Garden

[drizzellla]

Just came in from scrapping the frost off my car windows.

[Allegheny]

It was 36 when I woke up at 6:30A today, already up 12 degrees now.  But anyway, my living room is starting to look like a green house.

I have five plants that need planted in ground and a delicate hanging basket which I probably shouldn't have purchased so early.  Cottage Farm shipped an order that is arriving today.   Due to a lot of rain our ground is still too wet but I am going to try and work around that with a potting mixture.

[gardenman]

Our last "official" frost date around here is May 14th, but it's usually safe to plant before then. I had an uncle who was a long time, old school gardener and for sensitive plants he'd bury fresh manure or a big old pile of fresh grass clippings that he'd wet down, a foot below the tender plants. The heat from the decaying of the grass clippings/manure would warm the soil and air above it and protect the plants from damage in addiition to improving the soil over time. He'd do this with tomatos, peppers, sweet potatoes, and other heat loving crops and nearly never lost a plant. By the time the really warm weather arrived the stuff would have decayed enough that it was no longer generating a lot of heat.

He would also practice pit composting where he'd dig a hole four feet square and four feet deep or six feet square and six feet deep, then keep it filled with organic matter. (Chicken/goose manure, horse or cow manure, grass clippings, weeds,kitchen waste, etc.) After a year or so he'd cap it with soil and watch to see how much it settled. If it didn't settle, he'd then plant a fruit tree in the middle. If it settled he'd add more organic matter and a new topping of soil until it stopped settling. Suffice to say trees grown in nearly all compost grew very quickly, very well, and yielded lots of fruit.

These were old-time practices that had been used back in the early settler days but largely abandoned in modern times. Along with putting waste fish (less edible stuff like carp, eels, etc.) into holes with veggies to help feed the veggies as they grew. A lot of the older practices were very effective, but are largely forgotten and unused these days.