Finally, it's ready
Today was a tiring day. I woke up still sore from yesterday's shovelling, but with big plans to hit a milestone: get something in the ground. There was a lot of work to do before that, though. I had to finish smoothing out the soil in the box and string off the areas that I'm going to use as paths. That last item necessitated a run to Home Depot to pick up some supplies, made it too easy to run some other errands. Still, I did manage to do it: there are now eight tomatoes in the ground, two of each variety I started from seed. The other unlucky plants will probably go in the yard waste bin for next's weeks trash pick-up, unless someone at work decides they want to grow tomatoes, too.
A friend of mine gave me some left-over red plastic that he's trying out this year. Supposedly it reflects the right parts of sunlight and can boost tomato production by 20%. We'll see. I went ahead and laid it down, figuring that it would help keep the weeds away if nothing else. I still have a little bit left over, so I may use it for some of the peppers, too.
The garden box has five growing areas. What would have been the sixth is taken up by some nice trees by the fence that I didn't want to get rid of, at least not this year. The growing space next to the fence is the only one that gets shaded part of the day, mostly thanks to a large orange tree in the other corner of the yard. The remaining four spaces should get sunlight the whole day.
Sometime this week I'm going to have to sit down with the seeds I still have and decide what will go where. I have a lot of options, since some things (radishes, lettuce) grow very quickly, and I can re-use space and plant more densely than otherwise. I can plant about twelve full-size plants in each space, plus I have three other garden beds (small ones) along the fence by the street.
The start of a big weekend. Turns out the gardener's market was today instead of Sunday, so we got up early (for a weekend) and headed over to that first thing. I was disappointed with the selection. The email I saw claim "many unusual varieties," but really they had the same old stuff you can buy at any nursery. What's worse, the plants were pretty immature. Most of them just barely had their second set of true leaves. Still, I went ahead and picked up an ancho plant and two Anaheim "Barker's Hot" plants. The Anaheims are generally mild peppers, but these are supposed to have just a bit more heat, but still be good for stuffing.
After breakfast, we dropped by Yamagami's and I bought two serrano plants to replace the ones the snails destroyed. These plants are what I expected at the market: sturdy, lots of leaves, and basically ready to put in the ground.
Then, time to head home and deal with the pile of dirt. Glen came over shortly after lunch. It took us almost three hours to move the whole thing, one wheelbarrow at a time, into the backyard garden box. There wasn't really time after that to get anything else done, but I did spend a bit of time smoothing things out before giving up for the day.
I mentioned before the drainage system that used to be in the garden before I started work on it. The whole story is more involved, but I'll summarize. The previous owners of our house had three boys, so in the box that is now my garden they had a swing-set. It was filled with a large amount of wood chips. The top layer of these wood chips were still pretty dry and useless, at least for a garden, so I stripped off the top layer and disposed of them. The bottom stuff was wet and nicely rotting, so I figured I'd hang on to it.
Under the wood chips, I found black fabric, probably to keep weeds from growing. That's fine, good idea, I'll just have to take it out. In the course of doing it, one day I find rather thicker black fabric, but not everywhere, just in lines in a few places. When I peel it back, I find rocks. When I scraped away those rocks, I found pipes. They had built a drainage system (in Northern California, where even in an El Niño year it doesn't rain nearly as much as back east) to keep water from pooling in the play area.
So my little project of readying the area for a garden was suddenly much bigger. I had to move the left-over wood chips out of the way enough to get to these pipes, remove them, get rid of all of the rocks (which I still have to do), and then put it all back.
It's never that easy, of course. After I had yanked up the pipes in a couple of places, I actually found low-voltage electrical wiring in the trench, plus some smaller PVC, most likely for the irrigation system. Instead of doing the smart thing, and routing these items around the edge of the yard, this genius of a homeowner ran it straight down the middle. Hope no one ever wants to put a pool back there, because they're going to be in for a rude surprise.
I have declared war upon snails. If you're a snail and reading this, don't come near my house. If I see you, I will either crush you or drown you in soapy water, and think nothing of it.
I ran by Home Depot today on the way home from work and bought some copper barrier tape. Supposedly copper reacts with snails and slugs similar to an electrical shock, so they won't cross it. I lined the inside edge of my cage with it in the hopes that they wouldn't be able to crawl inside the box and wreck further havoc on my plants.
Around 11:00 PM I went outside to see how things were working and there were the snails, making their way to my plants. Unfortunately, the copper didn't work completely as planned, as there was one snail already in the broccoli, making do with the leftovers. It's possible it crawled up and dropped inside, so maybe I just need more copper tape around the sides so they can't touch the cage at all. Anyway, I picked it out and decided more drastic measures were needed.
That would be a plastic bucket and some hot, soapy water. Snails drown in soapy water (they survive plain water just fine). I proceeded to pick up every snail I could find and drop them into the bucket. That only meant twenty or so, but I like to think the ones responsible for the pepper massacre were among them. It probably barely made a dent in the local population, but it's a start. Next thing to do it buy some snail bait and sprinkle that around, and hopefully be done with them for the season.
Just when I thought I was well on my way to a healthy, thriving garden, near complete disaster struck. I wandered out this morning to see how the plants were coming along, and to my utter shock, almost all of the pepper plants were gone. Snails had devoured them the previous night or two.
