spring planting
Recently, as M will attest to, I've been going nuts with planting a vegetable garden. (I gotta have something to do after peak oil hits, after all.)
For the longest time after we got the backyard (in all reality a 15X40 postage stamp) landscaped, we sectioned off a small portion of it for use as a garden, but it only grew weeds and clover. All this with a nice soaker hose system at the ready.
All that's changed, now, and I've been following in Suzanne's giant footsteps with some planting of my own. We'll see how things turn out, but for right now the soil around here is amazing for planting things. Either that or the array of chemical supplies I've been using on these plants has created bioengineered monsters.
I'll try to go completely organic when I try to plant again, but for right now the main problem seems to be pest control. We get snails around here that grow to monstrous size, book along, and eat everything in sight; that seems to be the main pest problem. (I found this out, to my chagrin, after my lettuce plants had been ravaged in a single night.) So I dutifully put down snail pellets and pesticide powder... and kiss all hope of an organic garden -- at least this season -- goodbye.
I did a little googling and found some interesting things, in addition to a lot of -- I'll be honest -- hippie crap. One of the more interesting solutions seems to be spreading coffee around. So it's either that or get some traps baited with beer the next time I plant.
And here's what I'm planting:
Front Courtyard
Yellow squash, doing really well
Regular tomato, once on hard times but now doing much better
Assorted veggies: sweet basil, just bought and doing well; eggplant, once doing well but now looking a bit wilted; cilantro, needing water; artichoke, in big pot (not pictured), still going strong; climbing cherry tomato, once good but now looking anemic
The Back 40
Lettuce, eaten to death by snails; jalapeno, doing OK
Strawberries, just starting to bloom
Yellow onions, doing amazingly well; bell pepper plant, also partially eaten by snails
Russian potatoes, doing well but I mistook one for a weed and pulled it up
Spinach, just bought and (so far) protected by an amazing array of chemicals; leeks, which seem to be doing all right; cucumber (not pictured), doing well.
We'll see what kind of crop comes out of this and whether I've really just been wasting my time. I'm most excited about the peaches we might have this year (the introductory picture to this entry). When we first bought this place, the peach tree was in full swing and dropping large peaches everywhere, most of which we criminally let rot on the dirt. What peaches we did eventually try were juicy, sweet, and everything we could've asked out of a backyard fruit tree. A year later, after a year of criminal neglect and no regular watering to speak of, our peach tree repaid us by delivering a lot of sour, tiny peaches. That's changed now -- there's a sprinkler system back there, a nice lawn without a lot of clover (finally!), and I put in fruit tree plant food stakes around its root system a long time ago.