More gardening, somewhat tiring

[redbird]

cattitude and I went to the garden store this morning, and came back with a garden fork, to break up the soil so we can get the weeds out, two pots of basil (one each of two different varieties), and another six-pack of lettuce.

Then he went off to the library to work, and I did not much for the next few hours other than make myself lunch. The forecast had been for sunny and quite warm, and then it was in the low to mid 50s (F, call it 11 or 12 C) and gray until mid-afternoon, which left me feeling grumpy.

He got home mid-afternoon, and the sun came out and the weather got warmer, so after he had tea we went downstairs to garden. I planted the basil in a planter in the backyard (where I'd grown basil last year); this time I broke the soil up and mixed in a bunch of the potting soil we bought last month. Cattitude started using the garden fork to deal with weeds, and after a bit I helped him pull weeds out.

Then the four-year-old from across the street waved hello, said she wanted to come over, and offered to help. We accepted the offer, and 42itous went to get their garden fork, and also helped. They dug in our garden, and we all talked, until they had to go home for dinner.

While digging, the adults discussed the seeds we have each bought; I may accept 42itous's offer of cucumber seeds, and I offered her some clover seed because we have more than we can use. (The smallest amount of clover seed anyone would sell me was a quarter pound, and I wanted two different varieties; half a pound of clover seed is a lot for the amount of land we're working with.) She offered us other things, but the only one I would have been interested in right now, lettuce, I already have. (I'm planting already started lettuces because the seeds I've started indoors don't seem ready to plant out, but I may try direct sowing lettuce seeds once we're done with the garden fork/weeding stage and have some idea of where we're putting what.)

By the time 42itous and her daughter had to go home, we'd turned over and weeded about half the soil, and 42itous had uncovered an interesting piece of slate underneath it. We don't need it for anything, and it may get in the way of planting; I told her she's welcome to it if the landlords don't mind, so she sent them a text.

I put the lettuce in the ground, and then we came upstairs and took our muddy jeans off, and Cattitude did a load of laundry, just those jeans and the shirt I'd been gardening in.

(There are a lot of those purple-and-white violets in and next to the driveway right now.)

Comments

[42itous]

Sarah says I can have the slate. So I'll come dig it up, maybe tomorrow.

Tell me more about why to plant clover. Is it a ground-cover alternative to mulch, or to make bees happy, or both, or something else?

[redbird]

One reason to plant clover, and part of my motivation, is that it adds nitrogen to the soil. Farmers sometimes use it in crop rotation, instead of alfalfa or letting the soil lie fallow for a year.

Clover does make bees happy, but my other reason for planting it is that I like the flowers.

It's a reasonably good good ground cover to stop erosion, but I don't know whether it's a plausible substitute for mulch.

[42itous]

Oh, I didn't realize clover adds nitrogen -- yes, I would be happy to buy some from you. I don't have a lot of places to put it, but maybe it would be happy around the feet of my tomato plants.

I dug up a couple of dead shrubs today and I've made a new policy that whenever a shrub dies I will replace it with a blueberry bush. We'll see how these do -- supposedly they'll tolerate partial shade, which is good 'cause tomatoes get all the sun over here.

[redbird]

I'll be happy to give you some clover seeds; do you have a preference between the small white clover and the larger purple clover? It wasn't expensive, but I have a lot because the minimum order of white Dutch clover is a quarter pound for $3.49.

For another variety, it's $4.99 for a thousand seeds, but for a lot of varieties the minimum order is five or ten pounds: there's one whose minimum is five pounds for $22.99, recommended for pastures west of the Cascade Mountains. (Decades ago, the standard lawn seed mixture included some clover seed in with the grass, and then the fashion shifted toward all-grass lawns, and chemical fertilizers.)

Blueberry bushes sound like a fine idea. I have been idly looking at those, as well as black raspberries, and reminding myself that I should be sticking mostly to annuals for now (though I did put a flowering cactus into one corner in the front yard). When we lived in Bellevue, the city owned a couple of blueberry farms, which they leased to people who ran them and sold the berries. (The idea was to preserve Bellevue's agricultural heritage.) One of them was next to/surrounded by a town park, in a low and somewhat marshy area near Lake Washington where we walked occasionally. That has me wondering how much water blueberries need (as distinct from what they can tolerate).

[42itous]

I suspect if I gave Rosie the choice she would choose purple clover. :)

[minoanmiss]

Your garden! \o/

[inmymargins]

I love that you got to have a little helper. :)

Are you having to cover anything at night? We're still getting frost, so I haven't even begun planting.