GeoPathfinder

After last summer’s garlic crop debacle (see our blog posting on 9-23-2012, “Our Garlic Stinks”), we weren’t holding out a lot of hope for our fall-planted cloves.  After reading up on the aster yellows infection, we attempted to get some fresh planting stock, but there was none left to be bought commercially.  We did get a few bulbs from a couple of other farms in the area, but their crops were also infected.  Thankfully, our friends Jim and Jan, who live nearly 90 miles north of us, had a beautiful harvest of garlic and were able to share a few bulbs with us.

We planted the best looking bulbs from our stock in a new area of the garden.  Then we planted the 2 varieties from Jim and Jan in another part of the garden.  We also had quite a bit of elephant garlic left in the pantry from the 2011 harvest that we were still eating (they keep nearly forever!), so we also planted some of it in the segregated patch too.

We had thought about putting Remay row cover over the plantings to keep the leaf hoppers that spread aster yellows off the plants.  This late spring may have delayed the insect’s migration, or they may just have found enough to eat on the native asters and wild carrots, because we haven’t seen any infestations like last year. We decided to opt out of the Remay covers so we could keep a better watch over the plants.

It’s clear now that the garlic is up and growing that all of our local planting stock from the 2012 harvest is infected to some degree.  There were some skips in all of the varieties but  our favorite garlic, Russian Giant, looked the most pathetic, with curled, yellow tops only an inch or two tall.  We decided to dig it out and dispose of it before it spread its disease to anything else.  As we dug it, the smell of slimy, rotting garlic was a sure sign that we were making the right decision to cull.  By the looks of the rest of the patch, we may get some harvest from it, but we’ll definitely not save any seed stock from that planting.  Everything that is from stock that was brought in fresh, or the elephant garlic that was from the prior year, looks so much greener and vibrant, the way garlic should look at this time of the year. Hopefully, we’ll be able to replace the Russian Giant with some clean bulbs this fall.

We’ve been having a bit of “Mayhem” this month with the weather extremes.  We started out the month with a snowstorm that left us with 6″ of snow by May 3rd, although some locales not too far from us had 15″ or more.  Then less than a week later, we had well over an inch of rain and some very large sleet on the 11th.  A couple of mornings of frost followed, entirely “normal” for us at this time of year.  But the next day had temps in the low 90′s.  Then more rain.

It’s been even more of a challenge to fit gardening into this roller coaster ride of a season than ever in the past.  We started out May being quite behind in early gardening work since we had 7 snowy days in April.  Feeling like we were about a month behind where we’d like to be, we worked like crazy to attempt to make up for lost time.  Now the sudden heat and warm rains have meant that Mother Nature is also sprinting ahead.  Much of spring is now on fast forward with the fruit trees blossoming in quick succession, their pruning having been finished earlier this week.

While this mad dash is taking place, it’s important to maintain flexibility in the garden plans to accommodate the shift in timing.  A couple of examples come to mind of changes that we set in place this past week.  We had planned on planting our Roy’s Abenaki Calais flint corn in mid June in order to have it not contaminated with pollen from the neighbor’s field corn, both for seed purity and our preference to not eat GMO (genetically modified organisms).  Armed with “growing degree day” calculations and notes from prior years on our corn and the neighbor’s fields, we thought we had worked out a plan that would give us the best window for maturing a crop without cross pollination.  However, the weather has also been affecting the farmer’s field work, both with the late snows and the wettest spring on record for our area.  They are also 3-4 weeks behind schedule which means that our flint corn couldn’t be planted in mid June and mature a seed crop in time and leave time for our late sweet corn crop as well.  So we shifted gears and soaked our corn seed on May 10th, finished soil prep in the corn beds, and planted out the just germinating seed on May 12th.  We spread Remay (row cover) over the beds and crossed our fingers.  By May 18th, the corn was up an inch, and our neighboring farmer has yet to get his seed in the ground, with more rain in the forecast meaning additional lag time waiting for fields to dry enough for heavy tractors and equipment.  Working on a gardening scale means that we have much more opportunity to work after a rain as we don’t have to wait for the soil to be as dry.

