Planting, training, and flowers
There's almost too much going on the garden right now to post about. Time for a disjointed catch-up post!
The biggest deal this
week, as usual in the middle of May, is planting. May 15 is
traditionally our frost-free date, so everything I've been holding back
goes in the ground now. Tuesday I set out basil and sweet potatoes;
Wednesday Kayla and I direct-seeded corn, okra, and melons; and today
I'll seed butternut squash, summer squash, cucumbers, and bush beans,
then set out our sweet peppers.
As if that isn't fun enough, Friday is my icing-on-the-cake day. So I'll get to plant grape vines rooted inside over the winter out
in front of the trailer, then set out some flowers between them. A
great way to end planting week, with some long-term dreams and
short-term beauty.
In the perennial sphere, I
found time last Friday to summer-train our youngest apple trees,
although our older trees are still waiting for their turn. The photo
above shows our espalier
experiment (before I picked up the porch). I lopped off the top of the
tree this past winter and am now training two new limbs along angled
pieces of string. The third incipient limb was pinched off to maintain
symmetry.
Our normal high-density trees aren't so particular, but they do get the usual light pruning and heavy training
monthly in the summer. The only new innovation I came up with there is
to make simple spreaders out of asparagus stalks dredged up out of the
mulch at the base of the plants. A notch in each end and I have a
spreader that will hopefully stay in place until the little branches
solidify their shape.
Of course, weeding is
always on the agenda, although the task goes on the back burner during
planting week. I do a lot of hand weeding, but most of our soil is now
so good that the job is easy and fun...even when the beds are ignored
too long like around the asparagus plants shown above.
Speaking of weeds, I made
a mistake last winter by planting rye in my flower bed/grapevine area
in front of the trailer. While rye is a good cover crop, it's a weed in
my flower bed 
because the plant is in the wrong place!
Luckily, ten minutes of yanking up the grain reclaimed the space with no
hassle. Columbine and chamomile are now blooming, and most of the little herbs I set out there far too early
survived and thrived as well. With the ground finally bare, I poked
some scarlet runner bean seeds into the earth and set out some fennel,
borage, and nasturtiums one evening last week, so hopefully we'll have a
vibrant flowerbed in the near future.
Of course, it would take a
whole 'nother post to tell you about how all of our other garden plants
are faring. The cliff notes version is: first strawberry fruit Monday,
first pea flowers and tomato flower Wednesday, lettuce by the gallon,
asparagus finally starting to slow down from a daily dinner option to
tri-weekly. Delicious!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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