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Yay, garden bed!
Feb. 11th, 2006 11:53 amI got the late winter/early spring garden bed all prepped for planting. Now it just has to sit for seven to ten days, and then, if it's not too wet and rainy, I can do my first veggie planting.
Last fall's very lame half-attempt at winter vegetable gardening with some free carrot seeds that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spazzkat ended up getting for free managed sprout leaves before dying, which I now know was actually really quite good, given the conditions. I even think I know why they failed immediately after that. (There are a couple of things all tied to cold and a kind of crusting issue with cold, sandy soils of the type in the bed, the first of which retards growth, and the second of which promotes disease.) This morning, I added a bunch of better soil, bat guano compost, and dolomite lime, and mixed it all in with the soil that had previously been there. So I think the odds of having veggies from seed are not entirely awful. My only worry is that the new soil I brought in to mix with the old - at about a 50/50 mix - had more organic matter left in it than promised, so I am somewhat worried about nitrogen depletion. I'll have to counter that with fish oil and hope things go well.
Vegetable Gardening West of the Cascades has so far been a surprisingly pleasant read, in addition to being very informative. I'm through the first few chapters, and was surprised to learn that my half-assed guesses about what to do with the existing soil last fall were completely correct, tho' I should also have added extant compost (or a compost-crop, like winter peas to till under in the spring), which is kind of a given. But those things I did do were pretty much spot on to the author's recommendations. One funny bit about the book is that there's a crazy person reviewing it on Amazon who calls the author a Communist, which is about as wrong as you can get and still be talking about political theory and not, say, the manufacture of harps. Having been reading the book, the review is now even funnier than it was standing alone.
Oh, and before I run off to a Norwescon 29 concom meeting: James Lileks's new book, Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice, is not as good as either of his two previous books, but is still funny, but unlike the previous two, is also absolutely terrifying, but not in that funny way. "It's a miracle Dick and Jane survived!" indeed.
(And yes, I've got a CWU started. I just couldn't work on it last night. Too crazy-making. Tonight, probably.)
Last fall's very lame half-attempt at winter vegetable gardening with some free carrot seeds that
spazzkat ended up getting for free managed sprout leaves before dying, which I now know was actually really quite good, given the conditions. I even think I know why they failed immediately after that. (There are a couple of things all tied to cold and a kind of crusting issue with cold, sandy soils of the type in the bed, the first of which retards growth, and the second of which promotes disease.) This morning, I added a bunch of better soil, bat guano compost, and dolomite lime, and mixed it all in with the soil that had previously been there. So I think the odds of having veggies from seed are not entirely awful. My only worry is that the new soil I brought in to mix with the old - at about a 50/50 mix - had more organic matter left in it than promised, so I am somewhat worried about nitrogen depletion. I'll have to counter that with fish oil and hope things go well.Vegetable Gardening West of the Cascades has so far been a surprisingly pleasant read, in addition to being very informative. I'm through the first few chapters, and was surprised to learn that my half-assed guesses about what to do with the existing soil last fall were completely correct, tho' I should also have added extant compost (or a compost-crop, like winter peas to till under in the spring), which is kind of a given. But those things I did do were pretty much spot on to the author's recommendations. One funny bit about the book is that there's a crazy person reviewing it on Amazon who calls the author a Communist, which is about as wrong as you can get and still be talking about political theory and not, say, the manufacture of harps. Having been reading the book, the review is now even funnier than it was standing alone.
Oh, and before I run off to a Norwescon 29 concom meeting: James Lileks's new book, Mommy Knows Worst: Highlights from the Golden Age of Bad Parenting Advice, is not as good as either of his two previous books, but is still funny, but unlike the previous two, is also absolutely terrifying, but not in that funny way. "It's a miracle Dick and Jane survived!" indeed.
(And yes, I've got a CWU started. I just couldn't work on it last night. Too crazy-making. Tonight, probably.)
