Rambling: More Onions

Planted, that is. Another ninety-six onions, for a total of...er...240 onions in the ground. And the heap of seedlings waiting to be planted doesn't look appreciably smaller. I need to remember next year that Territorial is crazy generous in the number of onion plants per bundle.  The remainder are likely to end up being trashed.

I should say "being composted" but we didn't include a compost heap in the farm.  (For any new readers, "the farm" is a roughly 70 foot by 70 foot vegetable garden. We're used to much smaller gardens, hence the grand name.) I was going to have a "compost row," a row on which I dump all the clippings and thinnings and weeds, in a thin layer over the whole row. I read about this somewhere.  But then I put fabric over everything.

Well, almost everything. Which was the other accomplishment of the day--covering most of the last major areas waiting to be covered. At least, the areas ready to be covered.The blueberry row is still waiting to be amended with sulfur in a perhaps futile hope of making it sufficiently acid by next year, before I cover it.  (Oh. I guess I could make that the compost row?) The pumpkin row wants to be amended with manure before I plant the pumpkin seeds for this year.  The rectangle where the previous blueberries died needs to be cleared.

Himself is proceeding on the irrigation system--a central PVC spine with twelve outlets for the twelve four-foot-wide rows, each with a manual valve so that we can decide whether that row gets watered or not. This year, three rows will be "wet"--they'll get regular irrigation, though we're still going with wide plant spacing and planning to water infrequently and deeply with drippers. Six will be dryfarmed, though I'm going to cheat and irrigate two honeyberry bushes in the front two blocks of one, if I can get the honeyberry bushes now and can't find reassurance that I can get them in the fall.

The remaining three rows will get their permanent plants in the fall, when the rainy season starts, though two will probably be used for further dryfarming experiments meanwhile. The third is that blueberry row, which will mostly just sit around mellowing, then get blueberry bushes in late winter or early spring. I suppose I could grow some sort of acid-tolerant crop there meanwhile.

Why all this detail? I have no idea. Apparently I just want to garden ramble again.

I currently have six edible crops planted (snap peas, lettuce, kale, currants, strawberries, and onions) and no ornamentals. (In the farm. There are still flowers at the house.) Well, except for some tulips popping up in the future pumpkin row. I sort of wish that I'd put in some sweet peas, but I suspect it's too late now.  I'll have to wait for the zinnias that I'm tentatively going to plant in the flower row. And, oh, hey, I could plant a block of nasturtiums. You can eat those, after all. And I suspect they'll tolerate dryfarming.

I was going to put in roses early this year, but then the year turned freakishly warm, the rains stopped freakishly early, and the moment passed--even if I'm dryfarming roses, they need to go into reasonably moist soil. I would plant them anyway and plan to water for a few weeks, but I heard that the expected water shortage is looking even worse than previously anticipated. So the roses, raspberries, perennial flowers, blueberries, and planned shrubs for the back are all going to wait for fall, settle in in the winter rains, and adjust slowly to limited water next year. The perennial herbs will be planted soon; they'll have to take their chances.

I want to eat something out of the garden, as proof that I'll eat from the garden. There's enough lettuce for a dozen big salads; we could eat some of that tomorrow, along with some little kale leaves and maybe some fava leaves, because i just looked up whether I can eat fava leaves and, yay! websites say I can.

My automatic spellchecker is absolutely positive that I mean to say "lava."

I mentioned at the top of this post that I should remember Territorial's generosity, but in addition, I should remember to grow my own onion seedlings. I find it oddly fascinating to have grown my own lettuce and kale seedlings--for some reason, I've always bought those as plants. I think that I thought it was hard to get lettuce to sprout--maybe because of all that fuss about how the seed needs light.

However, all that eagerly sprouting lettuce was a bit problematic to transplant, and the transplanted lettuce is still at seedling size, presumably due to the need to recover from the shock,  while the originals back in the seedbed are big enough to eat. I suspect that I'm going to want to leave one block of open ground in a 'wet' row to not only seed, but grow out, my lettuce. That means that I'll have to (shudder) weed. Oh, well. Eventually I'll want to grow potatoes and carrots, and I suspect they'll need open ground, too.

