At least we think it is. So far it stands at four elephant garlic lost and one R.O.U.S. caught. This pocket gopher was just a tad out of Jack’s league when it comes to her mousing. It was enormous! Like scare you and turn around screaming enormous.

Lee went to the farm store last night to get a cinch trap. It was his last ditch effort before we sat outside with a shotgun. My dad humorously suggested building a guard tower in the garden. I was thinking that we were going to have to give up gardening for the year. Lee was getting horribly frustrated watching a garlic disappear down a hole every day. The whole situation was getting somewhat morosely comical. I’m glad that it is over with. At least I hope it is.

Lee is up in arms and so far he is losing. It’s getting quite ridiculous over here. Lee has one more thing up his sleeve before we try sitting outside at night with a shotgun.

So what exactly has been going on over here you might ask? Remember back when I was talking about Lee having some garden anxiety? We had found this huge hole by our garlic and Lee set a trap. Then he set another, and another, and another… Life went on and I wasn’t too perturbed that the varmint was outsmarting us.

Well I was okay with it until I found this! You may now gasp in horror as you look at these graphic pictures.

Yup, that was my beautiful row of elephant garlic. It was so lush and exciting for me as it is the first time I have ever grown it. Well this stinky little cuss decided to tunnel under the whole row and eat one of them. When Lee put a trap where the wily butt-headed monster came up, he back filled and then popped up a day later under the next garlic plant. Then when Lee went out today he said yet another garlic had been hit. This one looked like it had shrunk–the animal was eating it off from below and it was sinking. The entire area smelled of garlic. It’s becoming something out of the movie Caddyshack or the Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Lee has tried big traps, a mouse trap with peanut butter, cutting in the tunnel, and a fall in trap with a glass jar. He is going to try the cave in method and see if that works before we try the shot gun approach. I’m sure that will raise a few eyebrows from our old neighbors as they drive by.

The holes this thing makes are really big. Like you could almost stick your arm down it. It’s also very active. This hole I took a picture of and then came back an hour later to show Lee and the stinker had already backfilled it.

It’s war!

Lee finally got his tractor up and going. It was having some issues and the grass was getting out of hand. So much out of hand that my sissy town dog Edgar didn’t want to go to the bathroom because he hates getting his legs wet. I wanted to do cartwheels when I heard the lovely sound of the tractor starting and of Lee driving around mowing. I don’t like getting my legs wet every night either.

I did some mowing in the garden. The chicken’s grass was getting out of hand too. They won’t eat the long tall stuff because it is too tough for them. They like that tender new growth. Since the chickens were in danger of becoming lost in certain areas of their pen I thought it pertinent to mow for them. That and we moved the portable fencing and they are completely shut off from the vegetable garden area now instead of partially. They weren’t happy, but then they forgot about it.

My potatoes are up. I am feeling very happy about that. The varmit in the garden has been too obsessed over my garlic so I don’t think that it has tried eating my spuds yet. This may be a happy delusion on my part. But I prefer to keep it that way. Any more garden destruction out there and Lee may feel the need to stock up on ammo, guns, night vision goggles, and camo apparel.

We went to our annual Lane County Master Gardener fund raiser sale and got plants. We got lots and lots of plants. Basically I need to get a wagon or convince a bunch of people that don’t like plants to come along with me and be my plant holders. I have about half of the stuff I bought already planted. Among all my plant loot, I got some more blueberry bushes and a fruit tree for my Mom. You can’t beat the five dollar price tag on any of those.

The weather finally let off raining for a little bit. So we did a big ol’ “YES” over here while jumping up and down with excitement. Finally we can do some garden planting.

Lee dug a bed for the asparagus Friday night after work. This area was in the low section of the garden so Lee had to use a shovel due to the many rocks in the soil. I watched him. It looked exhausting. I told him so.

Then on Saturday he hoed a new 30 foot bed for some more potatoes. It still looked exhausting. I told him that again.

On Sunday he decided to hoe some more beds. He did a little one that finished out a previously hoed bed.

Then he did a new longer row. I told him he was making me tired.

“Are you tired yet Lee?” I kept asking him that over and over.

I think he was getting tired of my questions, so I decided that he wasn’t that tired.

We planted the potato bed and the asparagus, but I haven’t planted anything in the other one and a half beds. Lee added several pounds of lime to each bed to start adjusting the pH. Rain was in the forecast so I didn’t want the seeds to rot. When I wasn’t watching Lee hoeing the garden beds I did some weeding in my flower beds. A few of my plants didn’t make it over the winter but most of them did so I was happy overall.

