Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Gardening

The first of the seedlings went into the garden yesterday.  Androo came over after work and we did a row of onions, it being a root day on the biodynamic calendar.  Androo is here for an education, as well as to make some extra money, and he got one yesterday.  I'm sure it is the first time he ever planted the way I do!  We set a line, then I took a garden rake and raked away a foot-wide strip of last year's mulch on that line.  Then we dug out any lumps of grass, always the bane of a gardener, and threw them over the new fence into the yard.  Let them multiply there, NOT in my garden!!

Then it was on to the hard work, poking holes in the soft earth and putting in tiny onion starts.  They are pretty close together.  I'll harvest half of them as scallions for my market baskets and for my dinner, then leave the others to grow to maturity.  We put in Clear Dawn yesterday, an open-pollinated onion with good keeping qualities, yellow, medium size. 

Clay is on spring break and he was looking for some hours of work, so he and I turned a compost pile in the morning, then went down to the garden and incorporated a couple of wheel barrowfuls of compost into the 4' x 100' strip of new garden that we put in last week.  That is hard physical work!

I quit planting onions about 8 pm, having been at it, either in my office or the garden, since about 5:30 am.  (Okay, okay, I took a little nap in the afternoon!)  I left Androo to finish the tray of onion seedlings. I fixed myself some soup and called it a day.  It was nearly dark when I saw Androo's taillights going down the drive.

It's kind of nice knowing that the garden is back in business for the season.

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