D is for dig, T is for transplant

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I have been doing stuff in the garden, I've just had no time to blog about it. Pictures will come this evening! I can't take photos during the day because the middaylight makes things look crappy on film.

So, I don't remember where I was at in terms of number of raised beds last time, but I'm up to 5 now. I'm getting into the groove; it doesn't take me quite as long to double-dig a bed anymore. Here is the layout of the raised beds and what I have planted in them:

Yesterday I double-dug the fifth bed – the square-shaped one in the middle – and transplanted lots of things into it. I also transplanted more things into the bed on the right. I've managed to cram a lot of different kinds of plants into a pretty small space. We'll see if they like it!

My method of choosing where to plant what was rather ad-hoc, but I often make use of these three guidelines to help me decide:

• Companion planting: Which plants grow well together, and which do worse?
• Shading and space: How tall and wide to the plants grow?
• Age of seedlings: What needs to be transplanted most urgently?

The second guideline came in handy for the tomatoes, sunflowers, and squash. I know tomatoes and sunflowers can grow quite tall and produce a lot of shade, so they should be planted close to the north-ish edges of beds. Squash tend to take up a lot of horizontal space, so I planted them at the back of the yard so they could sprawl onto the back laneway.

For the curious, here's an exhaustive list of what's now planted in my garden, listed alphabetically:

• barley (Arabian blue)
• basil (sweet)
• carrots (Scarlet Nantes)
  
• chard (rainbow mix)
  
• cilantro
  
• corn (Indian blue)
• cucumbers (lemon, Pointsett 76)
• edible flower mix:
  • calendula
  • borage
  • cilantro
  • cornflower
  • sunflower
• flax (golden)
• lettuce (French heirloom Merveille des Quantres Saisons, black-seeded Simpson)
• melon (Pride of Wisconsin)
• morning glories
• peppers (Frank's sweet)
• pole beans (Blue Lake)
• poppies (Shirley)
• potatoes (white and red, though not sure exactly what varieties)
  
• pumpkin (small sugar)
• radishes, now going to seed
  
• spearmint
• spinach (Bloomsdale)
• tomatoes (Sweetie, Scotch Bonnet, Ruffled Red)
• zucchini

I've also been picking off the leaf miner-infected parts of my spinach and chard on a regular basis, and it's definitely helped. The plants seem to be happier, even though they've suffered much defoliating, and the leaf miners aren't making fast progress anymore. I was finally able to harvest my first spinach leaves a few days ago (which is accounted for in the list on the right).

Seedlings & sowings

I just realized that what I thought were weeds, might actually be the groundcherries! They look like weeds, perhaps because they are, in fact, considered weeds by many. And if I recall correctly, groundcherry was growing rampantly out on Plan B farm when I was visiting last year. Also, groundcherry is closely related to the tomatillo, which I remember at Everdale confusing with pigweed (before closer inspection). So I may have inadvertantly weeded out some of my groundcherries, but I've saved what I think are two tiny seedlings. The only thing that made these seedlings stand out to me from the other weed seedlings were their fuzzy stems, which I know tomatoes have as well.

Yesterday I began double-digging my fourth raised bed. It's the biggest one so far, and I only got about a third of it fully loosened. That was enough for the time being; I really just had to get two large tomato plants (one Sweetie and one Scotch Bonnet) and several oversized Simpson lettuce seedlings into the ground. Between the two I transplanted a bunch of white globe onion seedlings, which are a companion to both tomatoes and lettuce.

Today I sowed cucumbers, pumpkins, butternut squash, sweet dumpling squash, Pride of Wisconsin melon, and butterfly milkweed. I'm bringing the cucumbers and pumpkins inside during the night since it sounds like they require higher soil temperatures for germination than the other squash (according to the not-so-informative seed packets).

I tried to pick up a rain barrel today from a nearby Freecycler. Unfortunately, it was about 4 inches too wide for my bike trailer, so I had to leave it there. It was big and beautiful – a real functioning rain barrel, not just any old barrel – and it would have worked amazingly. Alas, I just don't have a big enough wagon, and I don't yet know of a local fossil fuel-free wagon producer. ;-)

I was working outside virtually all day today, and that was a mistake. I didn't realize today was a smog day in Toronto. I should have taken a clue from the characteristically orange-tinted sunlight, but I just wasn't thinking. As a result, I've felt a little sick all evening, especially after mowing the front lawn with garden shears. This is the first time I've ever noticed the effects of smog on my health so acutely.

