So long, seedlings

Two months ago, I started a bunch of seedlings: broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, lettuce, spinach, chard, cucumbers, watermelon, and one delicata squash.

The cucumbers died almost instantly under mysterious, perhaps even suspicious, circumstances.

Today I'm pulling the plug on most of the survivors. The eggplant are gone, and they aren't coming back. My one squash is toast And just look at my Brandywine tomatoes:

They look like they need little blindfolds and cigarettes to go up in front of the Tomato Firing Squad, don't they?

I don't know what happened. My cucumbers started turning brown before they died, so I tried to save the tomatoes by fertilizing them with seaweed extract, washing them with safer soap, and moving them from the partially-shaded back steps to the full-sun table.

Apparently that wasn't what they needed.

Oh well, I suppose I'll just buy some tomato seedlings from the local greenhouse (Sunset Greenhouse) like everyone else...

Double Digging

This is actually my second year attempting to have a garden in the backyard of this rental.

We moved to Maine last year in the beginning of April. It took about a day of working with my wonderful sister-in-law to clear the leaves and bizzare personal artifacts out of the backyard (so many broken toys! and someone really loved Ring-Pops!). Once we were done, I looked at the bare patch of dirt we uncovered and thought: Perfect for my garden!

This is obvious in retrospect, but bare dirt patches are not good places to grow veggies. This is Maine, for God's sake - our driveway has grass growing in it. That patch of ground was bare because something is horribly wrong with the soil, and my garden just kind of limped along all summer until a frost came in the fall and put the poor veggies out of their misery. (except for the ones I brought inside... they suffered much longer, but that's a story for another day)

Not this year, I vowed! This year I was going to make two big changes: put the garden where the grass was actually thriving, and do something to improve the soil.

Since I'm trying to keep my garden low-to-no-cost, I decided against raised beds. We had them when we lived in Washington, and they were great (the gardener, however, was still incompetent). But, in addition to the cost of whatever you use to frame the raised beds, you need to purchase soil and whatnot to fill the bed.

This year I figured I'd just dig a hole.

I read about a soil preparation technique called "double digging." (Wiki has a fabulous animation here) Apparently it's been around since the Middle Ages - and hey, you can't go wrong with something that's been around since the Middle Ages! Just think about all the other glorious things that have been around since the Middle Ages: Feudalism! Plague! Catapults! 

So I dug up four 4' x 4' plots in the sunniest part of the yard, the part where the grass seemed healthy. (As a bonus, I used the sod to cover up some of the barren dirt patches in our ugly, ugly yard.) I added a bag of compost to each bed and, many hours of hard labor and one broken pitchfork later, we've got a garden! Or at least a bare patch of dirt!

My daughter helps with the double-digging

Biological Warfare

We have the ugliest backyard ever.

For some people, like my husband, this isn't a problem. But then, my husband didn't spend his formative years reading Sunset magazine and Better Homes & Gardens. He didn't grow up believing that the patch of ground outside your house (yes, even a rental) should express your personality.

But I did. And right now, our backyard is expressing the personality of someone with clinical depression.

The problem is that, despite the facts that it's springtime, we live in Maine, and we're getting rained on just about every other day, huge patches of our lawn are bare, depressing dirt. Dirt filled with lots of really gross, white grubs.

A little reading in my stack of organic gardening books suggests that these grubs are Japanese beetle larvae (another bad thing for the old garden) and that an effective, organic way to get rid of them is to use Milky Spores. Yum, right?

Milky Spores are apparently little grub-targeting viruses that will infect the grub, slow it down, presumably make it even more gross, and then kill it, releasing thousands of new spores to infect the survivors. Kind of like creating a grub-zombie-apocalypse in my backyard.

My response? HELL YEAH!

I ordered a vat of the grub-zombification-juice. At $27.99, it's a little pricey (it's also $27.99 over our garden budget of $0.00), but it will be worth it to know there are thousands of grubs dying horrible deaths right under our feet.

Ah, gardening! Before I had a garden (when I was 13 and reading Better Homes & Gardens) I pictured only bucolic splendor - singing with the birds, picking the flowers, living in harmony with nature. Especially in an organic garden!

But it turns out the reality is a little more complicated. Organic gardening is more like trading a few punches with nature, or trying to wrestle an agreement out of the most uncooperative co-worker imaginable.

Ok, Nature - you got me with the grubs. And the frost. And whatever's killing my eggplant sprouts. But let's see if we can't work together with this Milky Spores thing and bring a little grass back to this dirt patch of a backyard.

Off to a great start! Or not!

I've always enjoyed gardening. Everywhere I've lived, when summer rolls around I'm in the backyard, or the community garden, planting vegetables.

I've also never been very good at gardening.

Oh, I've read books - stacks of books! Oodles of books! I've done research on-line. I made careful plans - this year I even used graph paper. Nothing says careful planning like graph paper! I ordered organic, heirloom seeds from the wonderful Seed Savers Exchange, made (and revised) elaborate garden plans, and started my seeds indoors about a month ago.

plans, beautiful plans

That's where it all started to go wrong.

For example, this is what my eggplants are supposed to look like:

And this is what my poor eggplants look like today:

That little sprout on the far left hasn't grown a millimeter in weeks! I've been faithfully taking the sprouts in at night, then moving them to the back steps so they can soak up the sun during the day. And this is how they repay me.

That big eggplant sprout really is turning brown, and I have no idea why. I think it's being eaten by tiny black bugs that hopped on over from my cucumber sprouts, which also look to be on death's door:

(yes, they're in a hanging basket - wouldn't it be cool to have cucumbers in a hanging basket? Maybe someday I'll find out!)

So, yes, ten years of gardening experience and my plants are dying before they've even been planted!


Good thing we have a Farmer's Market!