I also noticed that the lilac bushes are all out in bloom. My dad and sister hate lilacs because they get headaches. I don’t mind them though. If I had room inside I would cut big bouquets and put them around the house — it’s like bringing the outdoors inside.

One of my favorite trees is now blooming: the Dogwood. I love how long they bloom.

I’m thinking about cutting out this flowering bush. It’s in front of the Dogwood tree and it reminds me of Queens Anne’s Lace, which I hate. (Mainly because we have so much of it that grows out in our fields at the moment.)

Vegetable seeds are pretty easy to find. We buy most of our seed from nearby Territorial Seed Company, but even if we didn’t have this local resource there are dozens of other sources online and via mailorder. I know the world has lost a lot of heirloom seed varieties during the last 50 years, but individuals and companies have preserved a lot of varieties too. There’s no shortage of seeds.

Unfortunately, the world of small grains is very different. Last year I grew some buckwheat as an experiment, and this year I’m interested in growing barley, field corn, and buckwheat. Let’s take barley. Specifically, I’m interested in varieties of spring two-row malting barley. So far, these are the only sources I’ve found:

• Conlon Barley at $6.25 per 5lbs (plus $4 shipping)

Wow, it looks like I have exactly one choice! When there are at least a dozen two-row varieties available to farmers, why do home gardeners only have one? When my local university has been involved in developing several new varieties, why am I shipping seed in from Maine?

Does anyone know any other sources for small-scale grains? How about tips regarding the secret handshake needed to get access to the many grain varieties mentioned in the extension literature?

It’s been soggy over here and it’s impeding my garden progress. I’m feeling very grumpy at the moment and have a beef to pick with the weather. Today it rained over an inch and the rest of the week is forecasted for straight rain. Lee and I have been itching to plant things but the soil doesn’t dry out fast enough before the next rain shower comes. Our soil does drain pretty fast due to the sand content. My mom with her clay soil feels jealous of us, because she has to wait even longer to till in her garden. The picture on the left is actually the only place we get pooled water when it rains. That particular area got compacted from truck tires when we were hauling in tons of wood last spring. We don’t see any standing water on our property otherwise. I say that though, and I have no idea what the south corner of our property is like due to the bramble invasion.

I have spuds that are begging me to be planted. It’s hard looking at all those eyes on them and not being able to do anything. The spuds in the picture are ones that my mom gave me from her garden last year. Lee and I are going to plant saved potatoes and new potatoes of the same variety to find out if we can see any difference in potato output. My sister-in-law swears that they plant the same variety of spuds every year from their leftovers, and never see a decrease in potato production due to viral diseases (there are about two dozen of them). But according to Steve Solomon in his book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, if you don’t get new certified virus free seed stock then you run the risk of losing up to 75% of your harvest from diseases. To make things worse, most potato viruses do not not make the plant look visibly sick. If it ever stops raining I am going to plant French Fingerlings, Cal White, Red Norland, Milva, Sungre, and Desiree. These are all new varieties for us this year.

I LOVE asparagus! I have never grown it but Lee grew up with a huge row of it as a kid. Lucky guy. It’s always so expensive in the store so I am getting my own asparagus row started in our garden this year. Hopefully I don’t massacre it accidentally. I have three crowns of Sweet Purple and ten crowns of Jersey Knight. Lee read that if you can’t plant them right away you can put them in peat moss so they don’t dry out. Since this rain is not letting up any time soon that is what I did. You are now viewing my exciting new addition in a bucket.

I have a confession to make: for the past 19 months we haven’t been composting our kitchen scraps. Yes, I know, it’s shocking. We’ve wanted to. I’ve bemoaned the lost organic matter, but something was always in the way. We didn’t have a good spot for a pile outside. We didn’t have a container for scraps inside. Stupid reasons, yes, but we dump our carrot peels in the trash and say “I’ll get to it tomorrow.”

