Gardening Report March 28, 2020

Yesterday we tackled the biggest and most unappealing job in our seasonal gardening schedule:  Amending the soil and tilling in chicken manure for fertilizer.

Not the most aromatic way of spending the middle of the day.

Monday and Wednesday we spent weeding nutgrass from the second of our two plots (i.e., the one adjoining ours that we took over when the previous gardener had to abandon it due to health problems).

Now, before any of you get on our case for leaving the house, the problem is not leaving the house, the problem is going places where other people congregate and hanging around in close proximity for any amount of time.

Outside of the occasional grocery store or Costco run, we only leave the house to take a walk in the neighborhood (we can walk three miles without encountering six people and they’re usually on the other side of the street) or to go to the garden to work on our plots.

The park is a nice, big, open one; spring soccer and softball leagues are cancelled, and parents are justifiably loath to bring their kids to the playgrounds, so about the only people using it now are the joggers / dog walkers / rattlesnake enthusiasts / gardeners.

Our plots are about 3-4 feet apart in most places (a few are slightly closer together but they’re in a different part of the community garden where we are) and now there’s rarely more than two or three people in the entire area at any given time.

I forget the exact number, but there’s over 100 plots in the community garden area, all fenced in or enclosed in some fashion, and when you’re working your plot, it’s difficult to get within six feet of your neighbor (if they’re there) working in their plot.

Oh, I suppose you could both lean over your fences and wind up only a yard apart, but how often does that happen?

Nutgrass (a.k.a. cyperus rotundus is a deep rooted weed with a small tuber at the end of its root system.

If you want to get rid of nutgrass, you need to dig up that little tuber (smaller than a pea…most of the time).

I actually find weeding kind of relaxing…when there’s only a couple of dozen scattered shots to deal with.

But our former gardening neighbor unfortunately couldn’t tend her plot for a long time, and by the time we took it over the nutgrass blanketed it.

We’ve cleaned it out once…twice…thrice now…

…and will doubtlessly need to do so again next season.

(The challenge is digging w-a-a-a-y down to where the tuber is and pulling that out so it can’t send new shoots up.  Just tearing the green part loose does little good; the roots and tuber quickly replace that.)

Our schedule has been disrupted by both rain and the coronavirus.  We’d planned to start planting in the middle of March but are glad we’ve had to push it back.  A couple of cold snaps accompanied the rain and probably would have killed any seedlings.

The coronavirus is also playing havoc with our schedule (and Soon-ok’s mom being in a nursing home waiting out the duration, and we sometimes need to look after our grandson who is out of school, etc., etc., and of course, etc.).

So it’ll probably be mid-April before we can start planting.

We’re trying a thing called successive planting, in which we plant one seedling of a given fruit or vegetable one week, plant a second one the next, a third the week after that, etc.

This way -- the hypothesis goes -- all the crops won’t come in all at once but we’ll get successive weeks with lots of fresh veggies and fruits.

Mid-April is kinda late to start around here but, hey, ya plays da hand what’s dealtcha.

Yesterday’s soil tilling was long and tiresome, but as I said, that’s the biggest chore every season.

Once they’re planted and growing, all we need to do is keep and eye on ‘em, prune ‘em back if needed, and pluck any weeds.

After we finished in the garden (roughly one o’clock) we swung by Trader Joe’s to see if it was crowded.

It was, with a line spaced out in front of it, not super long but still waiting their turn to enter.

Local stores are implementing seniors hours where those 60+ or with underlying health issues can come and shop an hour or so earlier.  We went to Trader Joe’s on Tuesday when the seniors only line at Costco proved ridiculously long (five times longer than their regular social distancing line, because they originally announced seniors would be welcome an hour early before every shopping day then at the last moment changed it to Tuesday and Thursdays only); it wasn’t that different from a pre-coronavirus shopping day other than no free samples and people tried staying at least two cart lengths apart.

None of which has anything to do with gardening. So let’s close this now.

Addendum:

Today we set up trellises for the tomatoes we will eventually plant.  We at least now look like a proper garden, even if the only things growing are garlic and sweetpeas left over from the winter crop season.

The community gardens’ water is shut off until the storms pass so I can’t start fiddling with the irrigation system.

That’s always fun; it’s like playing with a train set only instead of model traits and track one’s laying out watering hoses and sprinkler heads, the latter of which come in a wide variety and so one gets the pleasure of dithering around and trying to decide if one is better served with a 180-degrees spray or two 90-degree sprays, etc.

© Buzz Dixon