Starting Our Garden

Memorial Day may mark the official start of summer for some, but for us it heralds the arrival of spring. Most people around here believe that the last frost has finally passed, and we sure hope so! Even for this area, it has been too cold much longer than usual. Night-time temperatures still dip into the upper 30s, though more often they are dipping only to the low- to mid-40s.

So this four-day weekend was a great time to start our garden, among many other tasks. Our garden is pretty small--only about six feet by ten feet--and took less than an hour to dig the old-fashioned way--with a garden spade. I chose this particular location mainly because it appeared to me that the area had been used for a garden before. I thought that maybe the soil had been amended before, might contain fewer weeds and such, and would be easier to dig. It was certainly easy to dig, and the soil appeared rich and dark. We'll have to wait and see about the weeds.

Our goal this year is simply to learn, so we didn't want a huge garden. It's been decades since I've worked in a garden. My wife has never gardened and isn't necessarily looking forward to it, but is looking forward to eating the produce.

We haven't quite decided what we will grow. We have decided that we will start with plants and not from seed, given the late start we are getting. We planted 4 "Sweet 100" grape tomato plants and one "Stripey" heirloom tomato plant which we will attempt to save seed from, if we can remember. We also planted an orange bell pepper plant and four cabbage plants. Next weekend we'll plant some seeds we had left from last year that we never got to use at our condo and see how they do: some kale, eggplant, and basil. If there is any room left, we may try a potato of some kind, and maybe a melon.

I think the really tricky part--even trickier than getting the plants to survive and produce--will be deterring the local wildlife from eating our food before we get to eat it.  We got some netting that is supposed to annoy deer.  I guess we'll see how effective that is.  I'll also look into planting some plants that deer, and other animals in the area don't like and see how well that works.

Our garden patch. I'll report later how effective the deer
netting is. Under the netting are tomatoes, pepper and
cabbage plants.