The takeaway from current-day planting appears to be that planting shrubs is a LOT less difficult than planting trees. It took us most effective two hours to get all five of our new bush cherries into the floor?Primarily because they did no longer need to be set nearly as deep, so we handiest needed to dig via turf and topsoil, rather than hacking away on the thick Raritan River clay underneath. Here are our 5 bush cherries, all in a row: Joel, Joy, Jan, Joel, Joey.
However, earlier than we need to flow directly to the task of planting the raspberry canes at the north thing of the house, we needed to transplant the rhubarb that come to be presently occupying that spot. So it took us each different 3 hours or as a manner to put together a mattress for the rhubarb, amend it with compost dug out of our bin, dig up the flora, positioned them within the ground, and cover them up once more with soil, extra compost, and mulch. Digging out the compost changed into part of the assignment that become each encouraging and demanding: encouraging due to the reality our little homemade cold-compost bin clearly does have a few beautiful, wealthy, darkish humus in it, and irritating due to the reality the good things come to be proper at the lowest center of the bin, in which it become honestly tough to get at. So a number of what in reality were given combined into the soil was half of of-decomposed leaf mould. (The reason we used our home made compost rather than the industrial stuff is that we've best a restrained amount of bagged compost that surpassed our domestic test, and we desired to keep a number of it for the raspberries.)
We still have a few worries about the rhubarb. It's not smooth whether all the flora will stay on being transplanted; the only that changed into the maximum important and healthiest of the lot, inside the center function within the picture, clearly lost at least a part of its root structure in the technique. So we may not get any rhubarb crop this year. We do have some new flora at the manner, however they won't produce some thing this one year. (I at the beginning perception we'd grow to be with too many vegetation for the bed, for the reason that Brian dug up three of the antique ones in desire to , and I concept I'd ordered 5 new ones. But it appears I best ordered four, so we are able to simply control to squeeze all of them right into a 22-foot area at three ft aside.)
After moving the rhubarb, we had to clear the bed of the wild strawberries that were growing all over it, nearly crowding out the rhubarb plants. I found myself wishing I could somehow move all these plants to the main part of front yard; I've been trying for years to find an appropriate ground cover to take the place of the grass, and this stuff, with its thick, low-growing mat of foliage, looked ideal. I even took the trouble to attempt transplanting a couple of them into bare patches in the yard, in the hope that they would, as this Yahoo contributor suggested, "spread like crazy and choke out [the] grass." But I suspect that if they could grow well in full sun, they would already have spread to that part of the yard by now.
After that, we decided the actual planting of the raspberries could wait one more day. They don't need to be planted deeply at all—in fact, the planting guide says that planting them too deeply is a common mistake—so we just need to dig a shallow trench, put in the plants, cover them up with dirt, and add compost and lots of mulch. And the weather forecast for tomorrow has been revised to predict afternoon showers rather than all-day rain, so we won't have to work in the wet.
The only disappointing part of the day was that, after knocking off work early in the hopes of making it to the D&D Next playtest at our local game store's Tabletop Day event, we found it had been canceled due to the illness of the guy who was supposed to run it. So instead we'll be unwinding from our day's labors with a pot of matzo ball soup and maybe one of our new "A Game of Thrones" Season 2 DVDs.
