I'm beginning to suppose I should alternate the call of the primary Gardeners' Holiday of the year to Polar Vortex Day. This is the second yr in a row we've suffered subzero temperatures around the stop of February and most effective just controlled to emerge from our cocoon to get the plum bushes pruned.
But that could be focusing on the negative, and Gardeners' Holidays are supposed to spotlight the wonderful. This first tour, especially, is not approximately the bitterness of the iciness bloodless, but approximately the idea that we're sooner or later starting to emerge from the cold and start pushing our manner toward spring. Despite the frigid weather of the beyond week, the first faint signs of recent existence are there if you appearance: tiny buds on the branches of the plum wooden and, on the rosebush, even hints of tender leaves prepared to uncurl. Winter isn't over, now not through an prolonged shot, however we have made it to the middle of the bloodless season and we're now on our way out.
So as bloodless as it's far proper now, and as some distance as it can experience from planting climate, it is nevertheless the start of a brand new gardening season, and we want to start setting our lawn so as for it. To that prevent, we have were given started our first seeds of the 12 months, the parsley, in a few tubes complete of baked garden soil (which Brian dug up some weeks ago and baked within the oven last weekend to kill germs - taking walks the vent fan on excessive all of the while to dispose of the awful smell that accompanies this approach) topped with a layer of business seed-beginning mix. (The upright cartons you can see in the records are full of simple soil in which he is trying to start a few pawpaw seeds, within the wish that he can grow one or two of these curious neighborhood fruit timber inside the rear corner of our yard. He's promised me that the whole-grown timber won't shade the garden notably, and additionally that he may not expect me to eat any of the fruit.)
And this afternoon, as soon because it had been given heat sufficient to assignment exterior, we went out and pruned our plum bushes in the desire of stopping the brown rot it actually is been destroying maximum of our crop. We failed to must take off as plenty this three hundred and sixty five days as we did ultimate yr, but we nonetheless ended up lopping off severa largish branches and a whole mess of little twigs to cast off all of the factors of overlap between branches?Both at the equal tree and many of the Opal and Mount Royal trees. I attempted to get some pictures of the actual pruning, but a photograph of a unmarried department being lessen does now not honestly deliver what a protracted, fiddly technique it end up, with Brian wielding the clippers and me walking across the trees to pick out spots that wished clipping, armed with a protracted pruned-off stick as a pointer so I need to reap the excessive-up branches. But I did manage to get a photograph of the carnage afterward?Or in all likelihood, for the reason that it's far wooden and no longer flesh, I should say
We're not relying on pruning alone to protect the plums from damage, however. The anti-fungal spray we tried last year didn't do much, possibly because Brian had nothing more effective to apply it with than a squirt bottle, so this year we've decided to pull out some bigger guns. We went to the Belle Mead Co-Op about a month ago and bought a bottle of a spray called Serenade, which I'd seen listed in the Fedco Seeds catalogue and which got high marks from users online. It's in a concentrated form, so this 1-quart bottle, which cost us $19, should make about 16 gallons of spray. We also spent about $10 for a sprayer that can be hooked up directly to the garden hose, allowing us (well, Brian really, since he's taller) to dispense it more effectively over the entire tree. The third product you see in the picture is Tree Tanglefoot, which we're planning to deploy once the plums start developing in hopes that it will deter the squirrels from climbing the trees and pilfering them all. Even if it only cuts down on their depredations and doesn't stop them, we can hope to get some plums that way, which is more than we got last year.
I have one more task to do to get ready for this upcoming gardening season: plotting out the beds to decide where each crop will go. This process should be a little easier than it's been in the past, because I've come up with a new system of rotating and flipping entire beds instead of trying to move around individual crops. So, for instance, if last year the tomatoes were in the left rear bed with the basil, marigolds, other herbs, and one pepper plant, then all those crops will still be together this year in the left front bed. However, I will also flip the bed along the y-axis so that the pepper is at the opposite end from where it was last year, so I'm not growing pepper plants in exactly the same spot two years in a row. (Ideally, I wouldn't grow them in the same spot more than once in four years, but this is the best I can do with my limited garden space.) So laying that out shouldn't take more than a few minutes.
And once that's done, all we have to do is sit back and wait for the weather to warm up—as we can trust it will—so we can start planting.
