– Planted a couple rows of watermelons, which was a little tough as I was on my own in terms of poking and watering the holes into the plastic.
– Deadheaded all the irises
– Started cleaning up the northmost garden and remulched a few areas.
– Helped lay down mulch near the yard for what is going to be an herb garden. The mulch is a long strip of green plastic. Bernie rigged a device to the end of his tractor that will lay down the mulch and dirt is kicked up and buries the sides. I was on one end of the field, cutting the end of the plastic strip with a box cutter. Sometimes there was a strip of a drip tube underneath and so I’d cut that too. Then I’d shovel some soil on top of the end of the mulch so that it didn’t blow away.
– Round noon, weeded the iris bed a little bit more. Most of the major weeds are gone now — the dandelions and the quack grass — and the most dead iris leaves have been removed. Filled the wheelbarrow about 2/3.
– In the afternoon, planted cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower. One person would poke a hole in the mulch with the end of this rod that was also a hose, so that when they poked a hole they it would also be filled with water, which made planting much easier. Then one person would be walking around with a tray of cabbage plugs and would hand them to the sad squatting person who would arrange them in the holes in the plastic. That sad squatting person was me. It was sad because you had to keep moving, because the cabbages and everything were planted far enough apart that after two or three plants you couldn’t reach the next hole. It was also very, very muddy work.
– Planted some dogwood saplings in a field that’s going to be left fallow, or else planted with some cover crop.
– Transplanted some long-ignored plants that were sitting in the shade of a box elder in the side yard — for at least a year, I think — into one of the gardens in the front yard. Some irises and some Stella D’oros.
– Did some more thorough weeding of the iris bed. Three wheelbarrows full. Loooots of quack grass and a few mammoth dandelions.
– Helped lay down some plastic mulch; see next entry for the fascinating details.
– Today we finished planting all of the onions. Bernie had done some of them previously, but the rest of us — three and occasionally four — got the rest of them in the ground. There were maybe half a dozen different varieties. It got a little tiring, although not as bad as planting the cabbage a few days later. (Because the onions could be planted fairly close together, you didn’t have to move as much.)
– Over lunch a spent a short amount of time weeding the iris bed, which of course hadn’t been touched for over a week. I forgot the Felcos in them, but fortunately they were there the next day…a cat didn’t wander away with them.
Sarah's Garden Stuff 