The onion family

We found some shallots at the Hadley Garden Center this weekend.

After digging two rows four inches apart we laid them all out about 4" from each other. One flat of shallots gave us a lot of plants.

They looked pretty happy to be in the ground.

In my "Crockett's Victory Garden" book, I was reading about growing garlic. He had this to say:

"In most parts of the country garlic does best when it's planted in late fall for harvest the following summer. But in [Victory Garden's] first year we planted it in May and it did quite well ... Planting is simple. I bought my bulbs in a food market, separated each bulb into single cloves, and planted the cloves 4 or 5 inches apart, pushing them into the soil until the pointed tops were just barely covered. By fall each clove produced a large bulb with no more help from me except to keep weeds under contol."

So ... we bought some garlic at the supermarket and decided to give it a shot.

That makes the list of our onion family participants in the garden this year look like this: Walla Walla Onions, shallots, chives (re-sprouted from last year's garden), and garlic. Vampire's beware.

While wandering around the garden we noticed a bunch of little sprigs that looked like grass. Rubbing some between the fingers released the wonderful smell of dill, apparently self-sown from last year's batch.

Along the garden these lilies were growing. We decided to dig them up and move them to this patch of dead grass. Along the center, where the soil is packed down we placed some snapdragon seeds.

The forsythia are in full-bloom along the edge of the property.

We cleared last year's dead growth from the peonies, revealing all these nice new shoots.

On the banking leading down to the garden we spotted these fiddle-head ferns.

And here is the one lonely daffodil that's shown it's face.

Won't be long now

We bought the Walla Walla Onions a couple weeks back and have been watering them and trying to keep them in a sun-lit window. The weekend was so nice that we finally figured it was time to get them in the ground. By this point they looked pretty sad in the containers, but hopefully some time in the ground will perk them up.

They're just little guys. They'll take a while, but it'll be worth it.

The peas are from a different supplier than last year, just to compare.

We put the pea seeds in rows, about 8" apart, spreading the seeds about 1 1/2" from each other. We wound up with two 10 foot long rows, covering the seeds with 1" of dirt. I marked the rows with sticks so we'd remember where things are.

A new crop in the garden this year is carrots. We opted for the packet of seeds embedded in paper strips that break down in the soil, since carrot seeds are so tiny that they're both difficult and time-consuming to sow. We dug three rows and laid one strip in each and covered the strips with an inch of dirt.

It took about 10 minutes total for a job that, with traditional seed packets, could have been unbearably tedious.

At the end of the night we had our first grilling experience of the season. After marinating some vegetables, chicken and beef in Italian dressing for fifteen minutes we skewered the whole lot of food and threw them on the grill, in an effort to remind us of the kinds of things we'll be growing and what we'll be able to do with our own vegetables, when and if we finally have some. I can't wait for it to be onions, peppers and squash that we grew ourselves on our dinner plates.

It won't be long now.

Tillin' Time

Last summer we made our first vegetable and herb garden. This year we're ready to give it a try again. At the end of fall we turned over the garden and added whatever leftover straw in the hopes that the dead plants and such would add to the helpful organic matter in the soil and help us out this year. The veggies we grew, I reasoned, depleted a lot of the nutrients in the soil over the course of the summer and fall and so we'd give some of it back. The photo above shows how the garden looked last weekend at the start of Saturday before we did any work on it. The black piles are burnt charcoal lumps from last season's grilling.

We discovered that the chives we planted last year (which we never seemed to ever use for anything) seem to be starting to grow back. This one is the larger of two plants, the smaller being about half this size.

We also spotted two little onions left from last year that seem to be showing some green. We dug up both the chives and the onion before we started, to save them.

The tools for the day are shown above. We bought a 5.5 cubic feet bale of peat moss and a 50 lb bag of 4-6-6 Espoma Garden-Tone fertilizer. Conventional wisdom used to be that 5-10-5 was a good overall choice, but consulting my friends at the Hadley Garden Center lead us to go with this veggie specific mix. The numbers stand for the percentages of Nitrogen, Phosphate and Potash in the mix, in that order.

(Unrelated: if you google peat moss and fertilizer you might get to this link for a band called Peat Moss and the Fertilzers.)

Once we got the peat moss and fertilizer spread throughout the garden, we used the trusty family tiller to till it all in and cultivate the soil to get it all ready for planting.

The end result is a garden that's ready to go.

And then on Sunday, it snowed. Later in the day it changed to rain, and hasn't let up.

We bought some carrot seeds and some pea seeds and some onion seedlings that we hope to get in the ground once it stops raining.