Well, tomorrow finally came a few days ago. We were browsing a second hand store and I saw a $7 stainless steel ice bucket that Robin agreed would make an acceptable long-term counter-top addition. We brought it home, and when we filled it the first time with scraps I went out with a hoe and cleared new spring growth of Gallium Aparine from part of the former bramble area behind our house. This spot is sheltered from rain by tall Douglas Fir trees, and should make a good location for composting. I added straw and some horse manure as a base, and started layering on the kitchen scraps. Ahh, the guilt is lifting …

Since the weather on Sunday was calling for days of rain, I decided to compost the rest of the horse manure that was still sitting in my truck. I layered it with old straw into a large pile next to the one for kitchen scraps. I’m going to turn this one regularly to keep it hot. We’ll use it in the garden as needed, but even a few weeks of active composting will make a difference. You can see from the photo that I missed a step. It got too dark to work, but I should have covered the pile with a thin layer of soil. Soil dwelling bacteria capture stray ammonia that bleeds off the pile, thus preventing loss of nitrogen value.

Note that if you have the room for it, it’s not necessary to build composting bins. They’re just going to rot eventually. That said, we plan to eventually build bins for three reasons. 1.) This area borders on our back yard area, so a bin will keep the area tidy and prevent dog snacking. 2.) Bins allow you to use a aerating tool to turn the compost without physically moving the whole pile. 3.) When composting animal carcasses and butchering remains, bins allow you to more efficiently use your carbon materials (such as saw dust).

Last year was our first vegetable garden since we bought the place in September 2008. The garden was tilled for us but the soil had no improvements done to it other than some fish emulsion I used as fertilizer. We did fairly okay with growing vegetables but you could tell some things really needed better soil to grow well. We didn’t try to do anything with the soil that year as we were beyond busy working on different house projects at the time.

This garden year we are taking a multi-pronged approach to improve the fertility of our soil. First, we are using Steve Solomon’s “complete organic fertilizer” with each vegetable at his prescribed rates. The recipe for making it can be found here or in any of his recent books. Second, we are adding lime to raise the pH which increases available soil nutrition and reduces stress in some plants. Third, we are using permanent raised beds so we can focus improvements around the plants. And lastly, we are starting to add organic matter to the soil. Sunday found us going down to my parent’s place to pick up some horse manure for use in the garden.

Today I finally got my onion starts planted. Hopefully the starts will survive as I bought them 3 weeks ago. I’m kicking myself for buying them so early before I was ready to plant them. We are growing Big Daddy and Copra this year. After looking at what I planted, we realized that I should probably go pick up some more starts. Onions are a staple for us and it didn’t look like nearly enough. Besides, Lee dug up two new beds for me and I only filled one of them.

I am very excited about the Copra onion variety after talking to my sister-in-law. She says that she plants them every year and they last them about the whole year. She then pulled out one of her Copra onions (this was about a month ago) and it was the most perfect looking onion. It looked like she had just bought it, although it had been stored in a box for 6 months.

Tomorrow I will go out with my saved cardboard and some straw and lay down my new pathway. I am very interested in seeing if this technique will help with the weeds this summer.

Lee decided to use the chickens as little manure spreaders. He started dumping wheel barrows full of the horse manure in the new future row layouts. The hens go through it and scratch it out and then he will just hoe up the beds later. Since they spread the manure it’s one less job for Lee to do.

The rain finally let up for enough days in a row that I went out with my new grub hoes to try tilling over a garden bed. I dug a 4′x20′ bed using the 4″ grub hoe yesterday, and another 4′x20′ bed using the 6″ grub hoe today. So, what’s the verdict?

It’s hard work. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. It’s certainly easier on your back than using a shovel, but I broke a sweat in our 55° weather. If you have health problems or grow an acre market garden I wouldn’t recommend it. There are those for whom a garden tiller is the only reasonable option.

But, I like it.

It’s good exercise. It gets your heart rate up without straining anything. You can easily control your pace to match your fitness level (my pace was slow). Our great-grandparents had better health than we do not just because they ate better food but also because they didn’t have a gas-powered-gadget-for-everything.

It does a better job. Many will disagree with me on this one, but please hear out a few points. Hand tilling does not destroy the soil structure as thoroughly as rototilling, preserving valuable mycorrhizal mycelia structure. You can aim your strikes to avoid earthworms or fetch out rocks as you see them. Also, I dug the soil at least 9″ deep, and often deeper. As Steve Solomon points out in Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, most rototillers only fluff up the top 5″ of soil. He recommends hand spading to 12″.

It is meditative. You can hear the birds, smell the fresh air, pause when you like, and lean on the tool’s handle. The chickens will inspect your work (a little too closely sometimes) instead of fleeing in terror. There’s no vibrating handle bars or gas fumes or roar.

