Weather

The weather has been very weird this year. We had an unusually cold spell in spring (20 degrees in late March), and unusally hot spell in mid-May (broke 100). And this week totally unexpected heavy rain - the official tallies are too far away to apply, but we've had at least 2" of rain in the past week. We probably had half an inch today only - never thought I'd be digging drainage ditches on May 31.

Usually I have good luck with Feburary or March planted carrots, but I checked today and many of them are bolting. Well, who can blame them - it's been cold and hot enough to fool a vegetables (I'm confused too). There were a couple of ones almost big enough to eat - there is nothing like fresh garden carrots!

The reason for the ditches is for the tomatoes - tomatoes can get root rot in waterlogged soil. A few plants aren't looking very good after a week of downpour. Hopefully the new ditches will let the soil water level sink fast enough that they can recover. And a few dry days would help a lot.

Sitting inside (it was raining too hard even for gore-tex) I found a great site,
http://organictobe.org/. Who knew that Gene Logsdon had a blog? He wrote the Gardener's Guide to soil that my Dad gave me so many years ago, and the Small Scale Grains book (and many other books). And Roselind Creasy and several others who's names I'm not familar with.

Back to the garden - it's almost all planted now, the peppers went in today in between the rain showers, under shade cloth to keep them warmer. We got more of the flimsy little tomato cages - while silly for tomatoes, they work great for peppers, and support the shade cloth. The only starts left to plant are a two more tomatatillos, a couple of squash (maybe one's a cucumber), and a bunch of basils. And the upper beds got de-grassed and sheetmulched borders, so the invading grasses should be easier to eliminate. I might have time to move the broody hens to another coop, rig some nest boxes, and see if they can set some eggs decently. They are doing a very poor job in the regular coop.