I mow, I mow, because the grass do grow

I mow, I mow, because the grass do grow (sung to the tune of Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho...)

Mowing.

Tilling.

Weed control.

Watering.

Frustrations

Yesterday's biggest frustration was my disorganized inventory of hose repair parts. I had an impulse sprinkler at the end of three-hundred feet of hose and the flow of water at the business end was poor. The reason this is frustrating is because I have had this problem before. I know that I use many hose repair parts every season and I didn't plan ahead and inventory or I had not organized what inventory I did have.

I fixed two leaks and fiddled with the "Y" connector at the spigot and now it is running like the proverbial race-horse.

I had another hose where it was missing the female connector. I can still use a hose missing the male end for a lot of things, but lacking a female end is a non-starter. A quick trip to the hardware store and I had two new splices, males and females...and still no joy. The threads on the spigot I wanted to use were crusted over with hard-water deposits and the plastic threads did not want to engage.

The first soaking in 9% hydrochloric acid was not sufficient. It will get a second soaking today and I will hit it with a wire brush. As a last resort I will spend the big-dollar and by brass female fittings.

My current thinking is that a minimum of five splices, three brass female fittings and two males would be about right for one year. Fortunately, almost all of my hose is 5/8" so I don't need inventory for multiple hose diameters.

Tomatoes are in the ground

Mrs ERJ's Sweet Baby Girl tomato is in the ground in her kitchen garden.

15 Stupice and 5 Ukrainian Icicle are in the ground in our "big" garden. I want to buy a couple of plants that produce large tomatoes. You cannot beat a slab of tomato to dress up a sandwich or a burger.

A 40,000 foot fly-over of the garden

I know that I get a flow of new readers. At the same time I have readers who stop reading, so my readership numbers have been fairly steady for the last five years or so. If you have been a reader for a while, you can disregard the following.

I have two main garden plots.

"Old" garden plot is approximately 75' square (roughly 5500 square feet or 1/8th acre) and it has a seedling tree nursery eating about 15' of the east end of it.

Immediately to the west of old-garden is the "Serious" orchard* which is 110' long by 70" wide (7700 square-feet).

The "New" garden plot is south of the orchard and "Old" garden and measure roughly 200' east-west and 35' north-south (about 7000 square-feet).

The New garden is separated from the Old garden by a row of asparagus and a row of strawberries and a cattle-proof (and gardener-proof) fence. The same fence separates the New garden and the Serious orchard.

You may notice a similarity between the size of these plots and the size of the plots in the fictional Copperhead Cove.

The over-arching plan

The over-arching plan is to group "crops" by disease-and-insect susceptibility.

For all practical purposes that means that crops get grouped by botanical family.

Potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and tobacco are nightshades. So are eggplant ("aubergine" in much of the world), garden-huckleberries, tomatillas, husk-cherries and several kinds of weeds. They get rotated as a block. Last year they were at the west end of "New" garden. This year their block is in the middle of "New" garden.

Cabbage, turnips, rutabagas, most Asian greens, mustard and radishes are very similar and they get rotated as a block.

Corn...gotta have corn. That gets rotated as a block.

The plan is to have a block of "fallow" in the rotation but that part of the plan occasionally fails. I like to plant Red Clover seed for the fallow block. 

And then there is the "everything else" that gets squeeze into odd corners in a haphazard manner. Squash, pumpkins, cucumbers are similar. Beans and peas are similar. Herbs.

Part of the "fallow" plan is to either plant a winter cover-crop or to allow ephemeral, cool-weather weeds to do that for me. One of the vulnerabilities of my rotation plan is that turnips are my go-to, winter cover-crop and that could be a reservoir for diseases/insects that bother the crops in the cabbage family.

Cover-crops serve multiple purposes:

• They reduce wind and water erosion that would otherwise occur on bare soil.
• They add organic matter to the soil when they are turned under.
• They sequester or capture nutrients that would leach away without growing plants to capture them
• They give the gardener a real-time "state-of-the-soil" report. For instance, the turnips in Mrs ERJ's kitchen garden were puny, nitrogen starved plants. That means that we need to do something to beef that up. Conversely, if nettle plants are infiltrating the casual "wild" cover-crop, then you have plenty of nitrogen and don't need to add more.
  
• If allowed to flower, turnips (or canola or rutabagas or kale or...) they provide calories for parasitoid wasps** in the critical, mid-spring time window. Research suggests that parasitoid wasps live three times longer when they have access to a food source, and presumably can lay eggs on three times as many insect pests.
  

Downsides of cover-crops:

• They are slower and messier to prepare for sowing. Lank chickweed and bitter-cress and turnip flower-stalks wrap around tillage equipment necessitating frequent cleaning.
• The ground seems to stay wetter beneath the cover crop (especially chickweed) and that delays seedbed prep.
• They look messy and unkempt.
• Dealing with the top three issues usually involves "scalping" the cover crop with a mower with a tiller which adds one more operation to the prep process which adds time and absorbs labor.

Mowing

Our yard is about half an acre. That means that I could mow it in about one-and-a-half hours with my push mower (pushing it at 2mph) if I didn't have to mow around swing-set, swimming pools, bird-baths, park benches, burn piles, exercise equipment, trees and move picnic tables and sticks.

 

* The "Unserious" orchard is also known as the "Pear orchard". It receive very little care and provide us with very little fruit. Unlike apples, pear trees seem to be very tolerant of neglect. If times got more serious, it would receive more care and we would actually bother to harvest the fruit.

**And flowering plants like turnips, horseradish and rhubarb seem to attract enormous numbers of pollen and nectar consuming insects from the surrounding area. Sugar "fluoresces" a very specific Infrared wavelength and bees can see in that part of the light spectrum (and humans cannot).