend (very, very sad), we still managed to get quite a bit of farm construction done. On Saturday morning, we went to the Portland farmer's market to check out seedlings. We were supposed to go to another plant sale after the farmer's market, but I bought all the seedlings that I needed at the farmer's market, and figured that I would only cause myself spacing issues if I went to the plant sale. At the farmer's market, I bought broccoli, cauliflower, red and green cabbage, leek, several kinds of onion, brussels sprouts, and thai basil seedlings. With the exception of the thai basil, these are all supposed to be cooler weather plants that should hopefully survive outside now, so I planned to transplant them over the weekend. Sadly, one of the thai basil plants is already a goner. We noticed yesterday afternoon that it was quite droopy, and this morning I saw that it had succumbed to damping off. This happens to seedlings sometimes, quite quickly, and kills them. As you can see in the picture, it's not pretty. At least it wasn't a seedling that I grew, so I don't feel responsible, although I am the one who selected it at the market...

We also went to the tractor supply store to buy supplies for the fence. We have lots of wildlife near our house, including deer, so a fence is not optional for the garden. We went with a five foot fence, but have been warned that this may not be high enough to discourage the deer. We'll have to see. Mike worked on putting up the fence (I did provide key assistance in keeping the corner posts straight, and wrestling with the wire fencing, but he did most of the actual hard work). I transplanted most of my seedlings, also adding a few that we picked up at Skillins on the way home, because I really do go there every weekend. On Saturday, I managed to get the strawberries, brussels sprouts, onions, and cabbage planted. We were rained out by 5:00, so I couldn't finish the rest of the seedlings. I wasn't too disapointed though, as I've learned over the last few weeks that 1) I'm really, really not very good at shoveling and 2) gardening involves a lot of shoveling. Because we ran out of compost last week, I had to manually get the manure into the remaining beds. At one point, I had to admit to Mike that I wished we had a tractor. Either that, or I need some serious shoveling lessons and possibly steroids to bulk up faster.

Above from top: Entire garden post-fencing, cauliflower/broccoli bed, start of the herb garden, and strawberry/rhubarb bed

Today, Mike finished the fence, and I put in the rest of the seedlings and was able to plant all of the seeds that I had scheduled to plant this weekend. I had planned out where I wanted to plant everything, and I almost managed to follow my plan - I mixed up my first bed, but got on track after that. I used hot pink string to make rows to follow when planting the seeds, which I'm hoping will help me a bit when I start weeding the beds, so that I don't inadvertantly pull up my plants instead of the weeds. I'm glad that we went with the raised beds, because even though it's rained for what feels like the last two months, the soil in the beds was moist but not soaked, unlike the rest of the yard which has turned into a huge mud pit.

Above from top: cabbage bed, brussels sprouts with arugula seeds, onions/scallions, and leeks/broccoli & cauliflower (I had extra seedlings)

Below - Seedlings taking over the office! The top photo is mostly tomatoes blocking everything else. In the bottom you can see the marigolds, zinnias, peppers, and tomatoes.


Hopefully in a few weeks, we'll start having baby lettuce. It's very exciting to look out onto the garden and see the seedlings and know that I planted seeds - now I hope that it grows! Next weekend I'll plant more of the warmer weather seeds as long as it looks like we won't have another cold spell, and then I'll transplant the tomatoes and peppers and plant my squash in June. We still have to prepare the beds for the squash, and decide exactly where they're going to go, but all of the other garden prep is done. Well, I also have to mulch the walkways in the garden, but it's so gross and muddy in there that I need to wait for it to dry out a bit.