The Garden Plan!

My 20' x 20' community garden plot is up and running. This picture was taken last Thursday - note that our trees still aren't leafed out completely. It actually snowed as recently as this past Sunday.


North Neighbor was planting onions with his son when I dropped sweet corn in dual rows along the North and South borders (I'll be hand-pollinating them). Our frost free date isn't for another week yet, but the weather when I planted was consistently hot - though of course now they're forecasting hard frosts for tonight and maybe tomorrow, so we'll see what happens. I sowed peas a few days before the corn, but hopefully they won't emerge for another 2 days. My salad greens and carrots were sowed two weeks ago, when I raised the deer netting. I'm not too worried about them though - I had dropped some seed in my deck planters nearly a month ago, and all have survived several frosts so far.

I didn't take West Neighbor seriously when she said that weeds would become a big problem. I know a lot of people will abandon their plots to chest-high weeds later in the summer, seeding the rest of us - but I don't plan on having any bare soil by then. In another few weeks I'll transplant in fall broccoli and warm weather stuff - beans, locally-adapted melons and a panel of tomatoes from an amateur breeding project.

Stopping by after the first post-till rain last week, the problem became more obvious. The whole field had a slight green sheen of millions of tiny sprouts. It won't be much of a problem when I transplant in larger plants, but the carrot and salad subplot I sowed two weeks ago is an emerging nightmare. I'm gonna have to take my own advice to properly identify my salad greens. Maybe this is why other people built up raised mounds of compost and dirt to plant in.

Good thing I actually planted in furrows for once...