I started by clearing out any remaining dead flowers from fall and those pesky little clovers that grow everywhere. Then I dug a hole that is bigger than you actually need. I try an do this whenever I plant just to loosen up the soil. Place the bulbs tip up about six inches deep and six inches apart. I would recommend planting them in groups of about three so you get some thick green when they come up. Cover the bulbs with dirt. Water a bit the saturate the bulbs. Dust off the gardening gloves and wait for them to make their magic!
I looked in a bag of Paperwhites that I had bought and noticed that they were growing! Whoops! It is officially time to plant your Paperwhites (if you haven't already). They are always the first bulb to come up and produce fragrant white flowers. Paperwhites are a little reminder that spring is around the corner, and respite from the grays and browns of winter. I started by clearing out any remaining dead flowers from fall and those pesky little clovers that grow everywhere. Then I dug a hole that is bigger than you actually need. I try an do this whenever I plant just to loosen up the soil. Place the bulbs tip up about six inches deep and six inches apart. I would recommend planting them in groups of about three so you get some thick green when they come up. Cover the bulbs with dirt. Water a bit the saturate the bulbs. Dust off the gardening gloves and wait for them to make their magic! .
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The ground hasn't frozen yet! If you still have carrots in the ground go pull them! I just pulled these a few days ago. While they don't look fantastic, they tasted pretty good. I washed them and peeled them and put them in a bowl. If you know you are not going to be using your carrots right away, put them in a bowl of water. Carrots out of the garden only last about day without water and then they shrivel up into gross little things. If you notice, some of my carrots are twisty, this is because I planted them too close together. Gardening tip: When planting carrot seeds, scatter them all in a row about and inch or two below the soil. You want to till your soil so it is nice and soft. The delicate tip of the carrot is the part that grows down so it needs soft soil. Here is the hard part. When they come up, you have to thin them. This means you have to pull carrots that are too close together and toss them so the existing carrots have room to grow. I didn't do this. I don't have the heart to pull up something I grew unless it is to eat it. Thus, my carrots are twisty and all tangled together. Maybe next year I will learn... Because the carrot grows underground it is sometimes hard to tell when they are ready. Often times the head of the carrot will pop above the soil and start to turn green. Like potatoes, any part of the plant that touches sun will turn bitter, green, and not delicious. When the head of the carrot pops out of the soil, harvest it! Gardening tip: The first year of a carrot's life it grows a big root, which we eat. If you leave it in the ground the carrot will come back for a second year. On the second year it will grow, and flower. If you leave it even longer the flower will dry out and you get carrot seeds! Carrots only flower on their second year. Last year I left about three carrot plants in the ground for a second year. They flowered and as the flowers produced seeds and dried, I cut them and saved them. That is what you see in my mini bucket. I now have enough seeds for years of carrot crops! All you really have to do is neglect a few plants. Easy to do! Composting: Composting is one of the most efficient, green ways to run a household! First of all, you reduce your garbage by quite a bit. Secondly, you are providing yourself with environmentally friendly, free, safe fertilizer. WIthout replenishing the garden soil each year, you will not have healthy plump vegetables. You do not have to be total gung-ho hippy to compost. I forget about it for weeks at a time, and then get all involved again. The good news, it everything keeps rotting whether you are paying attention or not! So here are a few hints to get your composting started. Ken Thompson wrote a cute little book called Compost if you are looking for more information. And as always, I would love questions! 1) Get a container ~If you live in Sacramento, you can buy a stackable compost bin from the city of Sacramento for about $65 which is roughly half of what they retail for. ~You can also easily build one from scrap material laying around your yard. The key thing is that, the compost needs some air, and some barriers to hold in moisture. I would recommend having four side walls and a roof. The bottom can be left open so the nutrients can seep into the soil underneath the bin. We tried the "pile" thing and we ended up with a lot of dried material that never composted. 