Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Update on Gardening Projects

(Here is my Flower Patch.)


I have just taken out the rest of the grass in my Flower Patch out front. I call it that because it is a small section between our neighbors yard and our driveway out by the road. It gets a lot of salt when it snows and half of it is weeds. The section that gets the most salt seems to be more sandy in texture and the other half closer to the sidewalk seems to be more of a clay mixture. It has a hard outer crust once it dries and is impossible to work with once dry.

I have definitely done more garden work in the past few weeks than I have in the past. I have never started this early. I usually don't do much except plant peas until after Mother's Day. I have planted peas at the first thaw most years. I wasn't able to this year I got them planted last week sometime. I have a notebook with exact dates but for the blog I will be more approximate.

It has been dry enough to work the soil in our area already. Right now it is too wet due to the rain this past weekend. I have found out if there is grass to dig up it is a lot easier two days after it rains, instead of waiting for it to dry out more. In fact I was able to dig up more with little effort. It is too wet to get the dirt of the grass roots. So what I did was dig it up in small sections then flip each over to dry out. Then I will get as much dirt off once it is dry then throw the grass sections out. I also don't know it this will cause some compaction of the dirt but for the effort I won't care much since I will be adding compost to the dirt once it is dry enough to prepare the rest of the way. I have been using the Nutri-Mulch from State Farm it comes from Sanpete county from a turkey farm. So far I have used it with great success. I had some plants that were struggling to survive and I mulched them this winter and they are twice as big as usual and very healthy this year. In other words they are thriving now.

I did do some work in my strawberry patch a few weeks back. It has become too crowded so I am experimenting with it. I cleaned out half and spread the plants out and left the other half crowded. I tried to leave both younger and older more established plants in both places and I will see if it increase there size and how many each plant produces. I also used an organic all purpose fertilizer on them. It is from Gardens Alive. It is suppose to be a slow release fertilizer and only needed once a year. That is what I like about it since I always seem to forget to fertilize on a regular basis. I think my garden would grow better if I was more consistent with fertilizing it. I have a goal to do better with my garden this year.

2 comments:

  1. I planted some pumpkins and squash on March 21. After three weeks, I thought they were dead. But last week I came outside and vwalaaah! Pumpkins and squash are coming up. Yay!

    - Chas

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  2. The ground was too cold for the seeds to germinate so it took them a while to come up. Seeds will stay dorminate in the ground till the right conditions are meet for them to germinate.

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