Another example of changing plans happened on Thursday.  We normally plant our many varieties of dry bush and pole beans in mid May, but due to everything being delayed we had set May 24th as the target date.  But on Thursday we had the soil ready and the trellises were already in place.  The weather forecast predicted several days of rain.  More rain could further delay planting plans, but if the seed is already in the ground the rain becomes a valuable resource, necessary for germination, rather than a hindrance.  So we worked all day and got everything planted.  As long as the weather continues on a warmer trend, we should be OK.  If we get another frost before the month’s end, we’ll have to cover any beans or other warm season crops that are vulnerable.  But this is a “normal” part of gardening in Minnesota and a risk we are used to handling.

As we were charting a course through these obstacles, I was thinking of gardeners who are more novice than the two of us.  Kudos to those of you who are taking up gardening of late as it’s an increasingly harder task than in the past as far as weather goes.  As we remember it, seed went in the ground, rarely got watered, and things grew without much help other than weeding.  Now the challenges seem to begin as soon as the season turns, whenever that actually happens.  Wishing all of you good growing this year.

Even though we have a sizable garden (about 1/1oth of an acre), we prefer preparing our ground for planting by hand.  It’s a lot quieter, for sure, but even better is the resulting soil texture.  In the spring, there is not much vegetation in the way that needs to be incorporated.  Most of the time we just need to loosen or fluff the soil a bit to get a little air into our clayey silt loam.   Roto-tilling looks great initially but doesn’t improve the soil’s ecology in the long run.  It breaks the soil up powdery-fine when dry, leading to surface compaction when it rains.  Or it makes it clumpy if tilling is done when the soil is still too wet.  It also changes the soil profile by mixing deeper layers of anaerobic microbes with the surface organisms.  And getting out the heavy iron leads to a hectic mindset.  There is extreme temptation to work up the whole garden at once, rather than bit by bit, leaving the exposed but unplanted areas baking in the sun.  A spade or a garden fork do a fine job of just relieving the soil compaction caused by the weight of winter snows, and have served us well for decades.  But we’ve been looking at ways to improve our efficiency at getting soil prep accomplished without breaking our backs, our wallet, or our peace and quiet.

We’ve looked at broadforks or U-bar diggers off and on over the years but their price was beyond our budget.  So this winter we decided to build our own version.  We already have a post-hole digger that hardly ever gets used.  It has nice, padded fiberglass handles that were the right length for a broadfork (4′) and 1.25″ thick.  We just needed to fabricate the tool bar to attach the handles and some tines.  We decided to use 1.25″ galvanized pipe (actual inside diameter was 1.38″).  A piece of pipe 18″ long with two elbows and two 6″ long pieces formed the basic tool bar.  The elbows were screwed on with a vise and pipe wrench.  The right elbow was drilled and a quarter-inch bolt drilled through it to keep it from coming unscrewed (“lefty-loosey”, after all).  The handles and their curved washer shims fit nicely into the 6″ pipe stubs, which were drilled to match up with the bolt holes already on the handles.  If necessary, the handles can be unbolted from their new tool and bolted back onto the post hole digger, and back again as needed.

The pipe was drilled with 1/2″ holes, 3.875″ on center, with 20 degrees of pitch from the plane of the handles, so that when the tines are stepped down vertically the handles are forward of the digger’s body at arm’s length.  Now we just had to come up with tines.  We decided to use grade #5 hardened, threaded steel rod that was 1/2″ in diameter.  A six foot piece yielded three tines that were each 13.75″ long, then we cut the remainder in half.  The extra length of the longer tines were used at each side to fasten a piece of  2-by-3-inch scrap lumber over the nuts and rod ends that would protrude through the pipe, providing a comfortable place to step/stand on the tool bar.  The bottom of the board has 7/8″ holes countersunk into it to accommodate the nuts.

One final step involved using a bench-grinder to sharpen the tips of the tines to a point, which was done before final assembly. We had considered also grinding off the screw threads along the tines, thinking that the tines would be harder to step down into our tight soil with the added resistance. But testing in our greenhouse indicates they may work fine as-is. We still have lots of snow on the ground so this won’t be seeing much action right now.  Hopefully this new tool will help us get caught up with the late start this spring is offering and the peas will get planted as soon as the snow melts!