2) Load it up with garbage! ~You want your compost bin to have a balance. You should put any plant materials that are left over from cooking in your compost. I have this little "garbage can" in our kitchen for the compostable materials. It has an odor barrier on top so your kitchen won't smell. Coffee grounds (even still in the paper) are great for adding some acidity. You should put in yard clippings like grass or leaves. If you are going to put in sticks, cut them into small pieces or they take forever to break down. If you have lovely adorable chickens, you should put their wood shavings and poop from the coop, and the egg shells in the compost bin. ~Strive for a balance of these things so the pH stays at a good level (I don't know anything more about the science of it than that). ~Do not put meats, oils, or fats in you compost. They will attract unpleasant hungry animals, and the bin will smell like rotting meat. The compost should be primarily plant derived with the exception of some of the chicken "products" I mentioned above. 3) Turn it ~About every two months the compost needs to be turned. If you have a stackable composting bin, then take the top layer and move it to a new, nearby location. Start moving the compost into this layer. This will make it so that they nutrients seeps into a different parcel of soil. If your bin then you may need to remove the top layer, mix things up , and put it back in. ~The goal in doing this is to move the composting materials to locations with different levels of air and moisture. It also keeps you from getting layers of material that are stuck together, or dried and they don't decompose. I leave this mini pitch fork by the bin and then it is always available when I get a whim to turn the compost. Lastly, turning your compost gives you access to the goods at the bottom! 4) Spread it ~Once you get to the bottom of your bin and you find the gold, the stuff that smells like forest floor and it almost the consistency of crumbly dirt, spread it! In the spring before planting I till it in, but during the rest of the year, I simply spread it on the surface of the soil. It brings nutrients and replenishes the soil. The compost can also act as a weed and moisture barrier. It does amazing things for your garden, it is free, and it reduces your trash! Why would you not! If your vegetable garden is looking like mine (sad, yellow, and a little bit dead) then it is time to do some pulling! Out of laziness I had not pulled up my summer garden yet. To my surprise I still had a few gems hiding in there. If you planted a winter garden, what did you plant? How did it work out? During the winter there is not nearly as much maintenance necessary in the garden so it is a good time to prepare the soil for the next planting season. You will definitely need some sort of compost bin to put all the remaining plants. If you don't, then just make a pile for now. Send me a comment and I can give you some ideas! Step one: Pull all the remaining plants that grew during the summer. If the roots are hard to pull up you can cut off the plant and let the roots rot in the soil for the winter. If you planned ahead for a winter garden, obviously leave those plants to continue to grow. I discovered today that I had some chard, lettuce, peppers, carrots, and onions growing so I decided to leave them for a few more weeks. I have to admit, I didn't plant a winter garden, but these fighters either held on from the summer, or were seeds that waited until fall to germinate. If your compost bin is stackable, put the top layer in a new location. Put all the pulled up plants in the compost. The smaller you chop everything up, the quicker they will decompose. I took of picture of this compost to show you that this is NOT ready to spread. Leave this size material in the compost bin. Step two: Dig down to the bottom of your compost until you find the stuff that looks almost like dirt. It should smell like forest floor. If it smells rotten or stinky it is probably too wet. If the leaves are dried and crunchy, then it is to dry. I will get into more details about composting another time. Spread this mulchy compost over the dirt where you will be planting next year. If you are feeling very ambitious you can till the compost in the soil, however leaving it on the surface is just fine! Step Three: After the compost is down you want to lay some sort of weed barrier. I used hay. It is cheap and fairly easy to access. We got ours at the pumpkin patch and used it for porch decoration with our pumpkins. Any local feed store should have some. The hay will act as a weed barrier and an insulator. It reduces the sunlight that can get to weeds. It will keep the soil a bit warmer in the winter and allow for better composting. If you have plants that you want to keep, simply spread the hay around them. I am working on my garden in sections. So today I just winterized what you see. The rest will have to wait until another day! |
Robin's BlogI am living in Downtown Archives
June 2014
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