I ordered a packet of purple sprouting broccoli seeds. This is a form of broccoli that you plant in warm weather--different sources suggest times varying between May and September--and then leave growing, in fits and starts, all winter. In spring it's supposed to grow enthusiastically and put out a lot of broccoli-esque sprouts, which you cut and eat over a reasonably long harvest period. The winter Territorial catalog had several kinds of sprouting broccoli, but now they're all sold out, which confuses me, because you don't plant them in winter. But so be it; I ordered my purple sprouting broccoli seed elsewhere, and have moderate hope that it will work.

Um.

That seems to be all. I'll let you know how the lava leaves taste.

Rambling: Blah de blah de blah. And onions.

Look! It's me! Writing another post!

About. Something.

Something or other.

A thing.

Um.

Oh! Hey! The onions came! Copra onion seedlings. From Territorial. Five bunches, at "4-6 dozen" plants per bunch. So, 240 to 360 plants. That's a little alarming.

Let's continue the math. Territorial's recommended spacing is four inches apart. If we're assuming that's in both directions, that would be sixteen square inches of ground per onion. I plan to, instead, plant four plants per hole (you can plant multiple seedlings per hole with onions, which is handy for minimizing holes in the weed barrier) in holes eighteen inches apart in each direction.

That would give me eighty-one square inches per onion, or five times the recommended spacing. That seems good for the dry farming thing. Except Gardening Without Irrigation says that summer-grown onions need "abundant irrigation." Hmm. Dang. Now, one or two websites suggest that you can dryfarm onions--one suggests a six to eight inch spacing, and I'm providing more space than that. And another website says that Copra is more drought-tolerant than other varieties. So we'll see. Would cutting to three plants per hole (108 square inches per onion) improve my odds?

I have enough onions to experiment with both dry farming and irrigation. At twelve holes per six-foot planting block, four onions per hole, 240 to 360 plants is five to seven blocks. I could irrigate roughly half and dryfarm the other roughly-half.

I wanted to grow my own onion seedlings this year, but revamping the farm took too much of my lazy-gardener gardening time. Maybe next year.

Um.

That is all.

Rambling: Day two! Look at that!

Look! I'm back!

Though not so much with something to say. I just wanted to post two days in a row to prove that I could.

Have you seen I, Zombie? I recently saw the pilot. I'm vaguely embarrassed at how much I like it. Though well-written silliness with extra snark tends to be the kind of thing that I do like. People are comparing it to both Buffy and Veronica Mars, so how could I not like it?

Um.

See, I have to finish this post by midnight to post two days in a row. And my brain just stopped.

The lettuce at the farm is doing well. Y'know, just to offer an update. I planted three kinds of lettuce, and Red Russian kale, under a roughly five foot by five foot swath of that frost-protection row cover, way back in December. I passed the point where I planned to transplant the itty bitty seedlings; they're pretty big seedlings now. I could probably start eating them.

The peas that I planted a little while ago are partly up. Eight out of twelve plants. I'm a little concerned that I may have failed to plant three of them, since three of the failures are all in a row.

I should plant more. Unless it's too late. I tend to forget to plant things until it's too late.

We're planning the irrigation for the farm, going back and forth, back and forth, between PVC and cheap plastic tubing. The plan is to dry farm most of it most of the time, but we want to have the irrigation infrastructure in place anyway.

Again the um.

That appears to be all.

Rambling: Blah de blah

Um.

We went to a theater event, as we tend to, and talked to various members of the theater staff, and as usual after such events I had a sustained spasm of creative jealousy. Creative jealousy tends to make me stop, rather than ramp up, my creative efforts. I'm trying to keep it from doing that.

Said creative efforts remain unfocused. 

In the garden realm, I've received my Blacktail Mountain watermelon, my Armenian cucumber, and my Bountful bush bean, seeds. I was pleased to read that watermelons are a desert plant and are suitable for dryfarming. Who knew? Other websites are encouraging about cucumbers as well. 

I don't know if snap beans are a good choice for dry farming or not. When I check Gardening Without Irrigation by Steve Solomon, he's distinctly unenthusiastic about bush beans, saying that they have "puny roots'. He recommends pole beans instead. But building supports is one of the things that I am not doing this year. So no pole beans.

We're growing Blue Lake bush beans, even if we have to irrigate them.  But it might also be good to grow several other kinds of bush beans, as a test, in either the "freak vegetables" or "more vegetables" rows, and just watch to see if they live or die. If they all fail the same way, that tells me something. If they have varying responses, that tells me something else.  I could grow, oh, five blocks, two kinds per block, nine (wait, no, six) plants of each kind. Ten kinds of beans. That should produce some decent preliminary results.

