peas planted!

Friday, October 30, 2015

today's garden work

We certainly are lucky with our fall weather this year. Tee shirt temperature and nice rains. Blue skies and calliope leaf show.

Today's tasks:

  - Empty eight bags of compost and topsoil into the new garlic bed (why does the soil height always go down in a raised bed?)
  - Spread and turn under the new amendments. (Got to get s proper garden fork. Don't know where mine went. I leveled with the side of the shovel.)
   - Planted 140 cloves of garlic. They filled the bed full.
   - I labeled each row.
   - Spread salt marsh hay, about 3-5 inches, as a mulch to protect the plants against freeze-thaws and drying out during the winter.
  - I piled the rest of the salt marsh hay bale on other plants I'd like to winter-over without putting them under covers. I covered some broccoli, small red cabbage, kale and beets. I think the hay will give it a few extra degrees of weather protection in the event we don't have snow cover.
   - I broke off a nice length of horse radish root to try out. Smells great. I grate it in vinegar so it lasts.
   - Finally, I dug another section of my sweet potato bed. Lots of tubers. Just pretty scary looking with the surface grub and wire worm damage.

3 comments:

  1. I understand about the lowering of dirt in raised beds! Cleaned ours up a few weeks ago and planted garlic, stood back and said "I need more dirt for next year." Exact words. It must vanish...

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  2. Kathy,
    I had a problem with wire worm last year. So, last fall I watered in beneficial nematodes and then this past spring, I interspersed marigolds with the vegetables in the beds that had the problem. I haven't had any wire worm issues this year. Marigold roots apparently put out a chemical that is toxic to wire worm. DebS.

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  3. Agree about the raised bed soil. I have mounted the soil and it ends up below the surface.

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