It's Getting Warm!

The temps for the next week or so are going to be in the 90s with a heat index of up to 110F Sunday and Monday. I'm a little worried about fungus on my favas and how my peas will fare, but other than watering every night and harvesting radishes tomorrow before they bolt, there isn't much I can do.

Here's another round of garden pics in the usual order with a couple of highlights! As always, you can click on each picture to see a bigger version.

The Alliums - Bunching onions to the left, Cortland onions in the middle, Red Wing onions and garlic to the right.
These Red Wing F1 onions might just be the nicest onions I've ever grown so far.

The Legumes - 2 types of peas to the left, 3 favas in the middle, 1 fava and 2 pole beans to the right.
I'm harvesting about a gallon of peas every 2-3 days.

These are the Ianto's Yello favas. They could use some staking.

The Nightshades - 20 tomatoes and 6 peppers

These are Red House Free Standing tomatoes. They're late and I never get a ton of fruit but I love the plants.
They're so lush and stocky!

The Other Stuff - Odds and ends on the left, Quinoa in the middle, 13 types of Amaranth on the right.
Volunteer sunflowers, lots of dill and many, many calendula scattered about.

"Calendula corner" - you can't see these behind the sunflowers in the pic above.

A bigger picture view from the southwest corner. I realize that everything beyond the tomatoes is kind of a jumble of green at this point but I love it :-)

Schweizer Riesen Peas

These are the peas that I keep forgetting to take a picture of. Schweizer Riesen from Solstice Seeds in Hartland, VT. As you can see, they're huge! They're also very tasty.

Schweizer Riesen peas

My Garden Didn't Miss Me :(

I've been out of state since Saturday and, of course, wondering how my garden was doing with out me. It did so well that I think I should go away more often! There are some weeds to deal with and other little things, but there are also peas, radishes, good sized tomatoes on the way, and everything is huge!

The sun was pretty far to the west when I took these and I couldn't get a decent picture, but the peas are bearing heavily. Schweizer Riesen is ahead of Shirk Family but both look good!

I purposefully organized these like my post from last week for easy comparison.

The Alliums - Bunching onions to the left, Cortland onions in the middle, Red Wing onions and garlic to the right.

The Legumes - 2 types of peas to the left, 3 favas in the middle, 1 fava and 2 pole beans to the right. I didn't take any close up pictures but the peas are bearing heavily!

The Nightshades - 20 tomatoes and 6 peppers.

A Heidi tomato, coming along fast!

The Other Stuff - Odds and ends on the left, Quinoa in the middle, 13 types of Amaranth on the right.
Huge volunteer sunflowers, lots of dill and many, many calendula scattered about.

A bigger picture view from the southwest corner.

Taking Pictures to Avoid Weeding

I finished weeding the quinoa tonight and then focused on taking pictures rather than sorting through the poppies and such in the last row. :-)

Pics are below. As always you can click on them to see a bigger version.

The Alliums - Bunching onions to the left, Cortland onions in the middle, Red Wing onions and garlic to the right.

The Legumes - 2 types of peas to the left, 3 favas in the middle, 1 fava and 2 pole beans to the right.

The Nightshades - 20 tomatoes and 6 peppers.

The Other Stuff - Odds and ends on the left, Quinoa in the middle, 13 types of Amaranth on the right.

A bigger picture view from the southwest corner.

Gardening through Neglect

Other than watering now and then I haven't done much in the Intervale since straw day. I did go weed the amaranth and half of the quinoa tonight though I didn't think to take a pic. The quinoa got mulched but the amaranth is still a little small.

That said, the garden is doing great! The peas and favas are blossoming, the beans are growing, the onions are huge and the tomatoes have settled right in.

Schweizer Riesen pea blossom

Windsor Fava blossoms

Side story: I spent most of last week getting my Craftsbury garden ready and planted only to have a frost on a night when the expected low was 45F. I'm waiting to see what comes back from the abuse but it wasn't looking good yesterday and they may have gotten another frost last night. Vermont gardening is rough.

Straw Day

First, I didn't get around to posting about it on Wednesday but I finished weeding the north end of the garden that evening. The bunching onions went a lot faster with the new, mini Rogue Hoe pictured a few posts back and I cleaned up the beds I'd done previously as well as the edges. It all looked pretty great if I do say so myself and the lack of bugs continues to be a nice surprise.

I did a quick job of weeding the Amaranth bed this morning, mostly to knock the weeds back a bit. The seedlings are still too small to put up with much soil disturbance beyond that. The good news is that they all seem to be coming up!

