Garden Maintenance

I’ve mentioned before that “in my gardening dreams I plant a seed or transplant a plant, lovingly water it while relaxing nearby afterwards with a glass of iced tea. The plants grow visibly every single day.  They create flawless fruit quickly“.

Another way reality doesn’t match with my fantasy is the existence of weeds.  Unfortunately weed seeds are everywhere.  They blow around in the wind.  They are in come mulches.  In fact, I have had to pull up many many cantaloupe sprouts this spring because I made the mistake of putting cantaloupe seeds along with the rind into the worm bin.  Sadly, the seeds survived and have been sprouting all over the place.

Weeds (I’m including any unwanted plant in the category of weeds) take space, nutrition and water away from the things you’re actually trying to grow.  Not only that, but they’re kind of unsightly as well.  In short, the weeds? They have to go.

Weeding can seem to be an overwhelming task.  Weeds want to take over the world.  I do have a couple of tips to cope with the whole weed issue.

1) Used raised beds.  As I wrote in a previous post, my bed in the school garden was only a chain link fence away from a soccer field that is constantly seeded and green with grass all year long.  Until we installed the raised bed, it really was just hopeless.  There was no way to consistently keep the grass out of that bed.  It made gardening there such a chore.  Now, I get a couple of shoots of grass, but I’m able to easily keep up with it.  When I added the new soil into the raised bed I put a think layer of newspaper on top of the old soil.  The newspaper will compost, but in the meantime, the grass and everything down there will die.

2) Set the timer on your phone and weed just a few minutes at a time.  Yesterday and today I went out to the school garden and pulled grass out of the half of my bed where the onions are.  I didn’t go insane with boredom because my brain knew that it would only be 20 minutes, then I’d be free.  You can do anything for 20 minutes. (Thanks Flylady)

There are certainly things you can do to to help prevent weeds in the first place.  We’ll leave that for another blog post.

I just got back from the school garden.  My primary reason for walking over was to spend 20 minutes pulling weeds from between my onion plants. As I was finishing up it occurred to me that those onions were never going to grow to full size planted like they are.  It’s a long story, but I didn’t plant them.  They were planted in groups of 3 and 4.  Looking back on it, I would have planted them each separately.  Because they were planted several in each hole, each onion bulb didn’t have room to become a big beautiful onion.  As much as it killed me, I had to pull some out prematurely so that the others would have room to grow larger.

When we plant seeds, we are instructed to put a couple of seeds in each whole.  I think the reason for this is that not all seeds sprout.  When more than one does, you have to thin.

As a new gardener thrilled with things sprouting in your garden, the thought of thinning goes against everything you want to do.  You’ve planted seeds, then you look at them daily, sometimes hourly waiting for them to sprout.  Pulling out those precious sprouts just seems wrong.

Do it anyway.

If you don’t thin your plants, they simply won’t have the room and the soil resources to grow the way they’re supposed to.  I’m all for making the best use of the garden space you have, but don’t compromise your plants by overcrowding.

Also, depending on what you’re thinning, you can actually go ahead and use what you’ve thinned.  The picture above are the onions I thinned.  I’ll certainly be using them!  Baby potatoes, baby spinach, baby carrots…you can use them all.

This is an area in which I am sadly lacking.  Please please, PLEASE! label your garden when you plant stuff.  Especially seeds.

I always think I’m going to remember what I planted where.  But do I?  No.

Recently I started some seeds in some cow pots.  I started summer squash, cucumbers, malabar spinach and green peppers.  When I was doing it I thought to myself, “I’ll remember what is in each pot.”

Famous last words.

As the seeds started to sprout it occurred to me that I would have no idea which plant was which.  Since I had specific places I wanted each thing to be planted, this was going to be a problem.

For instance, summer squash and cucumbers can become the plants that took over the world so it’s very important to put them where they won’t encroach other plants.

I think I have my cowpots figured out now, but I wish I would have labeled them.

Don’t do what I did.