Category: Daily Stuff

Spring prep has begun. The winter carrots didn’t do very well. They were planted too late, and were too small. Same with the turnips. Still got a few out. The spinach did great, however. I got 20-30lbs easily. Could have been more. Its difficult to harvest when its not extremely dense planting and the leaves are baby sized.

Now the plants will get choked off. And on sunny days its nearly 80 degrees. I’m hoping that tricks a few weeds into coming up and dying before April. Last year I get started in February. Based on how things grew, thats a bit early without supplemental heating. Its just too cloudy here until about May. A different story if we had regular sunny days.

So I’ll start seeds in March for lettuce etc, and get planting in April. I’ll have the same delay for tomatoes. The early ones didn’t thrive in the spring cold. I see no reason to put them out there before early May when the danger of cold nights is long gone.

I think I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but of the two tunnels we have, one is only really good soil. The other is on top a thick clay layer and very nutrient poor. And poor drainage. At the height of summer, the effect of that difference is obvious looking at the plants in each one.

In tunnel #1, the tomatoes were planted almost a month later, but they are taller thicker plants and yielding even bigger tomatoes. Tunnel #2 has spindly tomato plants which are producing smaller and less tomatoes total. The squash plants are also stunted and tiny, with leaves barely off the ground. While the squash plants in tunnel #1 are massive.

Below is a picture of tunnel #2. The first tomato transplants were put out here. The cold got them a little bit, but you can see only a couple plants are very tall. There are weeds everywhere, and the cucumbers are barely doing anything.

Meanwhile – tunnel #1 is visually cleaner, with lots of prospering tomato plants. The downside here is I didn’t plant nearly enough so there are some gaps in the tunnel being filled in. The core group of plants looks great.

Now the squash have stopped producing in tunnel #2, so I made the decision to cut everything down and prep it for fall. I have extra compost/manure I can add in and let it sit for a few weeks in the heat of August and breakdown under tarps.

Now its empty!

Been a while since the last update. The garden is a mess but going forward. A few tomatoes have started to turn. And while its a personal best for me, I had hoped they would be out sooner. The second caterpillar tunnel has much poorer soil than I expected, and its hampered a lot of the growth. To the point where the first tunnel has later tomato, cucumber and squash plants that look like they will surpass the others any day now, despite being planted weeks later.

The heat is doing me no favors, either, and a lot of romaine bolted. The pigs and goats next door love it anyway, though.

My turnips and remaining radishes also got burnt up by the heat. Only a handful of turnips got big enough, then they gave up and died. I suspect the fall crops under plastic will do amazing once the heat and pests go away, though. In the low tunnels I used before they were fantastic.

Right now, I’m playing catchup with seedlings, as those aren’t prospering either. Many of my seedlings stagnate, particularly lettuce. I’m trying to figure out the right fertilizer schedule for them to get them boosted up before planting.

I’m also doubling down on carrots, since they sold well. I have heat tolerant ones and some shadier beds. Again, the heat may have destroyed them. We’ll give them another few days to sprout and hope for the best. I really hate waiting for carrots to germinate.

Meanwhile, have a few pictures of the tunnels. My triangle of pollination between them, also called Pollen-grad, is doing better than any of the vegetables.

The compost I have is full of weeds, look at this!

Its really cramping my style, but oh well. At least I know for the next beds. Either this compost wasn’t properly heated up or I have misunderstood what the supplier was selling. Oh well, a problem I can fix with time.

After many hours of shovelling compost, the initial bed layout is done and 2nd tunnel is what I call incubating. Hopefully, it will warm up this week to wake up all the weed seeds in the compost. There appear to be an infinite amount of them so we’ll see how well that goes. And we’ve dug a small ditch along the uphill side to drain water away better. Even now there is some standing water inside the tunnel. Crazy to me how the soil refuses to drain anywhere ever. Below you can see the beds all raked out. They need a bit more compost. I had to underload the carts to make it easier to push them through the muck.

And I got the first sprinklers into the first tunnel, so I can stop watering by hand so much. A portion of the cabbages and a bed of lettuce got frozen out a couple weeks back, but everything else is growing well. The sprinklers make things very foggy.

And finally, don’t leave your expensive monitoring thermometer in range of the sprinklers. It recovered after the sensor dried off.