Of course, there are other experiments I'd like to run. I want to taste some dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes, to see if they're as glorious as rumored. Yes, Early Girl--it's supposed to be one of the best, or perhaps the best, tomato for dry farming, despite the fact that I don't like its corporate parents. Joe Schirmer from Dirty Girl Produce is supposed to be working on an open-pollinated version, which would free it from that parentage. But Googling tells me that seeds aren't available yet, only a very small number of starts if you're in the right place at the right time.

I keep debating growing Sun Gold tomatoes, too, despite the fact that the two or three times we grew them, we didn't eat them, because we're too darn lazy to pick all those itty bitty things. I must restrain myself.

Another candidate for space in the Freak/Other Vegetable rows is zucchini, probably Costata Romanesco.  I have no use for the squash themselves; I want to eat the blossoms. But maybe friends would want the squash. Or the ducks. Not our ducks. Friends' ducks.

Quack.

Yes, I am sober. I'm just writing in a slightly more free-associationish way than usual.

In sewing, I'm working on my Liberty Shirt pattern. I already did a narrow shoulder adjustment and shortened the sleeves to be three-quarter length instead of too-long length. I'm planning to do a forward shoulder adjustment and lengthen the body. And after that, I may make an alternative sleeve with an inverted pleat, just as an experiment, to see if it gives me more arm movement or looks good or both. Starting at the sleeve cap and gathered in again at the "cuff". The shoulder would be much like the sleeve on the dress on this page, but the sleeve would be three-quarter length.

Writing? I had an idea, one that I'm chewing over. But otherwise, this blog is the extent of the writing.

That is all.

Rambling: Focus, the lack thereof, and a lot of landscape fabric

I garden, sew, and write. And cook some. And eat a lot of chicken. I don't have much focus.

Writing is the one area where I'm at least under the illusion that I might have enough talent to go beyond pure hobby. Might. Maybe. Not inconceivable.

But not if I don't work on it. On the writing forum where I hang out, I occasionally discuss the idea that you need to write a million words before you know if you can write. That maps nicely to someone's (I can't find the link) statement that you need to write ten novels before you can write a decent one. Ten novels, a hundred thousand words apiece, there you go. And then there's Malcolm Gladwell's idea of spending ten thousand hours to acquire a skill. A million words divided by ten thousand hours is a hundred words an hour. That's really pretty paltry, but maybe if you include the editing time...

Anyway. I ought to write more. So naturally I spent most of my spare time this weekend farming.

Well, gardening. You remember the farm? It's the roughly seventy by seventy foot vegetable garden that we've been battling with for the past few years. This year, I have accepted (I think) the reality that a garden that cannot be managed on erratic and small chunks of time is a garden that will fail. Fail if I'm the gardener that is. So we planned the garden, this year, accordingly.

We got and installed a gazillion square feet of high quality (I hope) weed barrier, covering the whole thing. We're using it un-mulched, entirely violating the warranty, with the sun beating down, eagerly trying to make it dissolve. I've used this weed barrier before, so I'm hoping it doesn't dissolve it too soon.

The weed barrier is covering a dozen rows, four feet wide, sixty feet long, with two foot paths in between. Each row will be ten six foot long blocks. Plants will be spaced at eighteen inches (twelve per block), or three feet (two per block) or six feet (one per block). I'm treating the path as part of the spacing. That's kind of wide spacing. That's because I want to dry farm (which requires wide spacing) and because I want to limit the number of holes I punch through that nice weed barrier.

Twelve rows, ten blocks per row. The plan for those twelve rows, at least as of at this moment, is:

1. Pumpkins. Ten plants, one per block.
2. Roses. Same thing. Yes, I will be trying to dryfarm roses. The roses are probably not pleased.
3. Flowers, at varying spacing. Maybe one dinnerplate dahlia in a block, versus twelve zinnias, versus two Oriental poppies. Actually, probably no dahlias; they need lots of water, right?
4. Shrubby herbs, at varying spacing. One rosemary in a block; twelve thyme in a block. And so on.
5. Blueberries. One per block. I'm still working out how to amend the soil to make it acid enough to keep them from dying the way they did last time.
6. Perennial and freak vegetables. (Artichokes. Chives. Rattail radishes. Like that.) Varying spacing again. 
7. Strawberries. Twelve per block, ten blocks. We like strawberries.
8. Shrub berries--currants, raspberries, that kind of thing.
9. Copra onions. I'm not sure of my spacing, but right now I'm thinking three onion seedlings in each of twelve holes per block. This will be interrupted with about fifteen feet of preexisting weed-infested strawberries. 
10. Bush beans. Twelve plants per block. 
11. More vegetables. I'm not sure what kind. One tomato plant per block, that kind of thing. Possibly more onions, because I just realized that I ordered too many onion plants.
12. Melons (Blacktail Mountain?) and cucumbers (Armenian). One plant per block.

