Gardeners' Holidays 2019: First Sowing

This year, for a change, we did not have snow on the alleged first day of spring. In fact, it was quite pleasant out, though not really warm enough to ditch our winter coats altogether. So this weekend, we were able to get started in earnest on our garden.

We've started all our seedlings at this point. The parsley and leeks are pretty tall already, and the tomato and pepper plants are just starting to poke their wee leaves out of the dirt. (The scallions you see in the front of the picture weren't started from seed; they're the chopped off ends of some scallions we bought at the store that Brian put in a cup of water to regenerate. When the weather's warm enough, they'll go in the ground with the ones we're growing from seed.) The first crop to get planted directly in the ground, the snap peas, wasn't technically scheduled to go in until Tuesday, but with the weather warming up, we thought it would do no harm to get them started a couple of days early.

Before we could put the seeds in, however, we had to prepare the bed for planting, pulling out all the junk from last year and all the weeds that got a head start on our crops. And before we could do that, I had to figure out exactly which bed to prepare, because I hadn't actually gotten around yet to laying out the plots for this year's garden.

Fortunately, my new crop rotation method made this process much easier than it has been in the past. I simply rotated all the beds one place counterclockwise, moving the heavy-feeding tomatoes into the place occupied last year by the nitrogen-fixing peas, while the peas went into the slot where the cucumbers used to be, and so on. Then I also flipped the beds horizontally, so the pepper and zucchini plants wouldn't be at the same end this year as last year, minimizing the risk of disease. Actually, even after rotating and flipping, one of the pepper plants ended up in a spot that also held a pepper plant last year, so this method isn't perfect—but it's much faster than my old approach of treating all the different crops like jigsaw puzzle pieces and trying to fit them into the optimal configuration.

So, having determined that the peas were to go in the right front bed this year, we got to work getting them in the ground. Brian went out and cleared the bed while I was still fiddling with the layout, and then I went out and actually poked the peas into the dirt. We gave the seeds some water, but no fertilizer, since we were a little too pressed for time today to deal with opening up our big compost bin and shoveling out the finished stuff. But we can always add a top-dressing of it later.

We did, however, take one extra precaution to protect our peas as they grow. The last couple of years, we've had some problems with losing our peas to ambitious birds that yank them right out of the soil, either before or right after they've sent up their first shoots. So, to deter them, Brian covered up the spot where the seeds are planted with some row covers he made last year to protect our bean plants from some mysterious critter that kept chomping on them. They're just big arches of chicken wire with bamboo stakes at the bottom to stiffen them, and he was just able to squeeze the two of them into place along the back of the bed where the peas are planted. I imagine this wouldn't stop a really determined bird, but I figure it's kind of like putting The Club on your car when you park it; it makes your car enough extra work to steal that maybe the thieves will pass it over in favor of easier pickings.

Also, as you can see in this picture, Brian didn't clear absolutely everything out of the bed before the peas went in. Those two little blotches of green are a couple of tufts of last year's winter lettuce crop that appear to have successfully overwintered, so unless we get a hard freeze, we should be able to enjoy a couple of early salads this spring. We'll just have to make sure to eat it all up by May 8, when we'll need those spots in the garden to plant beans in. But with luck, by that time we'll have some of this year's spring lettuce crop ready to eat.

We're also keeping a close eye on our plum trees. The branches have buds on them, but so far, the tips of the blossoms aren't visible. As soon as they appear, we'll know it's time to spring into action with our new sprayer and see if we can manage to ward off the brown rot that's destroyed most of our crop the last two years running. Even if it works, we're not out of the woods yet, since we'll still have those thieving squirrels to contend with. But at least we'll have a fighting chance of getting some plums for ourselves.

So what with peas in the ground, seedlings in the southwest window, plum trees and cherry bushes just starting to bud, rhubarb plants just starting to reemerge, and a couple of teeny heads of lettuce peeping out of the ground, I'd say our gardening year is off to a good start. Of course, I'm not about to start counting our tomatoes before they're hatched. But so far, at least, everything looks promising.