Housekeeping note

I'll be leaving on vacation to the Southwest here pretty soon. The trip will include hikes in national forests and visits to Albuquerque, Phoenix and Scottsdale. We'll also be stopping at the Grand Canyon.

So I won't be around for about a week and a half to work in the garden, or manage the blog. But hopefully I'll come back with some cool pictures to share. The wildlife and plants of the desert have always been such a fascination for me. I remember making marker drawings as a kid of the painted desert, with big saguaros and Road Runner and Coyote-style canyons.

'Til then, happy trails and happy digging. And don't forget to water.

Update:
OK, so I did one more thing. I pushed some seeds into the ground just now: habanero peppers, green onions and carrots. Carrots are supposed to do well in sandy soil, peppers grow almost anywhere, and the onions are kind of an experiment. Anyway, I have them marked, so if something pops up there while I'm gone, don't pull it. It's not a weed.

Dana tells me she planted some watermelon seeds as well, which are marked with plastic straws. They're along the south side of the garden. Those ought to be good sellers if we can coax them into growing us some melons. Oh, and cucumbers too, which I think she planted close to the squash.

The good news is there's still plenty of space, so if anyone has any herbs, veggies or fruit they'd like to grow, give it a shot.

10 Gardening Tools for Beginners

After a while doing gardening, you can accrue a shed full of garden tools — some of questionable utility. You might buy things and later find you don't use them. Or you run out of money to spend on gardening and really wish you'd gotten something that would be just right for a job you have to do.

I wanted to write out in this post a shopping list for the beginner gardener. Just a few essential things you'll need to turn soil, dig holes, spread amendments and destroy weeds. I favor hand tools myself just because they're cheap, low maintenance and you get a little exercise using them, so you probably won't see many machine-powered tools here. In any event, I'm not sure what I'm going to include just yet, so lemme get writing...

1. Leather work gloves: Your most important tools in gardening are your hands — so take care of them first. Get yourself a good, tough pair of leather work gloves that are thick enough to handle the occasional thorn and protect your hands from getting all bunged up. Of course, mine usually do anyway. I'm kinda clumsy like that.

2. Steel garden rake: Get one of these. Preferably with a nice long handle. The steel garden rake is useful for cleaning debris and dead leaves out of your flower beds in the fall, but they're sturdy enough to dig weeds out with as well. I also use them to break up tough soil, smooth out uneven ground, spread amendments and mulch over beds, and till fertilizers into the soil.

3. Mattock: One of my personal favorite hand tools, I've found the mattock to be indispensable when it comes to dealing with the thick clay soil that most of us find here in Oklahoma when we start digging. You can use these to break up clods of earth, plow rows into your soil, chop up and pry loose tree stumps, and deal with some of the tougher problems you come across in gardening — the ones that require a little muscle. Most mattocks have an extended, hoe-like scoop on one end, and either a pick or an axe-like blade on the other end.

4. Hand cultivator: There's no getting around it. When you have to weed, you've got to be up close and personal. So get down in the dirt and pound those jerks with a hand cultivator. Look for a two-sided one that has a hoe-like edge and a two- or three-pronged cultivator side. Hack away at mature weeds, or else drag the tines through moistened soil to disturb young weeds and weed seeds. It might be more comfortable to get a long-handled one, but the nose-in-the-dirt method is more effective in my experience, which is why I don't even own a hoe.

5. Sharpshooter shovel: This is the type of shovel that's most useful to the gardener. They're the kind that are skinnier than they are wide, and have a sharpish edge at the end to cut through soil. Get one with little turned-out rims so you can use your shoe or boot to apply a little extra force when needed. Real wood handles are best for all the abuse you're going to put it through. Remember that wood can spring back, but once metal bends, it's never the same.

6. The Garden Claw: I think these are made by the same people who designed the Garden Weasel, which anyone who stays up for late night TV will remember from their infomercials. This tool is pretty versatile. They can break through difficult soil, mix in amendments, stir up compost, aerate lawns, destroy weeds and break up clods of dirt. It's pretty much only limited by how strong you are, but another advantage is you don't have to bend over as much as with some other tools. As you twist it, you don't have to bend at the waist provided it's adjusted to your height.

7. Yard fork: If you make compost, there's not really a better way I've found to keep it sorted and turned than the four flattened tines of a short-handled yard fork. You can also use this tool to aerate your yard or spread mulch around.

