I couldn’t help myself with the classic spring pun title. It’s too easy.
Critters are out, green trash cans are making appearances on trash day, it’s still light after a work day – we’re in spring folks! It’s been awhile since the last blog post exactly 3 months ago, so here we are. Rest assured long time Plot 63P Super Fan and Avid Blog Reader, I have NOT retired!
After a long and dormant winter, things are expectedly moving and shaking at an increasing clip. Enough has happened around here where instead of any one dedicated blog topic, a brief coverage of allllll the things happening and that have happened shall commence.
Book Club
First, it’s only fair to winter to discuss some of the reading material that was consumed on those rainy and sometimes snowy dark cold nights. When I sit down with my Kindle, Morgan sometimes asks what I’m reading. I reply by showing her the screen as I scroll through dozens of similarly titled gardening books, all between 10% – 70% read. Note – this is not an ideal way to consume books, however it does provide a barometer for knowing which ones enthralled me the most because those are the ones that actually get finished. Here are my two winners from this year:
The Resilient Gardener: Written by Carol Deppe, this book covers growing through the lens of homesteading and is specific to the Willamette Valley. I grew Carol’s personally bred, high-yielding summer squash last year Goldini 2 and was very impressed. It was entertaining at times and I enjoyed her practical, yet educational writing style.
Soil Science for gardeners: A lot of gardening books cover many of the same topics in the same ways, taking care of soil being one of them. Much of it is generic, basic and repetitive. However, this book was more of a deep dive into the chemistry of soil. It explained the interaction of soil, water and roots from more of a chemistry perspective. The molecular structure of different fertilizers, influencing positive and negative charges in ions and how it affects root uptake. It was a fascinating read and not as dense as the previous sentence would make one believe.
Honorable Mention: Gardening West of the Cascades. Another PNW-specific book that I’ve mentioned a few times over this past season. When it comes to concocting homemade fertilizer and gardening strategies from a lifelong practitioner, this book is something I continue to reread and reference in sections when applicable.
There were a handful of losers that I read as well which I won’t mention. They fall into the ‘loser’ category mainly because they felt like generic regurgitations of basic gardening knowledge. I suppose that goes for any how-to topic, there are hundreds of beginner books that all cover the same things using slightly different words and packaged into slightly different books.
Bed Awakening
This was the first time dipping the toes into overwintering my raised beds and overwintering some crops. I used straw as mulch last fall and I learned the lesson that it has to be pretty thick to avoid weed seeds from germinating and sprouting. As you can see below, it wasn’t spread quite thick enough.
That added an additional step to spring bed prep of pulling everything that sprouted. Luckily the weeds were easy to pull, but multiplying the effort by 9 raised beds made it a considerable amount of work.
I chose not to compost these greens and instead spread them throughout the beds to decompose and give what they took directly back into the soil. Then began the operation of removing all the straw mulch to prep for soil amending and sowing.
All of the garden beds I built last year have soil that settled A LOT, some over 6 inches down. Since virtually all of the soil I added last year was bagged soil from Home Depot due to time crunches and for simplicity’s sake, it was only fair to top the beds off with some of that good stuff. I ordered 5 cubic yards of soil delivered to the house and promptly covered it to prevent it from turning into mud. I have been and continue to take buckets of this stuff (yes buckets) to top off raised beds at the plot. I WISH I HAD A KEI TRUCK!
At the same time, spring fertilizer prep was done with a concoction of items chosen per the directive of Steve Solomon’s “complete organic fertilizer” recipe. I talk about this in previous posts, but this is all an amalgamation of minerals and nutrients that I spread over each bed back in fall and am doing again here in spring.
Ultimately this all added up to the following:
- Removing weeds grown out of the straw mulch
- Removing and storing straw mulch
- Adding homemade soil amendment/fertilizer
- Topping off settled soil with new soil
In the above picture I’ve sown 3 types of peas and rainbow chard (more on this in a future post). I could’ve started earlier but the spring prep work, projects (see below) and spring vacation plans delayed actual sowing. Regardless, I plan on succession sowing for the next 2-3 weeks to see how these early spring crops perform as the weather heats up.
In Motion
I pause our regularly scheduled broadcasting to showcase a few quick things that are already in motion!
The perennials are flourishing! Both rhubarbs are on their 2nd year after being transplanted from elsewhere, and with a bit of love and care they’ve peeked through the mulch about an entire MONTH earlier than last year which is awesome. This will be the first year where we get to actually harvest some of the stalks.
