But that would be focusing on the negative, and Gardeners' Holidays are supposed to highlight the positive. This first holiday, in particular, is not about the bitterness of the winter cold, but about the idea that we're finally starting to emerge from the cold and start pushing our way toward spring. Despite the frigid weather of the past week, the first faint signs of new life are there if you look: tiny buds on the branches of the plum trees and, on the rosebush, even hints of tender leaves ready to uncurl. Winter isn't over, not by a long shot, but we've made it to the middle of the cold season and we're now on our way out.
So as cold as it is right now, and as far as it may feel from planting weather, it's still the start of a new gardening season, and we need to start putting our garden in order for it. To that end, we've started our first seeds of the year, the parsley, in some tubes full of baked garden soil (which Brian dug up a few weeks ago and baked in the oven last weekend to kill germs - running the vent fan on high all the while to get rid of the awful smell that accompanies this process) topped with a layer of commercial seed-starting mix. (The upright cartons you can see in the background are filled with plain soil in which he's attempting to start some pawpaw seeds, in the hope that he can grow one or two of these curious native fruit trees in the rear corner of our yard. He's promised me that the full-grown trees won't shade the garden significantly, and also that he won't expect me to eat any of the fruit.)
And this afternoon, once it got warm enough to venture outdoors, we went out and pruned our plum trees in the hope of combating the brown rot that's been destroying most of our crop. We didn't have to take off as much this year as we did last year, but we still ended up lopping off several largish branches and a whole mess of little twigs to eliminate all the points of overlap between branches—both on the same tree and between the Opal and Mount Royal trees. I tried to get some shots of the actual pruning, but a picture of a single branch being cut doesn't really convey what a long, fiddly process it was, with Brian wielding the clippers and me walking around the trees to identify spots that needed clipping, armed with a long pruned-off stick as a pointer so I could reach the high-up branches. But I did manage to get a picture of the carnage afterward—or perhaps, since it's wood and not flesh, I should say "lignage."
We're not relying on pruning alone to protect the plums from damage, however. The anti-fungal spray we tried last year didn't do much, possibly because Brian had nothing more effective to apply it with than a squirt bottle, so this year we've decided to pull out some bigger guns. We went to the Belle Mead Co-Op about a month ago and bought a bottle of a spray called Serenade, which I'd seen listed in the Fedco Seeds catalogue and which got high marks from users online. It's in a concentrated form, so this 1-quart bottle, which cost us $19, should make about 16 gallons of spray. We also spent about $10 for a sprayer that can be hooked up directly to the garden hose, allowing us (well, Brian really, since he's taller) to dispense it more effectively over the entire tree. The third product you see in the picture is Tree Tanglefoot, which we're planning to deploy once the plums start developing in hopes that it will deter the squirrels from climbing the trees and pilfering them all. Even if it only cuts down on their depredations and doesn't stop them, we can hope to get some plums that way, which is more than we got last year.I have one more task to do to get ready for this upcoming gardening season: plotting out the beds to decide where each crop will go. This process should be a little easier than it's been in the past, because I've come up with a new system of rotating and flipping entire beds instead of trying to move around individual crops. So, for instance, if last year the tomatoes were in the left rear bed with the basil, marigolds, other herbs, and one pepper plant, then all those crops will still be together this year in the left front bed. However, I will also flip the bed along the y-axis so that the pepper is at the opposite end from where it was last year, so I'm not growing pepper plants in exactly the same spot two years in a row. (Ideally, I wouldn't grow them in the same spot more than once in four years, but this is the best I can do with my limited garden space.) So laying that out shouldn't take more than a few minutes.
And once that's done, all we have to do is sit back and wait for the weather to warm up—as we can trust it will—so we can start planting.
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