I started doing the same with the quinoa bed but the poor plants were tipping over if I got anywhere close to them. The germination there seems a little spotty, especially the southern half of the bed. There's definitely some lambs quarters in that bed too which will be interesting. I can't tell them apart so I'm leaving both for now.

I did a little poking around where I planted poppies and even found a few little sprouts! They're also spotty and don't seem to have come up anywhere that compost landed on them. Whoops! A lesson for next time! I think poppies in general are probably easier as transplants.

I did all of this weeding to kill time until the straw truck came! BACG organizes a big straw and hay buy that any gardeners can get in on and it costs less than buying it at the local stores. It's nice stuff too, fresh from the grain fields in Quebec. I ordered 6 bales which is definitely overkill but I hadn't planned on having all of the leaves and straw in my tomato section when I ordered last fall. Once the straw came I mulched the entire north end of the garden as well as the tomatoes in the southwest corner. The southeast quarter is where all the seedlings are and they're still too small to tolerate the straw, so that's on hold. Check it out:

The north end - Peas/radishes, favas and pole beans in front, onions and garlic in the rear.

The tomato bed with a fresh coat of straw.

A Break in the Bugs

The mosquito levels have been much more tolerable for the last couple of days and I've been taking advantage to spend some time weeding. All of the favas are done as are the garlic and bulb onions.

I spent two hours tonight doing half of the bunching onion bed. That one is slow going as the bunching onions are much smaller and blend in with the grass that I'm pulling. So far so good though, I just ran out of day light.

I also planted Sicitalian Black Swamp Beans (more on those here) and Aleppo Arab Runner Beans from the Roughwood collection. I started those inside so that I was less likely to have any gaps as the window for dry bean planting is already so narrow in Vermont. The runner beans were so big that they didn't really fit in 72 cell trays. I had to wedge them in diagonally!

Fava beans (foreground), pole beans (middle) and bunching onions (background)

You'll notice that the dry beans are surrounded by some green mulch. The lawn down there got a bit shaggy before it got mowed and there was a lot of fresh, half-dried grass laying around. I either just scored some great mulch for free or laid down an extra thick cover crop of dandelion seeds. We'll see.

Here's another pic of the same area, this one before the grass mulch was added and mostly to show off the fava beans. It's so hard to take a decent pic down there when the sun is low, but look at the size of those suckers!

Favas, pole beans, and alliums

Obvious I have some string work to do still but that should be quick.

One excellent byproduct of weeding is that I've been snacking on volunteer daikons the size of pencils. Yum! Lambs quarters are a good size right now too and have me excited for quinoa greens.

Tomato planting!

Twenty of the 22 tomatoes are in! I don't seem to have any Black Beauty tomatoes in my Burlington batch and I can't remember if there was a germination problem or whether they're just hiding in my Craftsbury trays.

One Speckled Roman has some weirdness with its foliage. I should have probably culled it but it looks more like heat/water stress than anything so I'm just going to keep an eye on it.

The western most row has 4 Dora and 3 Druzba tomatoes. The middle row has 3 Opalka, 2 Heidi and room for the 2 Black Beauty, and the eastern row has 3 Red House Free Standing, 2 Speckled Romans and 3 Baylor Paste. That row got one extra because I planted the RHFS 18 inches apart rather than 24. All rows are listed north to south.

20 of 22 tomatoes going in the Intervale!

I pulled the bottom branches off from each plant and planted each one a few inches deeper than they were in the pots. If you click on the picture to make it bigger they look a little short and bedraggled but they'll recover and have healthier roots in the long run.

Tomato Prep

My new Intervale outfit consists of wool socks, balled up thickly around my ankles, long Carhartts, a thick long sleeved t-shirt, a wind breaker over that, wraparound headphones to protect my ears, the wind breaker hood over those, sun glasses, and thick gardening gloves. It makes the mosquitos almost bearable.

I finished prepping the tomato rows tonight - the stakes are in, all the compost that I had left is spread on top of the soil, and the straw is all pulled back enough for the soil to warm up a bit.

Prepped tomato rows

It's supposed to be sunny and HOT tomorrow but then cloudy and/or rainy all weekend. I'm hoping to get the plants in tomorrow night but I'm building beds in Craftsbury tomorrow so tomatoes may wait until Saturday. Either way they should have an easy day or two to start out.

Borage seedlings in the onions

There are probably 100 borage seedlings growing in my onions all of a sudden. There was a huge borage plant growing in one corner of my garden last year and it seems to have left me something to remember it by. These are likely to meet the hoe soon but they look cool in the meantime.