I'm trying to maintain a nice calm task. by. task. pace in developing the farm. And trying to suppress my desire to do crazy things that I won't maintain. And trying to get the ground ready well ahead of the time that I'm ready to plant.

For example, I want to get the pumpkin row manured (with the bags of manure that have been lying around for two years waiting for me to do something with them) and fabric covered and marked off and ready to insert the seeds before the first of April, because the seeds don't need to go in before May. Or maybe June. And the melon and cucumber row is already fabric covered and could be marked off any time I have ten minutes to do it. And also doesn't need to be planted until May or June. And the strawberry row is covered and marked and ready for me to transplant strawberries.

Right now, the living things in the garden are the weed-infested strawberries, several healthy currant bushes, several near-dead blueberry bushes, one block of twelve fava beans that have sprouted nicely, one block of twelve Sugar Daddy snap peas that I just poked into the ground, and a little scrap of dirt with lettuce seedlings waiting to be transplanted.  I want to add new plants slowly. Calmly. I want this year to be a nice low-key success.

We'll see.

Gardening: Dryfarming Tomatoes

This is supposed to be a bad water year. The reservoirs are at...er...sixty percent? Sixty percent of normal for this time of year? Somewhere low. The snowpack is lousy. It's gonna be dry. So this seems like the perfect year to try dryfarming techniques--dryfarming being the growing of crops without any added water.

So I'm going to plant a few tomatoes tomorrow according to the following plan:

• I'll space them at least four feet apart. Each tomato will "own" the entire width of its four-foot-wide wide row, and will be at least four feet from the next tomato down the row. The paths between those four-foot rows are two feet wide, so that means that they'll technically be six feet apart in that direction, though path footage doesn't quite count.
• I'll put them in rows that march toward increasing afternoon shade--at least, I will if I get around to tilling a little more land; the shadier area probably won't get planted until next weekend. This isn't necessarily a dryfarming practice, but it'll be interesting to see how the plants fare with more shade versus less.
• I'll plant them deep, with foliage along much of the stem snipped off and the stem buried up to the last big tuft of foliage at the top. When I Google dryfarming tomatoes, this is recommended, I assume so that you can get those deep roots started from the very beginning. (And maybe having minimal foliage during transplant-shock time is also good?)
• I'll plant them into weed barrier/landscape fabric. The soil has already been amended with some manure and fertilizer and tilled. I don't know if tilling is good for dryfarming, but it's done.

An aside: The landscape fabric is not actually a dryfarming practice--I think. Dryfarming recommendations are that you prevent absolutely all competing plants--no weeds, no cover crop, no nothing. But the usual method of doing this is to grow in bare frequently-hoed dirt, and in fact a few inches of "dust mulch" to break the capillary barrier between the deeper soil and the surface, so that water doesn't wick up and evaporate into the air.

I was a little concerned that landscape fabric would keep that whole capillary thing going. However, there are studies that dispute the dust mulch theory, and nobody seems to dispute the idea that weeds will steal water from the crop. And I know my slack weeding habits. So weed barrier it is. We'll see how that works out.

• I'll stake... OK, I'm not sure what my plan should be here. I don't have to decide before tomorrow; tomorrow I'll just pound a tall stake in the ground near each plant. But does dryfarming care whether you do the one-stem thing, pruning off extra branches? Or does it prefer a bushy plant? Or does it prefer that they just flop on the ground? More research is called for.
• I'll water deeeeeeeep the day that I plant. That seems vaguely counter to the dryfarming thing, but nobody seems to be suggesting that you don't water when planting, and I don't want a shallow layer of damp soil encouraging shallow roots, and I'd guess that the longer that dose of water lasts, the better for the plant trying to recover from transplant shock. Now, in theory I should discover that there's retained winter water a few inches down, so I shouldn't have to add that much water. We'll see. I'm also thinking maybe I want to water at each plant's spot, maybe with a bubbler running low for a good long time, rather than watering deep and wide and covering each tomato's whole four-by-four space.
• After planting, I'll have to restrain the urge to keep dosing the seedlings with water. If they do look on the verge of death and I decide that I must water, I'm thinking that I want to water deeeeeeeep again, after as long a wait as possible, to keep them from getting addicted to regular fixes of water.
• According to my reading, I should have started with early tomatoes, like Early Girl. I didn't. Oh, well.
• I'm hoping for at least one more good rain, while the tomatoes are settling in.