A barrel of rain and a corn conundrum

I was greeted this humid, summery, sunny morning by a beautiful bucketful of rain, laced with apple blossom petals from next door:

It was actually brimming over when I first came out, so it would be nice to find a larger barrel. That bucket holds about three watering cans worth of water, and right now I use about one full watering can per day on my seedlings. Ideally, I would have a large barrel, or two or three, mounted about 4 or 5 feet above the ground, and a hose with a valve coming out the bottom. But I'm not sure it's wise for me to invest that much time and effort into this rented property that I might leave as early as this fall. But it's fun to think about it. It's actually very feasible. The hardest part I think would be finding the old wooden wine barrels.

I realized today that my Indian blue corn is ready to be transplanted (it grows very quickly), so I had to quickly come up with a plan to use up as many corn seedlings as I could manage. I maxed out at 4. (I sowed maybe 20, and unfortunately they're all doing quite well.) Corn needs 15" spacing, according to HtGMV, which left me with few options. I left a spot in the backyard bed for growing pole beans next to the chard (which are companions), and I remembered that corn and beans are also companions (two of the three sisters). So I figured out the arrangement that would use as much corn as possible while also making optimal use of space by filling in the rest with beans:

The circles represent the average amount of space needed by the corresponding plant. The beans I only sowed yesterday, so the corn will have a chance to get a little established before getting taken over by beans. And there I was wondering what kind of pole structure I'd need to design for the beans to climb on...

But what to do with the other 15 or so corn seedlings? I also have quite a few hulless Arabian blue barley shoots that look eager to move out:

Yasi's Place around the corner has a couple raised beds which they call the Wallace Community Garden. I'm definitely going to offer some of my surplus seedlings to them, as well as to my friend Kelly who lives a block farther. But somehow I think I'll still have some extras hanging around.

So I'm thinking of possibly doing a little guerrilla gardening. I live next to some train tracks which are surrounded by what appears to be mostly neglected but sun-soaked land. It looks neglected because it's abominably littered with trash. I might look around there for a spot that's far enough from road/pedestrian traffic but close enough to me that I can still keep an eye on it and do regular maintenance. I expect that at some point they'll want to mow around the tracks, so I should look for a spot that they wouldn't bother with (if I can find a little fence enclave perhaps).

Life of a double-digger

I prepared my first raised bed yesterday by double-digging an existing 18-square-foot bed in the front yard. Double-digging is one of the essential features of the biointensive method. It originates in French intensive gardening, which was developed for people with narrow backyards in France to enable higher yields for a given area. The idea is to loosen the soil two feet deep without completely disturbing the natural soil profile, so that roots can easily delve deep rather than spread out.

HtGMV describes several different bed preparation procedures you can choose from, depending on whether you're double-digging it for the first time, preparing last year's biointensive bed, starting a bed in poor soil, and so on. I followed the "Initial Double-Dig" procedure, since even though I was preparing it from an existing garden bed, the bed hadn't previously been worked biointensively. Here's the simplified version:

1. Loosen the top 12 inches of soil with a spading fork (I highly recommend the beautiful, stainless-steel Lee Valley tools) and remove any weeds, roots, or stones you came across.
2. Spread a 1-inch layer of compost over the entire area.
3. Using a flat-edge spade, remove the soil from the upper part of the first trench (a couple feet wide) and place it in a soil storage area for use in making compost and flat soil.
4. Loosen the soil in the first trench an additional 12 inches using the spading fork.
5. Dig out the upper part of the second trench and move it into the first trench. The first trench is complete.
6. Loosen the lower part of the second trench.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you've reached the end of the bed.
8. Shape the bed into a mound by raking it.
   

Result:

Ain't that somethin'?

Next, I planted carrots, radishes, sunflowers and edible flowers. Carrots and radishes both like to be planted next to lettuce. They are companion plants, which is another essential feature of biointensive gardening. Companion planting is a not-totally-understood phenomenon that some species of plants thrive better when grown next to certain other "companion" species. There are also some plant species that will inhibit the growth of certain other species ("antagonist" plants). The de-facto book on the subject is Carrots Love Tomatoes by Louise Riotte.

So back to the carrots, radishes and lettuce. Carrots and radishes like lettuce, so since I'll be expecting lettuce seedlings in a couple weeks, I left some room for lettuce to be planted nearby when the time comes. Carrots and radishes also make good companions themselves if they are interplanted amongst each other, as carrots take longer to mature than radishes, as this diagram illustrates:

I came up with a pretty ridiculous pattern for interplanting my radishes and carrots, based on the fact that carrots should be spaced about 3" apart and radishes 1" apart:

Please do not let this frighten you. Interplanting is completely optional. I just think it's super fun. (Remember, I was a math major.)

So then I poked holes where the seeds should go, popped the seeds in, covered the holes up, and gave the bed a healthy spray with the hose. I hope something grows out of it.