Amaranth Progress and Tomato Prep

There were too many mosquitos to hold still and take pictures, but the amaranth is up and the rain made everything grow quite a bit over the last 48 hours!

I started pushing in stakes for tomatoes but only brought enough for two of the three rows and the bamboo is cracked enough that I didn't push them in very far. I didn't want to impale myself in front of all of my garden neighbors! :-) I'll go back with more stakes and something to make pilot holes soon.

Seriously though .. the mosquitos were intense.

Fertilizer, Skeeters, Straw, and a new hoe

I spread a light layer of North Country Organics, Pro-Gro on just about all of the planted stuff in the Intervale tonight. I mostly wanted to get the garlic some nitrogen but Pro Gro is nice stuff so I spread the love. It is not, however, very photogenic on similarly colored soil, so here are some peas and favas instead.

Peas and favas!

Mosquito season has started in force. I had long Carhartts, a long sleeved shirt, and gloves on tonight and still got eaten alive.

I started prepping for tomato planting by pulling the straw back to let the ground thaw out. There's some quack grass to be pulled and a lot of baby maple trees to hoe but.. I was out of patience for the skeeters at this point.

Straw cleared for tomatoes

In other news, I got a new mini-hoe! Here it is on its test run in my barley crop at home! I've been avoiding weeding this bed just because I knew it was coming :-)

New Rogue Hoe!

Replacement Favas, Radishes Take 2, Amaranth and Weeds

Most of my favas are up and looking great but there were a handful of holes. I brought their packets down with me today and replanted to fill them. I'm not sure if it's too late for them to do well or not but it's worth a try. I added one Ianto's, six Masterpiece, one Sweet Lorane, and one Windsor. I also ran a scuffle hoe through the beds so the green weeds you can see in this picture should be shriveled to nothing within a day or two.

Freshly hoed favas with radishes to the left

I also thinned the May 6 radish planting, ran the hoe through the rest of the bed on the east side of the peas and planted the second round. These are also French Breakfast.  The (rather crooked - not sure what happened there) picture is of the first planting. Again, the weeds you see in this picture should be gone soon although there is some quack grass on the western side of the peas that I'll have to dig out.

Peas and radishes

I hoed the bed that will have beans (visible in the fava pic) and spot weeded a few areas in the onions. There's more to do there but I'm waiting for a shiny new short handled Rogue hoe that I want to use for weeding them. It should be a great trial run.

Lastly, I planted two clumps each of thirteen varieties of Amaranth. I'm direct seeding them to see if they'll mature that way as I'd like to start less stuff inside. Even if they don't, I should get plenty of greens. Each little white tag in this picture represents a variety and while they may not look like much now that row should be gorgeous later on!

A row of freshly planted amaranth 

Speaking of which, the Red Farro quinoa is poking out in little clumps. I'll have to thin these to one or two plants each soon but not just yet.

Red Farro Quinoa seedlings

2018 Soil Tests

I got my results from this year's soil tests back from UVM. This is before I added any compost and such. These are screen shots of the results so not very accessible if you're using a blind reader. Apologies from my accessibility-friendly side.

North End

South End soil tests

Nutrients in both of these gardens are really high though the soil organic matter (OM) is surprisingly not. For the north end to have 4.2% OM after having 20 bags of leaves on it winter before last, piles of compost in the planting holes during the year and lots of straw left on top.. I can only imagine how low that number was before!

The high phosphorus is indicative of years of manure based compost being applied and it's a problem across the state. I'd like to switch to a non-manure based compost at some point but that's going to take some research. If I had space and time to grow all of my own nutrients with rotations, it would be my first goal.

All in all, some pretty nice soil!

Updates for Peas, Radishes, Favas, Onions, Poppies, Orach, Quinoa, and Compost

Last thing's first - I got my compost for the year all into the garden! 15 buckets full, some spread out onto all of the exist beds with the remainder piled for when I am ready for tomatoes. This includes adding it to all of the existing beds.

Compost on the north end.

Peas, radishes and favas are all up! I didn't take any close up pictures so more to come there.

The bulb onions all got composted and then mulched with last year's leftover straw. I like the small, broken down pieces for onions as they settle nicely around the small plants and are easy to handle. I didn't mulch the bunching onions yet as I think they need some more growing time before I risk beating on them. Maybe a week or so.

Onions with fresh (albeit old) mulch.

The outside row of the SE quadrant got two types of breadseed poppies plus some Red Orach. There'll be some dwarf cosmos here at some point too but I'm letting the soil warm for another week or two.

