Easter and spring

Easter, even for us secular folks, means that spring has arrived. Here in the Southeastern U.S., it was a lovely day: warm, sunny, and glorious with spring flowers (wild, ornamental, herbaceous, and otherwise).

My gardening companion filled up the new raised beds with the rich 'created' topsoil this morning, so we're ready to plant next weekend (and build two more new beds!)

Back home in the Piedmont, I tidied the satellite garden, and turned over all of the soil blocks in the main vegetable garden. It's beautiful soil there, but it will either be fallow or filled with marigolds this summer, as an control for the root-knot nematodes that have been a problem in recent seasons (for susceptible cole, pepper, and tomato varieties).

The garlic is looking great in the satellite garden, and the onions are coming along. And the asparagus plants (grown from seed last year) have popped up new foliage, wispy to be sure! The robust asparagus crowns that I planted last week may be better contenders for permanent space, but we'll see.

I've got 3 artichoke plants to put somewhere -- probably in a spot that shallots didn't come up. I can't imagine woodchucks liking artichokes.... do you think?

Fall vegetable gardening

It was a good day in the garden. Feeling much better today after a nasty bout with H1N1 last week, my gardening companion and I puttered happily doing (relatively) small garden projects. Tiring, of course, and it required a bit of rest on both of our parts, but it was delightful to be outside.

I cleaned up the rest of the satellite (vegetable) garden, and transplanted some asparagus seedlings that I'd grown from seed (a European variety called Precoce d' Argenteuil) which I'd purchased in an enthusiastic buying session last winter. They clearly must have been described in a evocative way. They were nice hefty young seedlings and I tucked them into a bed rich with organic matter.

I covered other beds with nicely decomposed straw, thanks to my hay bale experiment last spring. I didn't actually end up with crops from the hay bales (uh, woodchucks can climb, I guess), but the compost planting holes stimulated decomposition much more rapidly than usual. One of the double bales is still in good shape, so I'm going to leave it for a spring planting experiment. We'll see.

My plan is to plant garlic and shallots in some of the satellite garden beds this fall, but let the others get ready for spring greens. Other garlic cloves will be planted in the main vegetable garden, which I'm planning to cover in spring with a crab/shrimp shell fertilizer product that will encourage chitin-consuming micro-organisms. (The idea is that they will also yum up the root-knot nematode larvae, which have chitin in their composition). Hmm.

But letting the main vegetable garden beds be largely fallow over the summer growing season next year may be the most effective 'rotation' to decrease the populations of nematodes.