One thing that will reduce the validity of this as an experiment is that the tomatoes will start just a few feet from where the strawberries end, and the strawberries are going to be given a decent amount of water, some of which will no doubt drift toward the tomatoes. For tomato survival, it's probably good that the tomatoes with more sun will be closest to this stolen water, and the ones with more shade will be further. For scientific purposes, there are too many tangled factors to make this a decent experiment.

That is all. Please wish my tomatoes luck. They're eyeing me suspiciously from their pots on the deck.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Farm Diary: Weeds and strawberries and cauliflower

I'm a lousy garden recordkeeper. And I wish that I were a better garden writer, which is something that will probably happen through more garden writing. And sometimes my mind is too full of gardening to blog about perfume or chicken. In theory, logging my garden activities in this blog could help with all of that. In practice, odds are good that I'll write this one diary post and never write another. But, hey, what's the harm?

The Rambling:

So. As previously discussed, we have a large-to-us vegetable garden that we refer to as The Farm. It's all tilled in wide rows, roughly four feet wide, with two-foot paths in between. Counting left to right from the south fence, there are six rows about sixty feet long, then five about eighty feet long, for Row One through Row Eleven in the discussion below. That's (mathmathmath) just over three thousand square feet of garden space, most of it with several hours a day of full sun.

Our previous garden garden was twelve by twenty-five feet. One-tenth as big. I didn't keep up with the weeds there, either.

I learned this year that in some ways, it's easier to control weeds in a large space than a small space. If I want to grow a variety of crops in a small space, I have to amend and improve the soil like mad and use pretty tight spacing, and that means that I'm committed to hands-and-knees weeding; I can't use a stand-up tool with enough precision to get between closely-spaced plants without beheading half of them. With a wider plant spacing, I just have to slice off weeds next to one plant, not between two, and I seem to be able to do that. I kept about 500 square feet of corn and assorted vegetables pretty nicely weeded for most of the summer, with two sizes of hula hoe, a small trapezoidal hoe, and a miraculous little weed-slicing hand tool. Most of the work was done with the small hula hoe and the miracle tool.

The wider spacing that makes weeding easier doesn't reduce the crop much, possibly not at all. Tomatoes planted eighteen inches apart need a lot of pruning and training and arguing. Tomatoes planted twice as far apart, and therefore one-quarter as many plants in a wide row system, will grow bigger and produce more fruit per plant, and don't need as much wrestling. But there are, again, one-quarter as many plants, and in a tiny garden there might be room for only one plant at that spacing. If it dies, no tomatoes; if it thrives, lots of only one kind of tomato. So the narrow spacing in a small garden is about variety and insurance, not necessarily about higher productivity.

So. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Weed control. Wider spacing makes it easier to control weeds with a hoe. But not enough easier. The 500 square feet that I kept weeded this year isn't enough. This winter and next year I'll be working with other methods of weed control. Herbicides will never be on the table (we'll just go back to grass before we do that), but landscape paper and plastic and fabric and perennial ground-crowding plants are. Wider spacing should work better for those strategies, too.

The Log:

The Big Till: Most of our tilling is done with the Little Tiller belonging to Gardener Neighbors. But there's some lawn next to The Farm. We want a little lawn to plop a chair on, but we'd like it to be small enough to mow with a hand-push rotary mower. Little Tiller will choke and die on all that grass. So sometime this winter or this coming spring, parts of the lawn adjacent to The Farn will be professionally tilled and covered in plastic for a year, eventually making each of the shorter rows a bit longer.

Since this means that a tiller that laughs at long grass will be at the farm, we're keeping an eye out for other spaces to till - such as all of Row Two, known this year as The Haystack Row, since all we did with it this year was fling clippings from other places on it. Well, and eat cherry tomatoes from the volunteer plants all over it.