I’m happy to say that out of the two artichokes planted last spring, this one looks like it made it through the delicate phase and is firmly established. It survived the winter and is already showing some heavy foliage early in the spring.
The chives were a transplant I decided to put smack dab in the center of the largest bed last spring for funsies. It seems to be thriving itself after a winter hibernation and I look forward to the fun purple flowers it puts out soon. You can already see the buds starting to form.
Last but not least, the garlic! This was the first attempt at growing an overwinter crop. They were sown last Halloween and all 25 of them look healthy and are growing steadily. With 3 varieties (one soft-neck and 2 hard-neck) I’ll be keeping a close eye on these throughout the spring to see how each variety develops. Stay tuned for more garlic content in the future.
Operation Fortify
Projects continue at the plot. In order to dance between plot renovations and growing things, I’ve been envisioning the evolution of the plot into it’s final form (for awhile) as a 3-year project. This is year 2. Year 3 will involve rebuilding the final large bed.
One project this spring is to move the plot entrance. Currently it sits at the red rectangle below (using an old picture). The goal is to move it to the green rectangle. The reason? Watering. If you look closely, the main water station/hose available near me is at the corner, so having the opening to the plot right there will make it much easier to drag the hose inside to water rather than dragging it up and around the path and into the plot at a cumbersome angle. Sometimes it’s these nuances that make gardening life much much easier. Seeing as watering is a frequent summer task, I’d rather it not be a pain. Credit to Morgan for this idea.
Another project is replacing the fortifying walls around the exterior base of the plot. The previous owner installed wood around the entire perimeter at some unknown date far in the past, but much of it has since deteriorated away. Throughout last season I found a few mole holes inside my plot’s mulched paths. There’s also a history of rat activity in this quadrant of the community garden. I even found a rats nest when I was demoing the old beds last February. I’d rather not have any of that drama.
This is thankless work and really not all that visually rewarding. Unfortunately early spring is the best time to get this done with the soil still pliable. It’s also a relatively quiet window where I can destroy paths and fix them before other gardeners start frequenting the area. The downside is it’s cold, muddy and a decent physical effort. I’m using 8 ft 2×12 pieces of lumber so it’s a decent task to get them from Home Depot, into my sedan, transported to the garden, carried down to the plot and installed. In total it will be around 8 of these boards. As unsexy as this part of the plot renovation is, my hope is that it pays dividends down the road by preventing critter entry and allowing more peace of mind.
Finally, the operation groweth! Morgan and I agreed on placements for adding three new raised beds on the home front this summer. The plan is to swallow up some of the backyard lawn in favor of more growing space in the sunniest areas.
Above is the rough location of each of the new raised beds. This will involve killing off the sod, leveling the areas, mulching them, and oh, building and filling three new raised beds. Two of them will lie directly in front of their already-built counterparts as a strategy for potential future tunnel trellising between them. The 3rd middle bed will lie in front of the perennials and is on average one of the sunniest areas in the backyard. The hope is to have these built and installed by early summer so that an inaugural summer planting can be made. We’ll see.
Other Stuff
I’m irrationally proud of my progress and knowledge building around compost after last year’s experience. If you’ve followed along on my compost journey in previous blogs you’ll know a lot of the problems that were cited. The compost was slow to break down and went through a lot of anaerobic decomposition.
This year the compost is already much improved! The biggest impact from the lowest effort change by far was covering the pile with a tarp through the winter. The compost did not get soggy nor smelly and was perfectly fine with the moisture level it maintained.
Additionally, I’ve gotten more efficient about what to add to the pile in order to maximize the heap and the rate of decomposition, even going so far as to add clay soil to the heap at the outset to help aid the building of humus. The result is a pile in the spring that already looks like last year’s pile did in the fall.
The last update is a passing of the baton to the next blog post; sowing!
Onions, cabbage and greens are making a comeback in the indoor starts. Carrots, peas and chard are direct sows into the spring-prepped garden beds. Summer crops are soon to be sowed indoors as well. We will see how it goes!
The next post will focus on progress and/or completion of the above spring projects, as well as diving into the exciting stuff of which all the above work powers; actual gardening! I’ve got a lot of fun seeds and plans this offseason and I look forward to sharing what will make it into the ground this 2025 gardening season.
-AA
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