Fiacré's spade: Gardening

On to more pleasant things. In between chicken doctoring and cleaning out Jane’s mom’s house, we’ve been diligently putting in the garden. The fun part of gardening is putting plants or seed in the ground. I can almost feel the plants stretching their roots with relief and thinking, “At last we have room to grow.” The seeds can wake up and start their new life, sending up leaves to catch the sun and begin making food for themselves that will eventually turn into food for me.

The peppers in the ground

Then there are the part of gardening that suck. I love having drip irrigation, landscape cloth, and row cover in place. I hate putting them there. These three things are, to me, the secret to successfully gardening without chemicals. The drip irrigation is the most efficient way to water. The landscape cloth saves us hours and hours of weeding, or the alternative of spraying herbicide. The row cover uses the ecological concept of apparency to decrease herbivory. If the bugs can’t see the plants, they won’t eat them.

Peppers with landscape cloth and drippers

And so I take a deep breath and put them all in place. The irritating part of drip irrigation is that no matter how much you think you are setting out your plants the same way you did last year, the irrigation never lines up right. Even the drip lines, which are the easiest, are never quite the right length. The rows seem to get a little longer every year. In previous years, I planted the corn in rows that were two feet apart. This year, when I wasn’t looking, Terry planted the corn in rows that were three feet apart not, as I naturally assumed, to make my life a living hell, but because “we have enough room, and maybe they will do better with more space.” So now I’ve got to move the drip lines. At least every third one still lined up with a row.

Corn in 3' rows with drip line

I think that I have always planted the peppers two feet apart both within and between the rows, but there are always drippers in the wrong place. Or the connecting hose is mysteriously too short, and I have to add extension lines with ¼” hard plastic connectors that are kind of rough on the hands. After I’ve got all the drippers associated with a plant, I have to turn on the water and see if they work. Half the time, there’s an air bubble that has to be bled out before the water flows. I have to open up the dripper until the muddy water sputters and squirts all over my glasses. The main lines are black plastic. By the time I’m ready to do the final adjustments, the water has been sitting in the lines in the sun for half an hour or more. That means that the water spraying all over me is typically uncomfortably hot.

And every year I think I’ve ordered the last supplies I’ll ever need from dripirrigation.com, and then I can’t find enough goof plugs (which is what you need to stop up the hole when you move a drip line from one place to another), or I’m running seriously short on drippers, or something. The lifetime supply of drip line that I ordered last year is gone. I ordered another 500 feet. I hope it lasts until next year.

Sometimes a line comes loose over the winter. As soon as the water goes on, a fountain erupts from the main line where the hole is. You might think that you can put in a goof plug while the water is running, but you would be wrong. After giving myself a thorough shower, I turned the water off, put in the goof plug, and carried on.

Goof plug

The problem with the landscape cloth and the row cover is the wind. Hilda and I work together, but still there are times when I feel we will both be carried off with the fabric stretched between us like a giant kite. This afternoon was relatively calm, and we were able to get the row cover on the peas and beans before supper. We’re in pretty good shape now.

Row cover over hoops

The grid of landscape cloth where the tomatoes will be

Tomatoes with landscape cloth, newspaper, dripper, and cage--whew!

In other news, my wildflowers are doing well.

Wild geranium

Shooting star--one of my personal favorites

We have a robin’s nest in a dead Hinoki cypress (a Japanese tree that Terry planted as an experiment) near the garage. All four eggs hatched. This afternoon, I could only see three chicks, but one might have been underneath. Anyway, here’s a series of pictures from the last several days.