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Thinning, Weeding and Watering Made Easy
With the advent of summer, it is time to buckle down and get a few tedious jobs done in the garden. But there are ways to lighten your load.
First, it is time to thin out extra plants that are crowding each other. Carrots and beets are two common culprits of crowding, and if you want sizable root crops, you need to thin them.
These small carrots need thinning
Carrot seeds are tiny, so we don’t often plant them one-by-one. Instead we tend to sprinkle them and –by gum- most of them grow. I maintain that thinning carrots needs to happen by the Fourth of July, so get to work. If they are real close together, you may want to use scissors to cut off the extras at the soil line to avoid pulling up carrots you are trying to save.
One way to minimize the need to thin carrots is to buy pelleted seeds next time. These are seeds that come coated with a thin layer of clay. Each is the size of a BB and can be individually planted. Plant them an inch apart and you can skip the July 4th job. As they get bigger, you can eat the carrots you thin, giving them a 2-inch spacing by mid-summer.
Beet seeds are large and easy to plant. So why are there clumps of beets that need to be thinned out? It’s not that you forgot your reading glasses when planting. The answer is that those “seeds” are not really seeds. They are clusters of seeds wrapped in a package like an apple, or a pear. Johnny’s Selected Seed Company, and a few others sell ‘Moneta’ beet seeds, which have just one embryo per seed. Those, if you space them well at planting time, need not be thinned.
Cutting off goutweed blossoms prevents seed formation
I like to be efficient at whatever I do, and that includes keeping a relatively weed-free garden. Many weeds quickly mature, flower, and produce seeds. Your job is to keep them from producing seeds. Right now goutweed – my nemesis – is blooming in various pockets around my garden, and I don’t have time to dig it all out. But I have a 16-year old helper who uses scissors to cut off all the flowers and bag them. We send them to the dump in black plastic bags.
Other weed control methods? Keep weeds from getting the sunlight they need to grow. You can do this by mulching. In the vegetable garden I spread out newspapers over the soil and cover them with straw, hay or leaves. Four to six pages of newspaper keeps out light, inhibiting weeds. Earthworms eat the paper over the summer, and newsprint is done with soy-based inks, so you are not adding heavy metals to your soil (which was the case years ago).
This method works well on walkways and around big plants, but is more problematical for onions and carrots which are small and closer together. I use grass clippings or chopped leaves, without the newspaper, around small plants.
Mulching tomatoes with newspaper and straw
Mulching in the flower garden is good, too. It keeps down weeds and holds in moisture. But beware: too much mulch can keep rain from reaching the roots of your perennials. An inch or two of ground bark helps a lot, but 3 or 4 inches will keep light showers from getting to the soil.
Some gardeners use landscape fabric under bark mulch, but I do not. I find pernicious weeds eventually send roots through the fabric and this makes weeding very difficult. Landscape fabric can also constrict perennials as they expand over time, choking them.
What about plain old black plastic? I don’t use it. Sunshine breaks it down over time, and makes a mess. It also keeps air and water from getting to the soil, which must affect soil microorganisms. But it will keep weeds down in a pumpkin patch for a single season. Still, the plastic ends up in the waste stream, which I want to avoid.
If we have a dry summer, you may need to water. Established perennials should not need added water, but your vegetable garden might. I don’t favor overhead sprinklers because they water everything: plants, walkways and weeds. I prefer a watering wand, which is a device I attach to my hose. It is a 30 inch aluminum wand with a sprinkler head and a valve. I can direct the water exactly where I want it. I like a brand called Dramm because the sprinkler head allows fast, gentle watering.
Watering cans are good, too. They allow you to see just how much water you are applying. This is important for new trees, which need 5 gallons a week or so. A sprinkler hose might seem like it is delivering a lot of water, but may not be.
A good timer will deliver water while you are away on vacation. They attach to your spigot and allow you to use an overhead sprinkler or a soaker hose. I have a soaker hose I like made by Water Right and available from Gardeners Supply Company (www.gardeners.com). It’s a round polyurethane hose, and much easier to use than the old fashioned flat ones I had tried previously.
So don’t let your garden dictate your vacation schedule. With mulch and a watering system you can come back from vacation with nothing worse than a lawn that needs cutting!
