Archive for May, 2009

The Transplants Move Outside

May 26th, 2009

transplants

I didn’t really want to post this picture because many of the plants don’t look overly healthy, but for the record… The weather kept dropping to freezing temperatures around 5 to 7 below and I did not have a heated outside structure to put my plants into.  This became a problem about two or three weeks ago when I ran out of grow light space and everything started to get really leggy.  I transplanted everything into bigger pots and had to keep the house lights on to try and give everything a little bit of light.  On the weekend however I managed to move a lot of the plants outside to get real sunlight.  Now hopefully they will start to toughen up a little in preparation for their next move into the garden.

Planting Potatoes

May 26th, 2009

potatoe planting

I somewhat underestimated how long it would take me plant a couple hundred pounds of seed potatoes.  With the arrival of a two blade plow to the arsenal however, trenching was the solution.  The potatoe plot is in an area of the garden that previously did not have the soil broken in so there are massive root systems to deal with.  The plow manages to turn the roots over and also leave a deep enough trench to drop the potatoes into.

What to do about grass fields?

May 26th, 2009

disced quack grass

What to do about quack grass.  Since I’ve decided not to spray a herbicide to kill the quack grass I haven’t exactly figured out what the best way to reduce/eliminate it.  Tilling the roots just increases the problem.  I managed to pick up a couple of implements, a discer and a plow.  Both appear to lift the roots up without breaking them apart like the tiller.  I’m hoping if I can get some harrows that I’ll be able to remove a lot of the quack grass roots.  For now though I’m raking what I can (but I’m limited on the time I can spend doing this).

the discer