New strawberry rows: So, about this time last year we (OK, not we; Gardener Artist did the work. I miss Gardener Artist in the garden, but I'm never really going to garden if I have someone to rescue me, am I?) cleared two rows that had grown cucumbers and onions and other miscellany and covered them back to the back fence shade line (maybe fifteen feet from the back fence) with black plastic, based on advice that black plastic for a year will help to knock back Bermuda grass. (This was Rows Three and Four, counting from the south fence.)

These two rows are destined to be the new strawberry bed. Last week I removed and rolled up the plastic, raked off the remaining dead stems, tidied up a little, and me and Gardening Buddy tilled them to a tiller depth, to about twenty feet from the fence. I was a bit surprised that it was possible to till; I thought they'd have been baked to one giant brick and would need hours of watering to be tillable But, no, there was a good little bit of moisture in the soil. I don't know if this was ground water preserved by the plastic and lack of plants, or if it wicked over from the irrigated bed next door.

We covered the rows with bird netting to keep them from becoming the world's biggest litter box, gave them about forty-five minutes of sprinkler because the soil was still a little dry and we were going to re-till amendments later, and ran away.

Yesterday I bought six bags of manure and two three-pounds boxes of soft rock phosphate, dropped them off, and watered the space again. I intended to do the math and figure how much of Row Three that stuff would take care of, and spread and till it plus a dose of organic fertilizer today. Instead, I got a tickle in my chest last night and I can't afford to catch a cold before the coming workweek, so I'm typing about gardening instead of gardening.

I suspect that the math will tell me that those six bags will amend a tiny laughable fraction of the bed, and we'll talk to somebody about delivering a partial truck of some sort of soil amendment. Although the previous strawberries went into, I think, totally un-amended soil and did really well, so...hm.

We'll read reviews of landscape fabric and spring for the good stuff for this bed, because we plan to plant it for a three-year run.  We may learn that the fertility is played out in the second year, but if we don't, I'd hate to have the fabric fall apart prematurely.

Once we're amended and tilled and fabriced, Himself will run dripper line down so that there's one dripper per square foot in both directions, and we'll start moving strawberries in at that twelve-inch spacing from the current weed-infested strawberry bed, all winter. If our gamble goes bad and the strawberry plants freeze and die as a result of the disruption, there are probably enough berries in the overgrown previous bed to plant the new bed three times over, so we'll just curse, wait for early spring, and do it again.

Corn row clearing: Last year, we grew corn on about fifteen linear feet (sixty square feet) of each of Row Seven through Row Ten. In bits of time last Sunday and this Saturday, we cleared the corn part of Row Eight. Even though I largely abandoned weed control in late August or early September when the corn got as tall as my shoulder, the space was pretty easy to clear--the weed cover was fairly young and easy to yank, and clearing the roughly sixty square feet took about a gardener-hour and a half. (Half an hour for two of us last week, half an hour for me this week.)

It's ready for tilling, if I'm going to plant any delicate primadonna plants, or, more likely, just planting. The other three former-corn-beds should be cleared in a couple of weeks, giving me four beds for planting anything but corn, since we did corn last year. Each is big enough to reasonably divide in half. 

This all makes me, the geek, think that I need a terminology for the rows. See, we planted the corn in the second quarter of the eighty-foot Row Seven, which could be called Bed 7b. (Where we also have a 7a, 7c, and 7d.) And if I'm going to plant half of that, then that's Bed 7.b.a. Heh.

So my tentative plan winter-spring plan for these spaces is:

• 7.b.a will be prepped for an early spring planting of potatoes and covered in landscape paper. By early spring the paper will probably be rotting through; I'll put down another layer and plant the potatoes through it.
• 7.b.b will be planted in garlic as soon as possible, through landscape paper or the cheap landscape fabric that we already bought.
• 8.b is not yet planned; I might just prep it for warm-weather crops and cover it. Or I might spread alfalfa (we have a few bales), plant favas, and plan on tilling them all in in spring.
• 9.b will be planted in overwintering cauliflower as soon as possible, through that same cheap landscape fabric, and covered in floating row cover against cabbage worms.
• 10.b iwill be prepped for an early spring planting of shelling peas (in half) and snap peas (in the other half) and covered in landscape paper.