8. Pruners: A pair of sharp pruners is needed whenever you have to harvest some herbs or deadhead some flowers. Hedge clippers are for keeping your bushes well-groomed, and loppers are for handling branches, saplings and other tough, woody stems that your garden can do without. Those three things are all the cutting power you need, but I'd choose the pruners first just because they're versatile.

9. Soaker hose: Watering plants isn't just a matter of splashing as much water as possible on them. That can be disruptive to the plants when the water comes down with enough force to damage leaves and stems, or else splash mud onto the leaves — which can spread disease. The soaker hose waters more gently and deeply, by introducing water as a mist that sprays through hundreds of tiny holes. Plus since it's a hose, you can weave it through your garden however you like. I used to keep one coiled on top of my compost heap to keep it damp. Also, this is probably the most water-efficient way to keep your plants healthy, as less water is wasted and it all goes to the plants.

10. Hand-held spreader: These are little plastic buckets, usually square, with a hand-crank on the side. Most of them have adjusters on the handle that allow to you decide how much of something to apply to your soil. These spreaders are good for applying granular fertilizers to your lawn or garden, or reseeding or overseeding your lawn. And they're less cumbersome than the kind you have to push or pull.

Plotting the Plot

The PennWell Community Garden is a group project, and everyone's input is needed to help make it a success. But with any garden, you have to have a good idea where you're headed. You must know what you want to do in this season, and what you'd like to accomplish in future seasons.

So by way of getting that conversation started, I want to use this blog post to spell out a little on how I'd like to see this garden grow in the weeks, months and years ahead. What started as just a seed of an idea, as Traci Huntsman put it, can continue to grow and expand proportionate to the amount of muscle and thought we're willing to put into it.

Here's a few ideas I have for the garden's near and far-out future. Please don't take them to be the end-all, be-all. I want to hear other ideas. I'm just one member of the group.

Short Term Plans (next few weeks)

• Finish clearing out the remainder of the bed space, and take some measures to prevent weed encroachment (namely, mulch of some variety)
• Finish planting so as to use up all available space. We're doing a good job with spacing requirements thus far, but it would be a shame not to use all of the land we have open to us. We should talk at some point about how we can obtain more plants, either from seed or transplant. A little bit of collaboration will help us plan this out.
• Top-dress the plants with soil amendments (and the area in between, if enough amendments can be obtained) to introduce more organic materials into the soil.
• Water judiciously throughout. This summer is showing some hints that it might be hot and dry. Maybe even record breaking, although I hope not. We will have to be careful and take steps to protect our investments.

Medium Term Plans (before the season is over)

• Begin our composting operation. Based on the plans I talked about earlier, we can build ourselves a functional compost bin with a little bit of lumber and a saw only. Afterward, we can rely on garden waste and compostables that we come up with ourselves (either from home, or from around the office) to create good soil.
• Organize our Mini Farmer's Market. The idea was floated in our first and only meeting to make our produce available to people around the office. We shouldn't wait until we're picking tomatoes and peppers to figure out how we're going to do this because, well, produce tends to either spoil or get eaten. Things we need to discuss are how we're going to advertise that we're doing this, what we will charge as far as pricing goes, how to make sure we offer quality products, what materials we might need, etc. I think the idea has promise if we just develop it a little.
• Also, hell, we need to give it a name. We have "branding" experts here I'm sure, so what do we call out market? My suggestion? The Cubicle Farmer's Market. Because that's what I feel like now. A cubicle farmer.
• Keep the garden well-maintained in between growing seasons. The last thing we want to do is let things become as overgrown as they were at the start of this season. It was a battle restoring it to usable condition, believe me! There are a few options here, like covers and mulches. Maybe one of the nicer options would be to plant some kind of cover crop, like a rye grass or some other type of nitrogen-fixing plant. This technique is called "green manure." The plant prevents other weeds and grasses from moving in, and then when the time comes to get ready for the next season, you simply till the plants into the soil where they add nutrients and structure. That way, the garden will be in better shape than we left it rather than worse.

Long Term Plans (future seasons)

• Talk about fall gardening. I haven't done much autumn gardening myself, but I understand that the cooler seasons are best for many different types of crops. Turnips, radishes, beans, tomatoes, squashes, pumpkins and melons are a few examples. Selling pumpkins around Halloween might be a pretty cool way to raise a little money.
• Explore the option of expanding our cultivated space. This could take the form of container planting around the bed, building a new bed, or digging an in-ground plot in the area adjacent to the existing bed. With more space, we can further our growing efforts. We could create a dedicated herb garden, or perhaps a small butterfly garden to attract pollinators to the area.
• Another option would be to plant fruit trees, or a berry patch. This might require some kind of approval from the building management people, but I've always wanted to plant a tree and never have. The arbor would have a symbiosis with the garden, attracting pollinators to one another. Eventually, the shade from these trees could create a microclimate ideal for a shade garden, or maybe shelter for a bench or table or two — a nice place for people to get away from their desks. And in a few seasons, we'd be able to add fresh fruit (think peaches, pears, apricots, etc.) to our Mini Farmer's Market plan.