It is faster. In Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, he argues that walking is faster than taking the train if you count the time required to earn the train fare. Similarly, digging with a grub hoe may well be faster, if you count the time to earn the money for the tiller and the fuel and the maintenance. Beyond that, ownership of a tiller seems to imply a gardening system of yearly tilling. (More time!) I hope to manually till only once, and thereafter rely on a system of top dressing, cover crops, broadforking, and no stepping in beds. We will see how this works out.

It seems I’ve launched into a philosophical discussion without reviewing the actual tools in question. They were sturdy and functioned well. I worked at about the same pace with both the 4″ hoe and 6″ hoe, although I expect I’ll prefer the 6″ for tilling as I get more accustomed to the work. I used the trenching and perpendicular nipping method recommended on the seller’s site, but I briefly tried the alternate method mentioned by the writer of the Stonehead blog. This actually seemed much more effective, and I plan to till the next bed in this manner.

With 160 square feet of raised beds complete, only 2200 square feet to go …

The garden is slowly starting to come to life. Once summer is on it will look completely different. Just a few more days and it will officially be spring.

The rhubarb starts that my mom gave me last year are up already. I gave them a shot of Steve Solomon’s complete organic fertilizer mix to help boost them. Since this will be their second year, I’m hoping that with improved soil nutrition I will really see a difference in the plant size. I see holes in their leaves already. Grrrrr. I thought that with poisonous leaves they would be left alone. Something is out to prove me wrong.

A lot of our fruit trees are blooming out. I am hopeful that all of them made it over the winter. Since we got the garden fenced and late night deer attacks have been stopped, I’m looking forward to a lot of second year growth on them.

My garlic still seems to be doing fairly well. This is good, as I only have two cloves of garlic left from last year’s harvest. Lee and I are super excited about our garlic this year as it was put in on time so we should have big cloves this summer. This is only the second year of growing garlic for us but I see this as being a staple in our garden from now on. We LOVE garlic over here. Best not to get too close to us. Okay, it’s not that bad. We are growing five varieties this year.

I did a bit of mowing around the fruit tree side of the garden. I would have just left it for the chickens to take care of, but there were some brambles growing in there that needed wiped out. While I was mowing Lee decided to get the chicken litter composting. What was once a hill of chicken litter became a flat non-hill after the chickens thunder-thighed their way through it. Once Lee finished mixing it up with various stuff, he put a tarp over it, and then realized the hens were not going to leave it alone. His solution was putting sticks all over the exposed edges to keep them out. It seems to be working so far and most likely causing the neighbors to scratch their heads over what exactly we are doing now.

The hens are having a ball in their new place. Since they have been in the garden, I have no longer seen any cucumber beetles. This is good and I have subsequently stopped having nightmares about those pesky bugs in my garden. We plan on blocking the chickens out of the garden as we plant. Otherwise, they are my current line of defense on the cucumber beetles until I get some guineas. Actually, I suppose I shouldn’t count my guineas before they hatch (arrive?). I have a book ordered on Gardening With Guineas that I need to read first. I want to see if I can incorporate them into my gardening to help with my bug problems.

Here is another gratuitous hen shot of my Golden Laced Wyandottes.

My only perennial herb that I have so far is Rosemary. Hey, I know, how can I only have one herb in my garden? Well you have to start somewhere! I hope to add a few more herbs this year. I planted it last year and it still seems to be okay. A few of the tops looked like they died back a few inches, but other tops on it look fine. So I am taking this as a “yes, I might just live” from it.

Lee decided that we needed to change the garden layout this year so the rows will run east to west. It was a tractor and sun related decision, so the blueberries that we planted last year needed to be moved. Mostly so they wouldn’t accidentally get wiped out if Lee does tractor exercises in the garden. It will probably stunt their growth somewhat so it’s better to do it now while they are still small. Lee got two of them moved and all the hens were helping out best they could (by getting in the way of course). They were positively sure that Lee needed their help in the whole process.

Last year a neighbor gave us a couple of tree starts that a friend gave him. One of those tree starts was a Bay Laural. I need to figure out a place to plant it. It came back to life in it’s pot so that made me happy. Hmm, does this mean that I really have two herb plants now even though it’s a tree? I do use bay leaves in a lot of my soups. The only thing that makes me nervous is that even though I was told it was a Bay Laural I am unsure if it is one of the safe kinds to eat.