Garden update : May 2009

Baby salad greens poking through. Putting these in a barrel, surrounded by gravel and sand seems to be a very good slug deterrent. That's well-suited to salad greens, too, because you cut them early and the others fill in the gaps left behind. So, you don't need a lot of space unless you eat way too much salad.


I've uncovered last year's attempt at soil rehabilitation (sheet mulching) and planted vegetable seeds here. I posted last year around the same time of year when I started that sheet mulching experiment.


I put a number of different tomato varieties here last year (I wrote about it back then) and it's a very good sun trap. This year, I'm going to interleave pole beans and peas. In all of my planting, I try to avoid too much of the same crop in one spot. Just as banks collect money in one spot for bank robbers to steal, putting a crop all in one place seems like it'd just attract more and more pests that like that crop.

New forsythia: one more step toward the evisceration of grass. Mint in the barrel is on the way back.