New blueberry row: It's not just the strawberries that are infested with weeds; so are the blueberries. The blueberries also aren't properly planted in acid soil. So most of the row by the south fence (1.abc in my terminology; the first three-quarters of row 1) is destined to be tilled in The Big Till, amended with plenty of acid peat and re-tilled with the Little Tiller, covered with the best landscape fabric we can get, festooned with drippers, and planted with the existing blueberries at a pretty wide spacing. In the spring, we'll get enough blueberries to fill the whole row back to the back fence shade line.

Shade line raspberries: Speaking of the back fence shade line, we're planning to put raspberries back there, behind rows 1 through 4. (1.d, 2.d, 3.d, and 4.d).  This area isn't flat-out shaded, it just has too little sun for your average garden vegetable--though more sun than many areas where I have grown some garden vegetables. We have raspberries in the back yard at the house that are producing halfheartedly in less sun, so I expect that we'll have a decent crop back there, with little labor. I'm not sure if we'll plant them at a controlled spacing in landscape fabric, or plant them through landscape paper on the assumption that by the time the paper has rotted away, the raspberries will be their aggressive ground-shading space-filling selves and will be shading out most weeds.

Plant purchases: Oh, and yesterday I bought three Japanese anemones from The Grange - two Honorine Jobert and one...er... that pink single-flowered one. In one gallon pots. I'm hoping that if I log all my plant purchases, then later I might actually remember what's growing.

Whew! That's just a fraction of the plans. The perennial herbs also need to come in from the back shade line and go somewhere sunny. And I want to fix up Row Eleven, the gravelly row by the fence next to the parking lot next door, where I hesitate to plant edibles but could plant cutting flowers. Whee!

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Dryfarming

We used a lot of water at The Farm this year. In the excitement of the new garden, we weren't willing to take the slightest chance of any plant being thirsty. While the bills weren't bankruptcy, they certainly took the edge off any claim to have saved on food costs. (Then again, how much is a dead ripe red-to-the-middle strawberry worth? Mmmmm.)

So we'll be making some changes next year. The strawberries and at least some of the bush beans will still get all the water they want, but the tomatoes and peppers and squash and sunflowers and any number of other things will have to do a certain amount of doing without. I'll grow the cucumbers that didn't get bitter this year during hot spells, in the hope that they'll be equally amiable about low water. The corn will have more lavish soil but less water. The herbs and perennial flowers will get a chance to show how nicely established they are. And we're thinking about experimenting with dryfarming. (Drygardening?)

What's dryfarming, you may ask? It's growing without irrigation, using the water that's naturally stored in the soil. Luckily, I'm gardening in Oregon, where the soil is saturated every winter, so there's a moisture bank to draw on. But all the same, dryfarming involves a lot of changes.

The most obvious change, as far as I can tell, is plant spacing - it's drastically expanded for dryfarming. Corn is normally spaced somewhere between six and eighteen inches apart, depending on the variety and situation. Steve Solomon's _Gardening Without Irrigation_ recommends a dryfarming spacing for corn of three feet, and that's for a climate that might be a bit cooler than mine. He also mentions Arizona gardeners that have grown un-irrigated corn at at ten foot spacing. One cornstalk in a space the size of a small bathroom. Yikes.

Steve Solomon has (or had) sixteen acres; space isn't a big issue for him. We have a fraction of an acre, but all the same, I'm planning a little experimenting. A couple of dryfarmed tomatoes at a five or six foot spacing. A few corn plants at a three-foot spacing, or maybe I'll go with two feet and water them a bit. A few un- or lightly- irrigated pole beans. I'll dryfarm at least one patch of garlic -- some sources say that since garlic gets a good deal of its growth in the wet spring, this should be easy. Some sources fervantly disagree. We'll see.

Of course, all that wide spacing does you no good if you allow weeds between the plants to suck up all the water. So dryfarming will require essentially perfect weed control. And, to my surprise and dismay, apparently a nice weed-suppressing mulch actually increases water loss in a dryfarm situation. The explanation for this oddity is that mulch keeps the top layer of soil damp, allowing water to travel by capillary action from the deeper moisture reserves all the way to the top of the soil, where it evaporates away. Without mulch, the top of the soil turns bone dry and and doesn't allow that surface evaporation. If you break it up to further destroy capillary action, you've created a "dust mulch", a phrase that still fascinates me.

So. Dryfarming. I'll let you know how it goes.

Image: By Li-Sung. Wikimedia Commons