You may reach Henry at henry.homeyer@comcast.net or P.O. Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746. Please include a SASE if you wish a reply by mail. Read Henry’s blog at https://dailyuv.com/
Getting Ready for Spring and Worrying About Tomatoes
I know that most of you have probably already ordered your seeds, but I just did so on the day I wrote this column in the last week of February. I spent a recent Sunday afternoon going through my seeds and throwing out any seeds that were older than those packaged for the 2010 growing season. Almost any seed is viable for 3 years, and some are good even longer. Of course storing seeds in a cool dark place helps prolong viability, too. It hurts me to throw out seeds, but I don’t want to plant and then find that I my seeds didn’t germinate well – or at all.
Many people have e-mailed me with questions about the various blights that have plagued our tomatoes in recent years. What can we do? Well, I hedge my bets. I buy both heirloom seeds (which generally have little resistance to blights and diseases but taste great) and modern hybrids that have been bred to resist diseases. Of the first generation hybrids (called F-1 hybrids in the catalogs) I have had good results with Sungold cherry tomatoes, Defiant, and Mountain Magic. The latter two are available from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Sungold is available everywhere. All are tasty, but nothing beats the flavor of an heirloom Brandywine.
Tomatoe Plant With Early Blight
I also order some seeds for tomatoes that are early to produce. A 60-day tomato is much more likely to survive long enough to produce a good batch of fruit than one that takes 78 days or longer. Those days on the seed packages, by the way, refer to how many days under ideal conditions it should take to get fruit after transplanting seedlings into the ground. If we have a cold, rainy summer a 60-day tomato can take a week longer – or even more.
In responding to a reader who asked about blights, I came up with a plan I shall try myself: creating a simple plastic-covered hoop house for some of my tomatoes. Some diseases have spores that live in the soil, and get on the lower stems and branches by splash-up. If I keep the plants protected from the rain and I water carefully, I should have few of those diseases. Mulching helps, too.
Other diseases are air-borne. Late blight, one of the most virulent diseases, is air-borne. Depending on the prevailing winds and the presence of diseased plants in your neighborhood, you might get it – or you might not. A greenhouse would be a big help keeping out those spores, but greenhouses are expensive. A simple open-ended hoop house should help some, and not cost much. It will be most protective if the open ends are not facing the prevailing winds. So that is what I shall do.
I’ve built hoop greenhouses with windows and doors, and it’s quite a bit of work. So this year I shall try something easier. I will make a 10 ft by 10 ft hoop house big enough to walk through, but without all the carpentry of a door and a window. It should hold 10-12 tomato plants, maybe more.
Here is what is needed: Twelve 10-foot pieces of ¾ inch PVC electrical conduit and some PVC glue. A piece of greenhouse plastic roughly 20 feet by 12 feet. Enough row cover or “Reemay” to drape over the ends, maybe 12 feet by 8 ft (I’m hoping this breathable fabric will keep out spores but allow breezes to pass through). Some carpenter’s spring clamps to hold the plastic and Reemay in place. And two 10-foot pieces of wood strapping that I will screw into the ribs of the hoop house to keep the hoops from moving.
I will pull a string tight between 2 sticks to define one side, and then measure over 10 feet and do it again. My soil is soft, so after I have glued 2 pieces of conduit together, I shall just push the ends in the ground, creating a hoop (the conduit is flexible but sturdy). Measure over 2 feet, repeat. And so on. I will try to buy my greenhouse plastic from a local greenhouse, or see if I can get a used piece they have taken down. Worst case scenario? I’ll buy 4-mil plastic that is not UV protected –but it will only work one year before it decays in the sun.
Once the cover is on, you could use a screw gun to screw right though some strips of wood strapping into the ribs with sheet rock screws to stabilize the structure and help hold the plastic in place. I’ll do it 3 feet off the ground on each side of the hoop house. Carpenter’s spring clamps can be bought for $2 each, and could be used to clamp the Reemay over the ends.
I reckon I can build that hoop house in an afternoon. If you want to have something even smaller, use just 10 feet or 15 feet of conduit per hoop over a 3 or 4 foot wide bed. You won’t be able to walk in it, but it will be even cheaper and easier to build. You’ll have to remove the plastic each time you want to weed, pick or water, of course.
Gardening is a constant challenge. If the blight doesn’t attack, maybe the hornworms will. But I’ll try not to worry too much, and try to figure out what I can do cheaply and efficiently to get the best production possible. Wish me luck!
Henry Homeyer’s Web sites are www.Gardening-Guy.com and www.henryhomeyer.com