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.