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Lots of people with lots of questions dropped by this morning.

A local ripple in the big wave back towards small plot, do-it-yourself gardening.

We pick some of their leaves most every week; but these two cousins keep comin’ on strong.

  Just one row of each of these muscle plants can provide a single household
key vitamins and minerals the whole summer through.

In the hot weather, we shade newly-planted seeds and seedlings from the full sun to help reduce soil evaporation, and keep the top inch or so of soil from drying out and killing the new tender plants. We’ll remove it after the new plants have their first real leaves, and we think the roots have established themselves in deeper soil. This shade cloth lets through about 50% of the sunlight.

A second avantage of protecting seedlings with this type of permeable shade cloth is that it breaks up heavy rain into a mist, which prevents damage to small seedlings and lessens erosion.

We pulled the last of the snow and shell peas today, and replanted new snow and shell peas for a fall crop – same varieties: Oregon Sugar Pod snow peas, and Pioneer shell peas.

The spring crop was ready for first harvest after about 70 days. So everything else equal, we could expect a new crop around the beginning of October. However, the spring crop starts with short, cool days and ends with long, hot days. The fall crop sees just the opposite. We need to keep them well-watered in the hot months so they don’t just croak.