After deciding that maybe I had put the plants out in full sun a bit too early, I moved them to the side of the house, where they'll only get around five hours of sun per day. I figure they'll get plenty of full sun once they're in the ground, but until then I should back off a bit. After all, they're stuck in those little cells and there's only so much growing they can do. Well, I guess I moved them too close to where the snails hide, and when night fell, they feasted on my poor defenseless plants.
About half of the plants survived: most of the Peter Peppers and Fluorescent Purples, some of the yellow wax and jalapeno, and most of the sweet bells. Pretty much everything else is gone, which means all of the interesting stuff I ordered from Pepper Joe's: the amarillo aji, Charleston cayenne, Big Jim, Argentina, plus the serrano and the habanero from that bottle of hot sauce. The snails also destroyed the basil. They left the tomato completely alone, which isn't surprising after I found a web site that says that tomatoes (among other things) repel snails and slugs.
Oh, well. There isn't much I can do about it now. Luckily, there is a gardener's market in San Jose coming up this weekend (Sunday), and I was already planning to go to that. My hope is that they will have some interesting varieties of peppers and I can just buy seedlings there to replace what I've lost. It won't be as satisfying as raising the plants from seed, but as long as I can get something other than the standard jalapeno and serrano, I'll be content.
Tilling day: this morning I went over to the garden supply place that I'm ordering my soil from to place the order and have a look around. It's not much to look at. I think it's primarily a supply for gardeners and people doing serious landscaping. While I was there, they told me about a soil amendment called clod buster that is good for mixing in clay. Since that's what I'm dealing with, I went ahead and bought fifteen bags (cubic foot sized) and dumped that in with the leaves, grass clippings and wood chips. Once I got home, I added a big bag (about three cubic feet) of redwood forest compost that the previous owners left behind.
Then it was time to go get the roto-tiller (although I guess the proper name is "rotary tiller"). It barely fit into the back of our Jeep Grand Cherokee, but they got it in, and, more importantly, Julie and I managed to muscle it out. Tilling took more time than I expected: probably about two and a half hours. Some parts I didn't get as deep as I'd hoped. I'm not sure if that's because there was too much stuff on top of the clay or because the clay was too wet (it does hold water pretty well). Anyway, I made a couple of passes over the whole thing and mixed everything up pretty well. Now it's time to wait until Saturday, when Glen (a friend of mine) is coming over to help me ferry the soil from the driveway to the garden.
That was all in the main, large box where most of the plants will go. There is still some work to be done in the side beds, along the fence. Those are small enough that the roto-tiller never would have worked, plus the previous owner installed some drip irrigation in them and I will need to be careful not to shred those tubes. I may just end up running all new stuff and put it in the main box, too. We'll see how much time I've got once everything is planted. (If you look closely at lower right of that picture, you can see the evil drainage piping I spent many weekends ripping out of the main box. I should take a picture of all of the gravel I shovelled out, too...)
It's been a while since my last update, but not a lot has happened. Last weekend I moved the plants outside for the first time and began the hardening off process. We had some absolutely beautiful weather, even by Bay Area standards, as it was up near 70 degrees Saturday through Wednesday. Today has been a beautiful day, as well. Unfortunately, all that sun so quickly may have sunburned the plants a little. The tomatoes fared better than the peppers (they are rather larger at this point). I'm just hoping everything pulls through. The other mistake I made this year was the size of the seed tray cells. They are just too small to support a plant for eight weeks, especially the tomatoes, which have basically stopped growing at this point. I'm pretty sure they are root bound.
Still no rosemary and only one oregano. Not sure what happened here, but I will probably try these again using direct seeding after the garden is ready to go. Which brings me to...
This weekend is going to be a busy one! I have a rototiller reserved for tomorrow and I'm planning to place my order for almost 200 cubic feet of good quality gardening soil tomorrow morning. While I'm doing that, I'm going to talk to the people at the nursery about mixing in some peat moss to try and loosen the horrible soil that's already in the box. My goal is to mix in last fall's dead leaves, grass clippings and that peat moss, and then dump the new soil on top next weekend.
Next weekend will also be eventful. I'm going to have the soil delivered next Friday, and ferry it back to the garden on Saturday. If there is time Saturday, I may start transplanting, otherwise I'll do that Sunday. I'm toying with the idea of transplanting some things into peat pots this weekend, since I can then just plant the entire peat pot next weekend. I may run out of time, though.
Yesterday I thinned out almost all of the plants to a single seedling per cell. Some of the peppers weren't quite ready for this yet, but all of the tomatoes were. The plants were getting so crowded it looked like they were fighting for sunlight.
What else this week.. not much, really. The seedlings are in a very boring pattern at the moment. Turn the cell trays once a day, water every two or three, and wait for the weather to improve. It's still raining here on a regular basis, but not every day. Yesterday it rained and today it's raining. Next weekend may be a very good time to turn the soil in the garden, if it doesn't rain and I don't head up to Lake Tahoe. :-)
Last week I called around and found a place that will sell me dirt in bulk. They sell a gardening mix for about $32 a cubic yard, and I'll need just shy of four cubic yards. The box in back is roughly 18 feet by 20 feet, and I need to fill it up with about six inches of dirt. I'm sure you can do the math if you're curious...