It's Time!

Finally, my garden soil is dry enough to work, as this has been a late year.  Normally we cook fiddleheads to share with everyone for Mother's Day and I give my mother and my boyfriend's mother a bouquet of daffodils. I also usually give each mother a petunia in a planter that needs to be moved indoors if frost threatens even though that rarely needs to happen. Not this year! That's Ok, we'll just have to adjust. I'm not in any huge rush to plant the garden this year. Where some people can get away with working their soil when it's a little wet, it proves to be very detrimental here. With our soil improving every year, yet still behaving much like clay, working the soil when it's too wet results in compacted soil underneath with a muddy layer on top. The garden would dry out decently on a warm, dry day and I would think I'd be able to work it the next day, until it rained (probably a lot) keeping me from any cultivation. 

Yesterday was dry enough to get my new Hoss Wheel Hoe in there and I took advantage, working the soil until dark and then some. The wheel hoe works like a dream. We've given up completely on deep tillage, instead favoring shallow cultivation and with the cultivation tines and plows we have for the wheel hoe, I'm floored at how simple the cultivation is going to be. This will allow me to plant the majority of the garden myself without having to get relief from my boyfriend to help me hoe up rows. The plows on the wheel hoe do that for us. I concentrated on going over the same area, over and over, to improve the depth of cultivated soil for my early potatoes. 

I'll be writing a more detailed blog post on the Hoss Wheel Hoe in the future, stay tuned for that! 

Another reason I'm not rushing to get the garden in before the soil is ideal is because I have a lot of crops planted already by the one and only, Mother Nature. See, I let a lot of crops go to seed last year to collect the seeds for this year. No matter how careful you are when harvesting the seeds, inevitably there's going to be some that fall to the ground and self seed. I have a lot of seeds that fell to the ground and germinated as soon as the weather was perfect to do so. Various lettuces, kale, bok choy, mustard greens, broccoli raab, radishes, arugula and mache, have all self seeded and germinated awhile ago, staying small due to the cold weather, which will provide us with lots of early spring crops. I also planted most of these crops in various spots around the house and gardens, I always fill my flower beds with lettuce. These crops combined with all the cold frame crops, asparagus, chives, rhubarb and strawberries will give us a good jump on the growing season. 

The cold frames are doing great, except for the first time ever, I'm having major problems with a pest. I had luscious crops of spinach, romaine and arugula eaten down to nothing three times now. The pest ate my first crops of all these, avoiding bok choy, kale, kohlrabi, tatsoi and mustard greens for some reason as they were spared, which I then replanted. Just as they started to amount to something, they were nipped off again and then again. I have lots of the apparently less desirable greens although not one of the spinach, lettuce or arugula plants were spared. I suspected it was slugs and set out beer traps that never caught anything, now I'm leaning towards mouse, mole or vole. I wish I could put my cat in the cold frame for the night to remedy things. I've replanted these crops again, even though it's getting kind of late for the spinach. I always have the worst luck with spinach, of course a pest had to ruin what was going to be a great crop of early spring spinach.  

Using the wheel hoe to cultivate soil for planting.