That's about all I can think of right now. Let's talk about it!

Plants on the Ground

OK, big progress from one week to the next. The PennWell Community Garden is now mostly cleared, and partially planted. Thanks to the starter plants purchased by our group (and they were some well-chosen plants, too... well done there), and some donations from Dana Springer, we now have some sweet peppers, some slicer tomatoes and some yellow and zucchini squash plants. Have a look!

Also, and perhaps more interesting since it will benefit us for future seasons, we have a better connection to water! Our lovely building management crew this morning finished installing a farm-style water faucet within close range of the garden so that a hose of just about any normal length should be able to water the entire bed without the need for big spools or a large collection of hoses.

I heard last week from Randy that they would be working on this soon, but I wasn't expecting it to happen this soon. In fact, it's working right now. So please offer your thanks to the building crew the next time you see any of them — on behalf of our grateful little band of gardeners. This will make caring for our crops so much easier.

So, there's a lot happening right now. As for me, I plan to put some seeds in the ground and finish clearing out the garden later this week, just as soon as I can come to work in a pair of jeans and non-dressy shoes.

I really enjoyed helping get the bed ready for planting over the past couple of weeks. Sure, it was a little weird at first packing shovels and mattocks into my mid-sized sedan, and splitting time between my cubicle and a weed-choked rectangle of dusty soil, but it was also a welcome break from my usual day filled with SEO terms and hyperlinks.

Maybe I looked a little funny doing it, but getting in a little manual labor in a job that usually doesn't require it is rewarding. Sure, you get tired, but it's a good tired. One of the big reasons why I like gardening is how much hard work it requires. It's not for everyone, but I enjoy it.

The work from here on out will be a little bit easier, although I worry about weeds coming back. I learned that there is a thin layer of fabric underneath our foot or so of soil, but it's probably falling apart by now and grass will try to find sunlight on the other side. So we have to plan to keep the weeds down with some kind of mulch. Aside from finishing the weeding and planting some seeds, the other thing I'm thinking of is mulch. It'll be good for the plants, and it will make what weeds we do encounter easier to deal with.

So that's where I'm at. Please don't hesitate to comment, e-mail, or just grab me in the hallway so we can go over what everyone else would like to accomplish next.

PS: Dana mentioned that we might need a few tomato cages as our crops start reaching skyward. I thought this was a good idea for our tomatoes and maybe even our squash and cucumber (if any are planted). They would help us conserve space by growing our plants up and not out, help us harvest vegetables easier, and prevent foliar diseases by keeping the leaves out of the dirt. Unfortunately mine are in such poor shape I couldn't think to donate them, but maybe someone else knows how we could get some.

The First Garden

Aside from the Oval Office, the South Lawn and Richard Nixon's bowling alley, the White House is also famous for its gardens. Press conferences brief or lengthy are often held in the Rose Garden, which was first planted in 1913 by Ellen Wilson, wife of President Woodrow Wilson. The Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, planted at the direction of the eponymous First Lady, was planted to help balance out the Rose Garden.

The grounds of the White House got its first functional kitchen garden when Eleanor Roosevelt planted her "Victory Garden" to encourage Americans to grow their own fruits and vegetables at home to aid the war effort.

Speaking of Victory Gardens, check out this period propaganda created by the people who brought you Loony Toons, including Mel Blanc. They, uh, probably aren't going to make any more cartoons like this one.

First Lady Michelle Obama helped to establish the current White House Kitchen Garden to help outline the benefits of organic gardening and, well, eating your vegetables.

As you can see, this garden makes use of companion planting, organic soil remediation, heirloom seeds taken from President Jefferson's Monticello, and a little bit of community garden philosophy by involving area kids.

Plus, any garden you can land Marine One next to is pretty damn cool in my book.

Digging a Hole

Another day, another shovelful. I don't have any pictures today because there isn't too much difference between today and yesterday. At least not yet.

But the good news is Dana and I have figured out the water situation. If you go out there right now, you'll see the hose unspooled, and it reaches perfectly well right to the extreme end of the bed.

