“Hardening off” is an important part of the process of getting your home-grown seedlings prepared for life outdoors. Seedlings grown in a greenhouse, under lights (as mine are), or even on a sunny window sill need time to adjust to the new conditions they will experience outside. These little plants have never been exposed to wind, have always had exactly as much water as they want, and have been protected from direct, unfiltered sunlight. In order to help them begin to adjust to their new environment, it is important to start putting seedlings outside a week before you plan on planting them in the ground. Put them out for just a few hours...
The giant killing machine
What does your family like to do for fun? In our time off, we like to dig giant trenches throughout our front yard! I’m pretty sure our neighbors think we’re crazy. A little over a year ago, we bought this house with a beautifully seeded lawn sloping down to the front door. And now we’re systematically tearing it apart, first breaking the sod up by hand and then with a tiller and now digging trenches as deep as we can get. Well, it’s all in the name of rodent control, more specifically groundhogs. I’ve worked on farms with groundhog pressure in the past and, as you well know if you’ve experienced the...
Tilling, Tilled
The garden is tilled up at last and, as soon as we get the fencing in, we’ll be ready to go! We had originally planned to till last weekend, but with the surprising April snow we received, the ground was just too wet. When tilling with machinery or even by hand, it’s important not to work on wet soil, as, among other issues, the compaction already caused by feet and tires is exacerbated and turning wet soil can cause large clods to form, making a less hospitable soil environment for microbes and plants. Today, the soil moisture was perfect and, in little more than an hour, our 900 square-foot plot was turned from grassy...
April snow
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To dig or to till
Setting up a garden presents a myriad of questions. First, we debated whether to grow in raised beds or straight into the ground. After our soil test came back looking relatively good for nutrients and free of contaminants like lead, we decided that growing directly in the ground was the most cost-effective technique. Once that was decided, the next question was how to transform the ground from lawn to garden beds. We had already done some gardening at the very top of our property, next to a huge stone statue of Poseidon, a relic of the Stotesbury estate that used to stand nearby. Unsurprisingly, the ground next to the statue was...