First Beans
The first beans of the season are coming along nicely even though they are under some pressure by rabbits. S'okay, I got sumthin for them rabbits.
Sowed my (not so) wild oats.
So, given that we are trying to turn virgin soil into viable organic agricultural soil, we need to grow a lot of cover crops such as oats. So's I ordered some oat seeds and planted them in with the peas back in early March. Normally I would have turned the oats under a few weeks ago but I'se trying to let them go to seed to do that whole exponentially expanding the amount of oat seeds I was in control of thus eventually leading to world domination thing. Here are some pics of the oat seeds. Bathe in their splendor.
Black Plastic Mulch Application
Coming from Texas where suppressing soil temps was the goal, I am not used to having to try to keep soil temps elevated. But if you wanna grow peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, or melons in PA, keeping soil temps elevated is what you gotta do. To help you in this pursuit, you can apply 'black plastic mulch' which is basically big ole rolls of black plastic that put down over rows that you've hilled the dirt up in the middle (see pics below). The trick is to wait till after a good rain to get your hill an initial soaking then put the plastic down and secure it either with dirt, rocks, or pegs. Wait a week or so for the earthworms and other dirt dwellers to re-stabilize, then go down the row and cut a hole at the spacing rate for whatever you want to plant there. So far we've put in tomato, pepper and eggplant transplants. Sometime next week, I'll put some cucumber and melon seeds in and see how hard it is to plant from seed using the sheets.
Pro-Tips: Hops Growing #299
Did you know that hop vines have to wrap themselves CLOCKWISE around the rope/string/whatever that they grow up? If one did not know this and one was going to begin growing their own hops and go through the effort of building their string trellis support system and wrap the young hop vines around the support string any old way (meaning some CLOCKWISE, some COUNTER-CLOCKWISE) one might be surprised to find that some of the hop vines grew fine up the rope and some of them got pissed off and had to unwind themselves. One might be confused until one realized that the vines that were initially wrapped COUNTER-CLOCKWISE were the ones that were having to unscrew themselves, literally. So young Hop Barons, take this lil pro-tip to bed with you and when your young hop vines begin reaching for their ropes to grow up, you wanna wrap them CLOCKWISE around that rope.
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