As December closes, I took time to clean up the hops.  I’d left a bit of each vine with the intention of trying to clone them to give away.  Things got rushed with the rest of the tomatoes and they never got buried.  Now they are just dead vines with no use.

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It’s a great day when you find your first tomatoes of the seasons on the vine.  Green of course but it’s a start.  The tomato plants are all around knee high and starting to climb the wire fences.  The first raspberry is already eaten.  Even the Peppers are showing up.

We found cucumber beetles on several of our squash and cucumber plants a few days ago.  A quick trip to the Grange Co Op and an organic solution was purchased.  The next morning the bugs were back resulting in another spray.  Then another bottle and the notice that the limit is 6 applications per year.  After four, there just wasn’t any stopping the bugs.

Enter Sevin. One treatment and no more problems.  I’m all for organics but there’s a limit on how much I’ll go out of my way for something that had no effect.

Each year the garden gets upgraded somehow.  The first year was a simple “deer fence” with posts tied to the existing fence T posts.  The deer fence worked well until the deer decided they wanted in.  Watering was with an oscillating sprinkler that we moved around.

Year two we built a true 9 foot fence to start.  Midway through the year I picked up a bunch of 3/4 inch pipe and a few sprinklers to mount on the fence.  The system was fed by a hose and controlled via two quarter turn valves.  Great progress but required manual control.

I picked up the upgrade for the garden this year, an automatic sprinkler controller. In addition to installing the controller, I moved the hose connection to the front of the garden to allow for a shorter hose.  Watering every morning to kick the year off and will add a second cycle when needed.  So much easier!

With the tomatoes and eggplants out of the greenhouse and in the ground it’s time to clear the last bit of room in the garden that the greenhouse has been filling for the last three months.  The greenhouse is a pretty simple setup with metal 1 inch poles and a cover that goes over the whole thing.  It came down easily but created a challenge of how to clean and store the cover for the summer.

For now the poles are in an extra trash can tied together with the small parts in the bottom of the can.  The cover should be rolled up soon and joining it for summer storage.

It’s really bad when a sales man tells you you’ve got a problem.  We lost one tomato plant in the last week.  A Carbon (black) tomato plant.  It was something that my wife had picked up at the spring growers event in May.   She found the card and knew where it was from but hadn’t had luck with initial contacts.

We were in Jackson ville this morning at the weekend market and a vendor had some tomato starts.  When she mentioned the carbon, the grower hadn’t heard of it.  It came up that losing one of 42 wasn’t that bad at which point the grower replied back “You’ve got a problem”

Busy day.  Now that the rototiller is working and most of the garden is tilled it was time to plant!  Tomatoes first and then eggplants.  About 35 tomato starts are in the ground.  This year we took a different approach.  Previously  we tied two 52″ cattle panels together with twine at the top then leaned them together.  This gave us frames that were about 4 feet 6 inches tall.

This year we picked up 7 foot T posts from the Grange Co Op and mounted a single panel between two of the posts.  This gives us the full 5 foot panel to grow on and by putting it 8 to 12 inches off the ground gives us much more room at the top to tie the tomatoes to.

Looking forward to another great year

The rototiller I have is many years old.  I’m not sure how old but it was manufactured in Europe (BCS) and apparently the company is updated all their designs from this model.  It’s a great rototiller when it starts but when it doesn’t, well it’s a pain. I finally figured out the exact starting order and dealt with the reason it would be hard to start.

First, the pull start didn’t always retract.  This makes it really hard to start when you can only get a half pull.  It also means you are pulling really hard and doing damage to the cord.   I pulled a few  times to many and another strand of metal broke loose.  One pull after that, the whole cable broke.

Stopping by the small engine repair shop for a few parts and the counter worker hadn’t ever heard of metal wires for starter cables.  After several assurances that even though it was a hard start the nylon rope would work just fine I took it home and spent a few hours pulling the starter assembly apart, cleaning it and putting it back together.

The first pull resulted in the rope slipping through the handle and back into the starter housing.  20 minutes of break down and put back together later I pulled again.  The first pull broke the rope. I tried a number of items including an impact wrench with a belt for a car.  After that attempt I noticed the notch on the wheel and it reminded me that they used to have a notch so you could put a rope with a knot into the notch, wrap it a few times and then give it a yank.  It worked perfectly.

That left one problem which was that even on a great pull it wouldn’t turn over.  I noticed that the deadman switch had a bit of slack.  Tightening that up made it start on the first time almost every time.  Now it’s a fun rototiller to use.

I added more corn and and added a second set of starts today.  The first batch were transplanted up to 4″ containers today to make room on the peat tray.