This morning while I was pruning the fruit trees, I was thinking about how amazing our property is going to look by July and August. We’ll be tackling more than half an acre worth of planting this coming growing season, and I feel hardly prepared.
As many of you already know, I’m highly allergic to mold. Well, after planting the tea and other seeds, mold spores shot up and started to spray the plastic seed dome. It formed colonies right on the plastic and made a design that looked like flowers. This is the mold I’m allergic to, and yet there I was for almost two weeks spraying the seeds in the flat and not realizing that the mold spores were making me wheeze and the true cause of my allergy suffering. I thought it was the kefir I was drinking, but I was wrong.
When I woke up this morning, I wasn’t wheezing. Yesterday Dom moved the two seed flats down stairs where he’ll be tending to them for me. When I realized I had no wheezing, I decided to try drinking the kefir again and I had no ill affect.
So what does this mean for my greenhouse responsibilities? Well, someone else in the family will actually need to take care of things for me. It will either be Vicki or Dom. I haven’t talked with them about it yet (just thought of it as I was typing) after what I’ve been experiencing over the last two weeks, it just seems like it might be better to pass on this one.
Anyway, in the photo above are the first trees we planted last year. I pulled the mulch away from the tree forming a circle, and tomorrow Dom will be pouring duck poop water around the trees. The only trees that won’t get the poop water are the new trees planted this winter.
After all the trees are watered, I’ll expand the circle a little further out and a layer of Dom’s compost will be laid in the circle to prepare for planting the garlic, onions, celery, cabbage and chives. Each tree will have that combination of vegetables growing around it.
I won’t be planting anything around the sand cherries, but I will be pulling the winter protection off the fig trees and planting garlic and rue. We had a lot of swallow tail butterflies come last year, but none of them stayed very long. I want to ensure we have a gorgeous butterfly population so we’ll be planting a lot of dill, fennel, parsley, milk weed (for the Monarch butterflies), butterfly bush, maypop, and so on.
I’ve planned for the garlic to be planted everywhere this year. Originally I was going to do some boring rows of just garlic and then opted instead to use them with all our other vegetables and fruits. The only exception to this will be where beans, parsley, sage and peas are planted.
After assessing the front of our house and looking at the large number of tomato seeds ordered, I’ve decided to put our tomato guild in rows on contour in the chicken pasture since we don’t have any chickens in there right now. That means that we’ll need to wait till the fall to build the large coop and order chicks.
The tomato guild will have the following:
- Yellow pear tomatoes
- Spun Gold Marigolds
- Nero Toscana Kale
- Dwarf blue curled kale
- Red Winter kale
- Purple Opal basil
- Costoluto Genovese Red tomato
- Marmande tomato
- Roman candle yellow tomato
- Striped Roman red tomato
- Purple Calabash tomato
- Bee balm
- Italian Pepperoncini little pickling peppers
- Doux D’Espagne or Spanish Mammoth sweet red pepper
- Quadrato D’Ssti Giallo sweet yellow pepper
- Garlic
- Chives
- Green basil
- Arugula
- Hyssop
- Borage
- Trailing nasturtium
- Lovage
- Watermelon planted on the ends to expand into the chicken pasture covering the ground
My plans are to plant as many supporting companions as possible to help them out this year. Last year our tomatoes were pretty homely, pitiful and didn’t do well at all. This year I want to have more tomatoes (and other veggies) than I know what to do with.
A few other things ordered this week for the garden were:
- Stinging nettle
- 10 Asparagus Crowns
- 3 Rose hip plants
- one 3-1 apple tree
- one 3-1 cherry tree
- iceberg lettuce (hey we like iceberg lettuce with our homemade blue cheese dressing!)
- red romaine
- more milk weed
Things we still need to order:
- Worms
- Bees
- A lot of weeper hose and the connecting fittings
Recent Comments