She also brought some very handsome squash plants to transplant in. She says half of them are zukes and the other half yellow, but she's not sure which is which. That's OK. They'll tell us given a little time.

I can't spend any more money on transplants this season, but I am looking forward to trying my hand at growing a few things from seeds. I've never tried carrots for example, but something tells me that this loose, sandy soil I've been working with all week long will let them stretch out their roots nice and deep. If your soil is too hard or compacted, sometimes you can grow some funny-looking carrots, I've heard.

OK, that's it for now. I will probably go out there again later this afternoon and get some real work done. If I really push myself, I might be able to clear the rest of the bed... but my mouth might be writing checks my arms and back can't cash... Check back here for updates.

UPDATE (3:00):
More work done with mattock, rake and shovel. The light rain felt pretty good, though it's not really enough to dampen the soil. I'm maybe... 70% there, but the last part seems very imposing at this point. Working in the center of the garden is actually harder than at the edges. You might not think it, but that extra foot of raised bed really makes a difference to your back and shoulders when your feet are on the ground.

Side note, I think the best planting approach is to have the bed completely level — as opposed to making hillocks or troughs as you might see in a plowed field. The reason being the soil composition. Hillocks and troughs are good when your soil holds water well and your crops might be at risk of getting waterlogged. With this soil being so sandy and loose, I don't think we'll have that problem at all. On the contrary, when the weather heats up, we're going to have to be judicious with our watering as moisture will sluice easily through this soil.

Whew

Sorry for the visual, but I'm gonna have "300" abs by the time this garden is ready to plant.

"I'm glad I brought my long-handled shovel."

In seriousness, the garden is maybe... 40% free of grass and weeds. I figured out a good way to pry loose the big clumps of grass that gather near the edges. Just use the old sharpshooter shovel. For the interior part, away from the edges, I've been using my Garden Claw tool. It doesn't get in there as deep as I'd like. I hope it's deep enough to keep this grass from resurfacing.

If any of you are planning on planting, I think it would be best if you did so on the side of the garden I've been working on. I'm working north to south, if it isn't clear from looking at it (and I hope it is!)

All right. Now, back to the job they're paying me for. Happy digging.

PS: I nearly forgot, but one of our building people, Randy, has told me and Dana how to get water out to the garden. There's a 250-foot hose on a mobile reel, and a place to hook it up.

Furthermore, he told me that there was a work order filed to install a farm-style faucet near the chain link fence by the garden, so in the future it won't be such a schlep to get the hose out there. That should be happening within the next three weeks or so, I'm told. I'm looking forward to that!

UPDATE:
Here's how things look after this afternoon's work.

Yeeeeeeaaaaah. You can see dirt now!

Compare this shot with what I put up yesterday.

Still not completely there, but I'm beginning to think we might just make this happen by Friday.

By the way, I'm sorry about all the divots.

Turning Dirt

Now it's time to move some dirt at the PennWell Community garden. We have a nice little selection of heirloomy peppers and tomato plants ready to go in the ground. Here they are:

Also, I have a seedling or two in one corner.

Today, I spent about 45 minutes tearing out some of the grass rhizomes that have grown back since the ground was plowed under. Here's what that looks like:

Unfortunately, here's the view from the other corner...

Can't even see how nice that other corner looks, can ya? Yeah, we've still got some work to do.

But I'm sure we're up to it! Stay tuned for more.

Mom's garden

Took some pictures one of these past weekends around my mom's house. I'm always pretty amazed at how good things look there even before she does anything approaching "work" on the garden. It just looks this good on its own... Well, she put a lot of work in during the past years, of course.

Some Russian sage here. This plant is old. Not sure how many seasons I've seen it grow. I like how the blue trails down the stems.

This plant looks suspicious, but it's actually a hibiscus. Hasn't flowered yet, but it DID survive the winter, which is cool.

I'm not sure what this flower is called, but it's packed with petals. Cool color against a background of hosta.

This is a flowering spearmint, practically a bush, with cannas in the background. I think I'd like to divide that spearmint and take some home for my beds. When it's not flowering, the mint is tasty.

I've said it before, my mom is the only person I know who can really grow some strawberries. She'll get several more harvests like this one before the season is over.

Xander digs the berries. They are pretty amazing... The smaller ones especially are a lot tastier than anything you can buy anywhere.

He's not much help with the weeding yet, but he's working on it.

I'll probably have some more pictures later in the year when things really start flowering.