9 inches of rain?!

Well, that does explain the daunting amount of weeds that I saw when I got there the other weekend. I accomplished only a limited amount of weeding then, as I had a stunning headache, but I returned with reinforcements (thank you, K, you know who you are), who provided both moral support and significant help yanking out the accumulated weeds that had sprung up in the intervening period and all that rain. Now I can find my plants once more. Hoo-ray!

This blog not equipped with Smell-o-vision, sadly

It's been a complicated month, starting with a complicated couple of weeks, what with helping my mom with her medical difficulties (she's doing well now, and resting). Over the second weekend, I stayed at my mother's to be available to help, and we had some quiet time; we also got some rain - which gave me the opportunity to re-experience the wonderful aroma that the ferns on the east side of mother's house give off after the rain showers. It made me realize that that's what I think of as what green smells like. Should green have a smell? I think so, and that's one of the smells, associated with the evening calls of robins. I should have taken a photo, but didn't think of it at the time.

I have since, however, become somewhat annoyed with the perversity of this month's precipitation. Every single window of opportunity that I had to get to the garden, I got rained out - no, not merely rained out, but thunderstorm-and-lightninged out. Did I mention the garden's on rolling terrain, in a meadow? So - not necessarily the smartest place to be during a lightning storm. Also, quite annoying for the seeds: it's not exactly smart to try to plant seeds in running mud, or into soil that's about to be pelted with big heavy drops so that they'll splash right out again. *PLOOSH*

*sigh*

Okay, so in the department of "making lemonade cause you got lemons" - I have been learning about all the nifty edible weeds that grow in my garden, instead of growing other plants I had been planning ... Photos to follow, but basically I've been making salads or stir-fries from the purslane, pigweed, and fat hen growing in the garden. Hey, I'm predating on the invasive species, what? :) Oh, and that's just one more use for that Sara Stein book. Ha!

Also, I still plan on getting seeds into the ground, and I hope my tomatoes and a couple zucchini seedlings that I was given have somehow prevailed, in spite of the vagaries of the weather. I will enjoy the cold-weather crops (more spinach and radishes - and hey! I have so many potatoes to look forward to!!!)

So thank you for enduring my unintended hiatus. Mum's doing well and we just had a family visit this weekend in Maine, chez Aunt and Uncle; who also nicely gifted us each with a couple of plants (again, photos to follow). Thanks!!!

Since I haven't been able to garden, at least I've been able to knit. A friend recommended I get involved in ravelry.com - a knitting and crochet enthusiast site that's in beta testing. Lots of fun - but addictive! Still, if you've been checking my Flickr feed and wondering why the heck there were so many photos of yarn and knitting instead of plants...now you have your answer.

I hope now to return to my regularly scheduled gardening, blogging, and maybe now I'll have to include a little knitting. That's the update, thanks for your patience, and now if the weather will just cooperate...

Control over watering...

ilex raised a good point in a comment today, and I was going to directly reply in a comment, but then I realized how long my comment was going to be, I thought I'd better just post on the subject.

She asked about whether it was a difficult transition to go from container gardening (where I get to control the plant's water intake, i.e., not too much or too little) to planting outdoors and therefore being largely subject to rain, and I think that's a valid question. I hadn't given it a whole lot of thought, as such.

In the past, my containers always outside, or on windowsill; in fact, one year they were in full sun all day long on a second-story balcony, so while they avoided bugs to a great degree (yay!) drying out was a major problem: I had to soak them every single evening without fail. In addition, containers are less tolerant of extremes of temperature and moisture: they're smaller (in the sense that they have no access to other water sources - they only have what you give them) and so are more prone to drying up, particularly the clay pots, given that they have more exposed surface area. Likewise, they are vulnerable to the cold - a particular consideration in the exposed position on that second-story balcony I had. My housemates and neighbors thought I was nuts that year; I collected baseball-sized rocks as thermal mass to surround the containers in the early spring (read: February). It worked, but yeah, they thought I was nuts. Until I was eating salads harvested from those pots, so...

So, sun (or lack thereof, in the case of one place I lived) and pests brought in by others (e.g. houseplants from the supermarket bought by a roommate, introduced aphids and whiteflies) were the problems I dealt with, rather than water-control being an advantage.

As for the outdoor garden - so far, I have either lugged jugs of water into the plot, or had access to water spigots (when they got turned on for the season; they were off for the first several weeks). We've had a fair amount of rain recently, so for the immediate future I'm not concerned. I'm also covering the seedlings, and plan on investing in some chickenwire cages to cover my rows, to protect them from the ravages of the woodchuck.These nifty ones (picture above) belong to another gardener at my community gardens, and are made of better-quality, more expensive screening (rabbit-fencing?). I think for my purposes chickenwire will do alright.

That said, there are in fact a number of community gardens in the area of Boston. the ACGA has a nifty search engine that, if you are an apartment-dweller like me, will help you search, by zipcode, for a garden near you.

I chose this garden because it lies directly along my daily commute to and from work, and is about a mile away from home. Granted, there's a BIG hill between us, but it's not the end of the world. This makes it easier to maintain the garden during the more extreme weather: I had planned all along to stop by in the evenings on my way home and water the plants (with jugs of water, since I haven't invested in a hose). I have a watering can with a decent spout that won't slosh the little seedlings right out of their homes, so... I think I've got it covered.

I guess the answer is, I'm more concerned about the woodchuck and bugs than about the plants drying out during the hot months, or about either too much or too little rain. If it rains too much, I have means to cover the rows and steer the water away (those raised beds plus the storm windows which I can prop up to give them a little shelter). If it rains too little, I plan on watering them regardless. The disadvantages are bugs and other pests, at least so far as I can see at this point.

Later in the season, I'm told that our meadow is a bit of a cold sink, so that factored into my decision to invest in some lumber in the fall to construct a couple cold frames.

I hope that helps clarify some of the factors I considered when I decided to transition from the containers to the garden.

rain gauge

rain gauge, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

Made a brief visit after work today - arrived 7ish, close to 7:30, but there was still a little light and it had stopped raining long enough for me to trek out to the plot. Perfect time to install a rain gauge, right? AFTER the rain stops? Yeah, well I missed it this time. I'll check the NOAA page to see approximately how many inches we got this time. Lessee here... according to NOAA/NWS archive, over the past two days we got 1.97 inches
Okay, I can live with that. So about two inches of rain.