I just couldn't help myself. The warm weather these past couple of weeks made me do it. Every year I try to test Mother Nature. I want organic veggies as soon as possible. I don't have a greenhouse to start plants in early spring, but I do have a dining room table in front of the sliding glass door. This year I bought seven of the 72-cell mini greenhouses to get a jump on gardening. They didn't work out too well. The little seedlings quickly out grew the little peat pellets and I had to transplant them into larger containers. Out of the cupboard I got some 16-ounce plastic drinking cups, the cheap ones, and I filled them up with potting soil and transplanted all the little plants into them. So enters the camping table to join the dining room table where I once thought I had plenty of room. Last week the pepper plants grew out of their peat pellets and had to be transplanted. Now the floor space under both tables is full of more 16-ounce plastic cups with even more veggies. I will have to come up with a better idea next year.
I am trying something new in the garden this year. My soil is 100 percent Johnson Lane sand, the kind the dust devils pick up and blow to Utah. I have been adding goat poop, rabbit poop and straw to it for years but I figure I'll pay for some "good stuff" this year and see how much it helps with production. I brought in several yards of amended soil from a local compost store the past few weeks. I have unloaded and pushed back to the garden, one little truck load at a time, one wheel barrel at a time. I tried to only put a shovelful in each spot that a drip emitter is at. Why waste the soil on the weeds.
I just couldn't help it, I had to do it. I spent all morning setting up the tomato cages with the Walls-o-Water around them and diligently placing each of my hand-raised little plants in the ground. Now, if we don't get a mid-June freeze like last year or thunderstorms that drop big hail, I might just get an early and long harvest.
As you know, we froze mid-week last week and anything in the ground without the walls of water, I lost. So today, I replanted. Now that the parade is history, we'll see.
Happy gardening.
-- Lisa Welch is a Johnson Lane resident and can be reached at 267-9350.
