my parents garden

On Father's Day, I visited my parents and helped a bit in their garden. My dad hoed the tomatoes and planted beans, I pulled some garlic and labeled plants I gave them earlier in the spring. I also planted nasturtiums and giant sunflower seeds here and there. They have been picking lettuce, spinach, and arugula all spring. They have nice fennel, peas, red cabbage, napa cabbage, beets, and celery coming along. Also tomatoes, peppers, basil, and cucumbers. Arugula and bok choy have gone to seed, with flowers adding color and attracting beneficial insects.




My dad planted a couple of my giant pumpkin plants in the middle of his front yard. They will cover a newly installed meter and have LOTS of room to sprawl over the grass. This variety is reputed to produce several 100 pound pumpkins per plant. Cool!

mom and dad's vegetable garden

On Saturday, I helped my parent's with their garden. Mom is still recuperating, but doing GREAT. She was the supervisor with her captain's chair. Dad and I got the garden all set for fall.

We removed all the old plants: tomatoes, squashes, and cucumbers. Picked green tomatoes. Pulled a few onions that had been hidden.

We left the big curly kale plants, a bunch of 4 foot tall bell pepper plants, a nice patch of basil, rows of bright yellow marigolds, a 3 foot sage plant, a big tomatillo plant, a row of rainbow chard, and a row of red beets.

There were a lot of garlic sprouts coming up from heads that didn't get harvested. I dug all these and moved them to the other end of the garden. So many it made a triple row!

As we worked the air was quite chilly - maybe 50*F and Skippy had stolen my sweater again. We marveled at an enormous V-formation of geese that flew overhead. Must have been more than a hundred, all honking to each other and heading due south.

I moved a row of lettuce and beets that were in the area we wanted to rake and seed with cover crop. I put them in with the garlic row. The greens will be harvested within a month so they won't bother the garlic. I also added a few new spinach and escarole Frisee seedlings. Then I covered this row with hoops and row cover. I'm curious to see how it will fare as the cold weather comes. The row cover lets light and air in, retains humidity and warmth, and protects from wind. It will stay on for a couple months, or maybe all winter.

We seeded about half the garden with a mix of clover and winter rye.

There was a frost warning for their area, so our last job, as the sun set, was to spread sheets on the peppers, basil and flowers. These sheets will come off tomorrow morning.

a sad story about potatoes

Yesterday I visited my parents and we dug potatoes from their garden. We were looking forward this. But we didn't have very good luck :(

Dad dug, I sifted through the soil and grabbed the potatoes, and Mom washed them. But there were hardly any. And the ones we did find were half eaten! Another critter! Its too bad. They had little tiny tooth marks and very large portions of the potatoes were missing.

I thought the critter was maybe a mole. My sister suggested a pocket gopher might be more likely to eat potatoes. She says moles are more likely to eat worms and other insects. What the heck is a pocket gopher? Are there gophers in Massachusetts? And why didn't we have at least a hint there was an animal down there eating or potatoes?

Rodents eating vegetables seems to be a garden theme for me this year....

mom and dad's vegetable garden

Can you believe the size of these vegetables! Twice the size of mine.

mom and dad's vegetable garden

Last weekend I brought all sorts of seedlings up to my parents for their garden. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, pumpkins, winter squash, summer squash ... We had a wonderful time planting together. The seedlings we already planted are doing well too.

double digging

Before we planted my Mom and Dad's garden last Sunday, we double dug it. My dad gave us instructions. (I had already spread a good 4 inches of new compost on the garden.)

First we dug a 12 inch trench and moved all the dirt to the far end of the garden. (We I say "we dug" here, I will mostly mean "my husband dug".) Then we turned the adjacent soil into the trench to progressively move the trench down the garden. The result is a bed loosened and amended 12 inches with minimally disturbed "structure", which means happy worms and other soil inhabitants.

The bottom layer was dense and very hard to dig. I hope this year's vegetables will benefit from this nice preparation. It took about 2 hours for the 3 of us. A good team project.

planting Mom and Dad's garden

After double digging the new compost into Mom and Dads' garden, we planted:

One row of marigolds, Lemon Boy, Petit mix and Fireball
3 Early seedlings tomatoes with Wall-O-Water on green mulch film
One row cabbages: Radicchio, Savoy, Wong Bok and Super Red
One row salad greens: Elegance mix, Black seeded Simpson and Red Romaine
One double row of onions: Ruby Ring, Frontier, Sweet Yellow Spanish and Ailsa Craig
Two long rows of potatoes: Butte, All Blue and Cobbler

preparing Mom and Dad's garden

Yesterday I went up to my parents house and enjoyed a day in the dirt. I had ordered a truckload of compost to be delivered. I was expecting a morning delivery, but as my luck had it, it was a 5:30 pm delivery. So I had time to do a lot of raking and prep work, but had to scramble to get the dirt spread and turned before dark.

My parent's garden plot is about 15 by 50 feet, by my guess. It is against the woods with a westerly exposure, so it gets lots of midday and afternoon sun. As the trees to the east grow, my parents have been gradually inching the garden out into the yard to get more sun.

The plot has a few things growing in it now. Perennial rhubarb, and herbs oregano and sage. Also three nice rows of garlic.

I had meant to order enough compost for a 2-3 inch layer, but looks like I was off by a factor of 2. It was pretty intimidating after the truck left to be standing there by an enormous pile - just me and my shovel and the setting sun. I surprised myself and did get it spread. Then I limed (10 lbs) and added a little organic fertilizer (Garden Tone, 5 lbs). And I was able to turn about half of the plot before Skippy insisted it was time to go home.

I ended up with 4-6 inches of compost. This is almost too much, but from what I've read, it should be OK. I will try to go back and double dig the whole plot down to 12 inches. (My Dad may get a friend in with a big rototiller before I get back to it, but I just hate to think what that does to all the worms he has.)

The compost is dark and even and looks great. No mixed in trash, no sticks or rocks. Just very nice and good smelling stuff. I hope it will produce a bumper crop!

Note added: Here's the link for the compost that I added: Agresource Compost. Looks like its already pH adjusted - so I didn't need to add lime. I'm also noticing that the weeds prior to prep seem to be "sweet" soil weeds: dandelions and chickweed. Well, at least tomatoes like the soil sweet, as do peppers and zucchini. The carrots and beets may not appreciate it. We'll see.