The next bed got Red Faro quinoa planted, some from Baker Creek and some from Southern Seed exposure, just because I somehow double ordered and decided to compare.

Flowers on the left, quinoa in the middle, soon to be amaranth on the right.

A Bunch of Onions

The bunching onions are in! I planted roughly 24 of each of most of these except for the first one which was closer to 15 or 16.

• Crimson Forest bunch onions (Baker Creek)
• Deep Purple bunching onions (Johnny's)
• Evergreen Hardy White bunching onions (Johnny's)
• He Shi Ko bunch onions (Baker Creek)
• Red Welch bunch onions (Baker Creek)

These little whippets were planted on March 30 so they're pretty young and delicate. The Red Wings and Cortlands look huge in comparison!

Bunching Onions

The compost looking stuff in this picture is just extra Promix that I dumped out of some plug trays.

There was a few feet left over at the south end of this row so I stuffed in the leftover Red Wing F1 onions. A few of them may be a little crowded but I can thin them for greens if nothing else.

The only thing that's left for the north end of the Intervale garden is beans and it's not warm enough for those yet. The next thing to get planted here will likely be the flower/orach row.

Onions Take 1 (and 2)

I stopped at the Intervale in the cold, cold rain yesterday and planted a double row of Red Wing F1 onions next to the garlic. They're on the right side of this photo and there are roughly 80 or 90 of them. My phone really doesn't like taking general pictures that involve the straw residue but I'll try to get a clearer shot at some point when it's less wet!

3 rows of Cortland F1 onions on the left
2 rows of Red Wing F1 and 1 row of German Red garlic on the right!

I went back tonight and planted a triple row of Cortland F1 onions next in the next bed. Those are on the left side in the above photo. That's all of my onions for the year so fingers crossed that the river stays where it's supposed to and the deer stay away! These are the Cortlands There's somewhere around 120 of them.

Cortland F1 Onions

Bunching onions are next!

Radishes, Take 1

It was raining so I didn't take any pictures but I did plant 3.5' of french breakfast radishes today. I plan to stagger plant the east side of the pea row. If I do one 3.5' section per week I should pretty much always have radishes! I give it a month before I forget.

There are several new loads of compost around the Intervale tonight. A sure sign that more people will be there soon!

Soil Testing

I went to the Intervale tonight to collect soil samples for analysis by UVM's soil lab. I took samples from each of the two half plots that I now use, even though they're next to each other. The soil tests are fairly inexpensive and I'd like to see how different the two sides are.

To collect a soil sample I wandered around each plot taking little pinches of soil and putting them in a bag. There was a mix of surface soil and some from a few inches down and it was all put into a ziploc bag and mixed up. This should give a pretty good average for each plot.

While I was there I used a fork to loosen the southeast quadrant of the garden. This will be the greens section and should get planted fairly soon. Maybe even this weekend!

Southeast quadrant with the soil loose and ready to go!

I also put down a thin strip of mulch between the lawn and the peas. It probably won't slow the quack grass down much but it'll make it easier to pull later on.

Peas!

The bamboo poles are where I planted peas. There's nothing up yet but it's still early. Tomorrow's rain should help!

Pea Planting

I stopped at the Intervale with my friend Walter tonight and planted Schweizer Weisen and Shirk Family peas, both from Solstice Seeds. I also lugged down a 5 gallon jug of water (I don't think the garden water is on yet) for the fava beans.

I didn't take a picture of any of that, so instead here are some of my Amaranth starts. This one is Aurelia's Verde from Baker Creek but the important part is - doesn't look like I'm growing a whole tray of pigweed? :-) You can click on the image to see a bigger version.

Favas Are (finally) In

The ground has been white almost every morning since my last post and most of the days have either been rainy or snowy as well. It was kind of a gross week weather-wise but today is really making up for it - 55F and clear as can be.

I planted 4 types of favas into the beds that I prepped last week.

Ianto's Fava Bean (Baker Creek)

Masterpiece Fava (Baker Creek)

Sweet Lorane (Victory Seeds)

Windsor Fava Beans (High Mowing)

I also put the bamboo in for peas, though I need to track down where I left my twine last fall. There's also some bamboo where the runner beans and Sicitalian Black Swamp beans will go, just for a placeholder.

Lastly, I prepped two more beds and filled two more pathways with woodchips using the same process as in the last post. I finished the day by spreading what was left of last year's broken down leaves and straw around to protect the soil from rain erosion. The old straw makes it look like I didn't do much down there today but.. I suppose aesthetics aren't the point. :-)