Peas and Onions and Compost Oh My!

This past weekend I spent a few hours planting peas and onions in the garden. I also spent some more time preparing the soil for the new plantings.

My compost pile from last season is only about half finished. I did not spend the time or effort needed to properly turn the pile through the season. As a result, the bottom of the pile was well seasoned, the top portion, however, was not. So I dug out the portion that was ready and worked it into the beds that I have dug up to date.

The soil in the community garden is pretty well shot, to put it mildly. There is little to no organic material left in the soil after years of abuse. Needless to say, it is very easy to see the difference between the areas where I had added some store bought compost last year and everywhere else. I am aiming to do a better job with my compost pile this year so there will be a greater quantity ready for next year.

While cultivating last year's onion/carrot/broccoli patch a couple weeks ago, I noticed a few volunteer onions had come up. When my onions died off early last year I pulled them in a bit of a huff and apparently missed a few.

Since I am rotating as many of the crops as I can, the volunteers had to move. They, along with the left over bulbs from last year, have been moved to their new home just a few feet away. I just have to hope now that the sun we got over the last couple days didn't cook the new transplants.

I planted the peas just like the package said, 2 rows 6" apart. This worked quite well for my beans last year (although the beans were closer to 12" apart) and in fact I am digging up a special area to allow a full 25' long two row planting (for the beans, the peas are in the bean patch, but will hopefully be done in time to replant with beans for a late harvest).

Although in general I do not believe in row planting, it works for beans and peas because it makes picking them much easier. I had a small section last year of 3 rows for beans, and it just didn't work. Finding the beans while picking was too hard and I missed quite a few.

So now we wait and see. We're in for a good amount of rain this week, followed by some hot days. Hopefully this will give the onions and peas a good start.

Perennials From Seed

For some reason I've never thought about starting perennials from seed. To me, perennials always seemed be something you got from a friend after their plant got too big. Unfortunately I don't know anyone currently with overgrown perennial beds.

The small area behind our deck used to be our mini-vegetable plot. Now that we are part of our community garden, we no longer need this area. In fact, last year the weeds choked out the few extra pepper and tomato plants I had stuck in the ground.

I've decided it is time to do something different.

To that end I have started a bunch of seeds to turn the small stretch of dirt into a perennial bed. I am definitely not a landscape designer, so my choices may be somewhat suspect, but here they are: Foxglove, to provide a tall backdrop; Black-Eyed Susans, Purple Coneflowers and Shasta Daisies; to form a relational middle ground and Forget-Me-Nots for the foreground.

It works in my mind, we will see how well it works when I go to transplant them.

Tilling the Garden

This year I have decided not to have the garden plot harrowed. My thinking is to maintain the same planting areas as last year. This will conserve the soil improvements made last year as well as the garden layout. There are some drawbacks to this plan, but overall I hope it will save some time and effort. This is especially important given the slope of our plot.

Today I put in an hour and a half worth of hoeing. That equates to around a third of the job done. It would probably go a lot quicker and easier if I was in better shape! :(

When I setup the garden layout last year I pulled some soil out of the growing areas to create raised paths through the garden. This created a defined set of walking areas that shed rain into the growing areas and not the other way around. During the course of the year the definition between path and growing area declined due to erosion and foot traffic. Part of the hoeing process is to re-define the edge between path and growing area.

Being New England, the winter has grown a good crop of rocks. I pulled out a 5 gallon bucket full of rocks today. And that was without being very meticulous about picking them up. Although it would be easy to leave the rocks there, I do believe that by pulling them out, slowly the growing areas will become less and less rocky. Each year this should make the hoeing a little bit easier.

Finally, Some Peppers are Up!

It took 2 plantings and 5 weeks, but I finally have some pepper plants starting to come up. Just barely though as they aren't much more than poking up through the dirt. I don't remember having this much trouble getting them to sprout last year. Keeping them alive, yes, sprouting, no.

I only have 3 or 4 out of 2 dozen up. The rest should come along shortly, at least I hope so. Timing wise I should still be ok for a late May planting. If the spring stays as cold as it has been the last week or so, they'll WANT to be delayed to let the soil warm up.

Looking forward to getting some flowers started this weekend!

My Grow Light Setup

Starting seeds indoors requires some form of artificial light. The easiest and cheapest way to accomplish this is through the use of 40 watt flourescent 'worklight' style lamps. These can be found quite cheaply ($10-15 for a 2 tube light) at your local big box home improvement stores. In my case, while renovating our condo's bathrooms, I salvaged the old worklight style lighting fixtures and rewired them to have normal wall plugs.

It is difficult to see in the pictures, but I have two light fixtures connected with pieces of scrap wood. The wood pieces have one eye bolt each with an 'S' shaped piece of coat hanger wire to allow easy adjustment on the chain.

For chain, I am using a purpose bought dog chain. For $4 for a 15 or 20' length, it was far cheaper than any hardware store chain would have been. The chain makes it easy to change the height of the lights as the plants grow.

The picture looks clutter because I have added reflection panels to maximize the amount of light available to the seedlings. The panels are nothing more than cardboard cut to size and wrapped in aluminum foil. The aluminum foil bounces the light around the enclosed area increasing the light density. Without the reflective panels the light would spill out into the room and not be available to the plants.

An additional benefit of the panels is they help keep the plants warmer than the surrounding basement. Although flourescent lights are fairly efficient, they do produce some heat, in my case the ballast that drives the flourescent tubes also produces a good amount of heat. Although I haven't measured it, this heat definitely keeps the plants warmer than without. In fact, after the 14 hour on-time, you can feel that the basement is warmer than it started.

Some people use heating pads to warm their seedlings. I am counting on the lights to provide enough heat. I found out the hard way that this is not good enough for germinating peppers. It seems to be enough for everything else, however.