Day one of Life of a Garden:
Although it's not yet mid-March, it is late to begin our garden journal, in that there have been several events passed this winter, relevant to our theme.
The first, is the wonderful day last month when my partner Robert, and I (Kimberley) gathered with our garden friends Joanna & Daniel and Tim & Hillary to co-op our seeds and seed orders.
We gathered at J & D's house, armed with our seed catalogs as well as our collective dreams of "dirt manicures" and luscious tomatoes still warm from the sun that produced them.
Joanna made gorgeous chocolate treats and a big pot of tea, and we set about trying to organize our desires into schemes with potential.
Joanna, a seasoned gardener, is a veritable expert on tomatoes. Additionally, she had a lot to say on companion plantings, when to start seedlings and what not to bother planting at all. Her seed vendor of choice is Johnnys Selected Seeds from Maine. She also had a good number of seeds saved from previous seasons (one packet was from 1992!).
Last year being my first garden ever, I had what I hope was not just beginners luck in that we had a beautiful, bountiful harvest, from a veritably weed free plot - that is, because I spent literally hours there every morning making sure that no weed saw the light of more than a single day.
Robert was master of watering and tomato maintenance, because not unlike Joanna, the rest of the garden is basically decoration around the tomato plants.
Seed saving hadn't really occurred to me until I started to run out of things to do around late August. As we picked the last of our prized Pink Lady tomatoes, I thought to myself, "Holy crap! I should be saving seeds so we can have these same babies again next season! Then I wondered why the thought hadn't occurred earlier. I figure you can't expect too much your first run - I mean everything last season was a learning experience for me.
The idea of seed saving sent me to the internet looking for the how-tos and ultimately to Seed Saver's Exchange. SSE is my vendor of choice both for their beautiful presentations, and their righteous mission - to preserve our seed heritage, and to protect heirloom varieties from extinction through education, on site preservation and dispersed cultivation via their seed sales.
The group traded their saved seeds, ordered from Johnny's and SSE and got back together to parse out the booty a couple of weeks ago.
The next step is planning out what needs to be started indoors and when.
We already have our light system and a sufficient supply of materials to use the APS seed starting system, which is a wick watering device and which I am planning to go into great detail about in later posts after we actually get started.
We still need to research and purchase our seed germinating mixes and potting soils in addition to fertilizers (if any) and we want to invest in a light meter, and possibly soil testing kit.
This year is going to be the most expensive investment year because it's all new. In past, Robert always purchased starts from the nursery, which is fine if you'll be content with the standard varieties a nursery offers.
As a chef for over 20 years, once I got my hands dirty, I immediately began to long for colorful heirloom varieties like Dragon Carrots, and Rainbow Chards, and Bull's Blood Beets - but let's not go there quite yet - there's plenty more where that came from.
The seeds we plan to start immediately are onions because they go in the ground as soon as the soil can be worked, which around here I believe is around late April, but we'll have to wait until the community gardens are actually open for biz in the tilled areas which is sometime in early May (I should know this, since my partner is a coordinator!) After a harder search than I thought should be necessary, I found a wonderful web article at The Kitchen Gardener called The Humble Onion. It's chock full of what you need to know about planting onions, and I'm grateful to the producers for clarifying the process and assuring us that it's not so hard after all.
The Tommy Thompson area offers both deep tilled and no till plots, of which we plan to work one of each. I'm not fully sure of the advantages and disadvantages of each, but that is part of what we intend to learn this season.
I know that with the tilled plots one disadvantage is being on the BACGs schedule meaning that you must have the plot cleaned up by a certain date (generally in mid November). This eliminates the possibility of fall plantings such as garlic, and also of late harvest crops like leeks and cole crops that can survive or even thrive through some frost.
The tilled plots are particularly nice for gardeners who are very active, in that the deep aeration is wonderful for the annual plants to dig down some nice roots without much resistance. Deep tilling pulls up a lot of weed seeds however, and this is a source of debate amongst gardeners as to the advantages v disadvantages etc.
I think they both have merit, and it all depends on your plans and your style and I for one am grateful to have both as an option. I'm looking forward to learning from the experience of each mode as well.
So that's our start for now. I am going to try my best to journal this season as thoroughly as possible with many photos, and tips, and challenges, and prose, and recipes and ideas as I can cram in here so we can all learn from our successes and failures.
As the fairy in my kitchen proclaims, "If you're not killing plants, you're not stretching yourself as a gardener." Let's hope this turns out to be more the exception than the rule.
XXKHT
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