Being as it was Earth Day, I spent a couple of hours today playing in the dirt. I weeded the two large garden plots and turned over the earth in each. I can confirm that the black flies are out here, too. I was working in short sleeves and got a couple of bites on my forearms.
I raked out one bed to make it ready for the planting of onion sets. I'm doubling the number of onions going in the ground this year for three reasons: 1) we ran a little short this winter in the home-grown onion department 2) Terry wants some white as well as yellow onions and 3) they require so little attention once they get started. Since we will be gone for much of the summer, that last was a vital part in the decision.
The other bed is where we grew cukes, tomatoes, and string beans last year. It had a thin layer of straw on it over the winter. I turned that in but found the soil to be pretty solid lumps of clay despite the 20 bags of top soil I mixed in there last year. I'll let it sit until Saturday afternoon before adding more top soil and raking it out.
We're not planning much of a garden this year since we'll be on the road for much of the summer. The only other plants that will go in the ground are melons and squash--winter squash, not zucchini. If we put zukes in we would have baseball bats by the time we get home in late August and those aren't good for much except, well, baseball. The melons and butternut squash, as pre-started seedlings from Agway, will go into specially prepared mounds of a mix of topsoil and cow manure. With luck, we should have a bountiful harvest if the borers don't get them. Since we haven't had any borers in the zukes the last two years, we should be okay.
We will not be planting any lettuce or spinach--they will just bolt while we are away and will not get used. Nor will we bother with tomatoes. It's too short a season, and they require lots of water and flower picking to keep them tight. The same for bell peppers. Our season is too short and they just don't do well even in pots on the deck. We'll pass on the cucumbers for the same reason as the zucchini. And string beans? If no one is here to pick them once they start producing, they too will be like baseball bats when we get home! I suppose I could grow navy beans or lima beans but then I'd have to dry them to store them properly.
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Terry went with a few of her stitching friends today to visit the History Center in Ithaca, NY. One of the women she knows had an exhibit of Hungarian embroidery there and she gave them a personal tour and explanation of the materials. They had lunch at Moosewood, a famous vegetarian restaurant.
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We took a little walk outside after dinner this evening and found quite a few wildflowers growing along the ATV/log skidding trail that winds around the hill. Parts of the slope are quite moist so there were violets, spring beauty, trout lillies, columbine (still too early for flowers) and even horse tails. There were another four or five we couldn't identify from memory. I'll have to go back there tomorrow with my camera and see if I can get some pictures. The forecast is for nearly an inch of rain on Sunday and if they are correct, that should mean an abundance of growth early next week.
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I planned to go down to the Mansfield Agway tomorrow morning to get some bags of topsoil, but I got a call this evening that the cap for the Tundra was in and they would like me to be there around 10 AM to get it installed. They're about 30 minutes away and installation should take about an hour. I'll get the dirt after. The cap is too important. My Tundra will have a whole new appearance by noon.
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