A perfectly germinated tiny section of a tiny row. Eleven days after our last look at the spinach, it’s definitely made some progress. It already looks good enough to eat!
2024 from the start
All the posts from 2024, in Jan to Dec order…
Squash to the field
Transplanted butternut squash seem to be doing fine in the great outdoors. The row cover will protect them from the fairly cucumber beetles, until they’re big enough not to be bothered. The beetles eat the plants and can also pass on bacterial wilt (I’ve experienced hungry cucumber beetles, but luckily so far, no wilt). This rock cover is medium weight, thick enough that it’s easy to handle without tearing and can be reused, and thin enough that it lets 85% of the sunlight through. A small tradeoff for no chemicals!
Potato spotting
When you spend a lot of time scanning the ground for the very first sign of germination, you get pretty good at spotting new seedlings as they emerge. This new potato plant is easy, it’s quite large, with a rosette of crinkly, distinctively dark green leaves. Carrots and green onions are a whole lot tinier. Beets, spinach, and brassicas can at first look pretty much like the weeds that pop up around them, they blend in. Still, no matter the crop, after a while, you develop a seedling recognition system that automatically zeroes in on even a single new arrival, just like that. It’s always a pleasure to see that seeds are still getting along with the weather and doing their thing!
Wheel hoe vs weeds
A tool in its element! Wheel hoes are great, and this particular one* is fantastic. Unchecked, you can see what weeds get up to given a week or two. This stretch of dirt was protected under the edge of the row cover that’s been protecting the zucchini to the right from cucumber beetles. Now there’s a dense mat of dandelion (weed or excellent salad green?: right now, weed), thistle, mallow, and lambs quarter. And there’s the steel blade that will run through them, gliding just under the soil, slicing them down. Brutal sounding, and all part of the garden balance. (The zucchini have powdery mildew, those white splotches on the leaves, which usually happens when there’s not that much sun. It can get really bad and ruin things, but usually, zucchini will outgrow it. It’s about sunny days…the weather. Another “we shall see…”)
*I got this wheel hoe well over a decade ago from Valley Oak Tool Company, one of the few companies that are a pleasure to recommend, purely out of appreciation for quality product that does its job!
Zucchini…
Always reliable, and still a pleasure, with a sense of wonder and a little relief, to see the first zucchini of the year appear. Weird? Maybe. You’d think after growing veggies season after season, at some point, one would get used to it all. For me, at least, that hasn’t been the case! For whatever reason: cool!
Melons!
You will be cantaloupe! A ways to go and just getting started. You might not think it, but there’s nothing like slicing into a sun-warmed melon in the middle of the field on a scorching hot day. That’s the thought at the moment!
Another cloudy day…
Why complain about the weather when…it could be worse?! And yet, ugh, yet another cloudy one. So far this season, there’s definitely been a shortage of days. You can see it in the paler green of the leaves and the slower growth of the veggies (not so noticeable with the weeds). Still, week to week we’ve had a decent amount of rain, and mostly reasonable temperatures, warm but not too warm. Pretty good. So I guess it’s just another cloudy day, and we’ll see what happens next!