Port Potager

Although this summer was been mild and hurricane-free, we often do get a good deal of wind here. Our old row cover fabric  from the spring took a beating because of it, so we picked up some new to protect our broccoli bed from cabbage loopers : This fabric is of much better quality than the stuff we used before, and it comes in rolls 13 feet wide. We got a 16-foot length, which (as you can see) is too big for our 4x8 broccoli patch. Turns our we based our measurements on our older, taller PVC hoops. Better too big than too small, though. We folded up the ends and used bricks to hold them in place: Another upgrade to help hold the row covers in place are these pvc clips: I read about these in  The Year Round Vegetable Gardener , by Niki Jabbour. All it takes is a bit of PVC a size up in diameter from the ones you use for hoops. Kirk cut them into these short pieces, then cut a slice out the long way, leaving the black PVC in a C-shaped piece. Then you j...

At first I wanted to blame the kids for this: After all, this young broccoli plant is at the end of the row, and in a spot where balls from the yard have been known to fly. But a closer look shows some teeth marks, I think. And the there's this cabbage from yesterday: And this denuded baby bean stalk too: I haven't seen anything around except chipmunks. They are living in the perennial border and don't seem to have bothered with anything there at all. They do use a drainage pipe under the screened-in porch as an expressway to the back yard, though, so maybe they've been sneaking grocery trips in the garden without us noticing much. Looks like it's time to break out the bird netting and row cover fabric for the season. The netting worked last year on the beans, and once they were bigger, no animals bothered with them any more. Now I know what I'm doing in the garden today, I guess.

Over the weekend we set out our broccoli and cabbage seedlings. These are the tiny plants that we started from seed back in February . These seedlings had been doing really well , up until the time when they were left out on the wind and got a sunburn during the hardening off process. That debacle killed some of the tiniest and slowed the growth of the rest. Still, we had several strong plants left, so we set them out on schedule: Above are very tiny broccoli seedlings. They are set in one-foot squares, a la Square Foot Gardening . Most of these seedlings have two adult leaves and a small root system, so in theory they should be transplant-able. Still, they seem kind of pathetic after their disastrous hardening-off, so I planted a seed or two next to each one as an insurance policy. An additional insurance policy here is the row cover you see above. Kirk quickly knocked together what basically amounts to a large wooden staple that we pushed part way into the earth. A...