The columbines are up. These are the blue/purple ones; I’ve got seeds of them to start this year.
Friday I found an interesting site about soil. You can enter your address, then draw a rectangle over your lot, and it will tell you what kind of soil there is at that location. Mine turned out to be Howard gravelly silty loam with a bonus of 30% rock fragments; it’s considered not suitable for topsoil(!). This went a long, long way towards explaining for me exactly why I could grow those perennials so well but had the dickens of a time with “easy” stuff like squash. That knowledge was finally enough to convince me not to put too much effort anymore into growing veggies. I had determined to grow a number of peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants in pots this year, partly because I have decreasing areas of sun and partly to protect them from blight. But finding this out about my soil made me realize that I need to keep my in-ground growing focused on herbs and perennials, not tender perennials and annuals like veggies. I do have a bunch of herb seeds germinating, and I further went and bought some plants of herbs I couldn’t find seeds for or didn’t really want to bother with growing a bunch of, so I ready to go with the herbs. Re the veggies, I will be spending a lot more at the farmer’s markets this year, trying to take advantage of those floods of produce that happen throughout the season that offer opportunities to process and store up food for the winter. But even 30% rock fragments is not going to stop me from growing peas and beans in the ground, because I love me some fresh peas and beans.
Given the rocks and non-topsoil, I thought I better finally get down to a project I started last year and never finished–fertilizer. I put together a fertilizer based on the recipe in Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times. It’s composed of soybean meal, agricultural lime, dolomitic lime, garden gypsum, rock phosphate, and kelp.I felt a little uneasy about the rock phosphate. I lived in south Florida at one point, and if you have ever seen a phosphate mine, you know the meaning of raping the Earth. Ethics aside, I spread the fertilizer on some of my plots this morning and did a light tilling. A robin came by to help get rid of the bugs. I put in the pole snap peas in my patio plot (shown–looks pretty bare now and you can’t make out the perennials in the background, but it will look pretty good in a month or so) and by the fence with my elderly neighbor. He has been nice enough to allow me to use part of his plot for growing garlic. He’s been amending it with grass clippings for years. There are four rows of different kinds of garlic coming up now, more than enough to share with him and his kids and to last me a year. I really look forward to harvesting these babies.
The scale at which the soil surveys were taken makes them a very approximate guide: if you go to your local university to the soil science department you might borrow an auger and dig around in various areas; it’s quite easy and you might well find ground more suitable. Though your plants are so pretty now I’m almost reluctant to suggest it!
Thanks, Scylla! I have often thought of getting a soil test done and have not gotten around to it. The problem with my yard is that a lot of it is in shade, and there are lots of trees with surface roots, so it can be a challenge even without this soil business. I usually have better luck with the herbs, though.
A quick and unrelated question: Do you happen to know of anywhere I can find distribution maps for plant life?
We have what is either Osha Root or Poison Hemlock growing profusely around our property and if it’s not the former… I’m going to have to do some careful weeding and defoliant-soaking.
Hey, Scylla,
They can overlap in terms of where they grow, but osha naturally grows in mountainous areas. Hemlock just grows wherever it can, preferring moist areas. Hemlock has musty or mousy smelling leaves; osha has a celery scent, I’ve been told. Hemlock roots are white; osha roots are brown. Hemlock stems have purple spots on them, esp. towards the bottom of the stalk. I have not seen osha, but I have seen lots of poison hemlock. Esp. watch out for water hemlock, which is even more poisonous than poison hemlock.
Well, I’m pretty sure we have Hemlock of some kind, then. None of these smell particularly like Osha. -Everywhere-. I’ll have to flag it out for a meet-n-greet with Round Up, because we have a young kid in the family who routinely stuffs plants into her mouth.
nice of your neighbor to let you use a bit of his space. am hoping to have my little bit turned over this weekend! i’m so excited–all of my little seedlings (except the green peppers) are happy to be growing..although it makes me a little sad to have to thin them out. seems like such a waste! given that noone has dug up this plot before, except the occ. dog, i’ll be working compost in nicely, but waiting to see how thinks sprout this first year before adding fertilizer.
It is indeed nice of him, but he enjoys taking an opportunity to kibbitz about gardening. I like to do the same, so we’re even.
Isn’t it great to get out there?
I finally got some pepper seedlings into one of the raised beds this evening. The hens were out for recess weeding and scratching, and the dog was settled in the patio watching poultry tv. Only got in two varieties, pasilla which I harvested seeds from last year, and some paprika, but it was a dozen seedlings. Need to put some marigold around the edges.
And then, I forgot I plopped in some potimarrons between the scarlet runner beans and purple favas, in the first raised bed, last weekend. Took a look at what was popping up and thought those were sunflowers, initially! Then I remembered…
I have two half barrels full of garlic. Just growing from store bought heads that were starting to sprout. Keep meaning to pop in a couple store bought scallions in order to get a big mass of them going, but keep forgetting.
I did the very same thing and identified my local soil which is Mercedes Series Deep Clayey Loam. Think that means I need to add some sand to it and some compost. Really wish I had a Tiller machine to do that with, but, still using my pick, hoe, and shovel.