Gardening By The Moon

Today has been a day of getting back into the swing of things for me...mostly the gardening swing.  It's been a beautiful day for being outdoors, even though it was cold enough to have to warm the place up with a nice fire in the wood burning stove while we had some coffee.  It didn't take long for us to bundle up (relatively speaking, not heavy winter clothes), collect all our cultivation tools, and head to the garden.   

Before I tell you about that, I'm excited that our ruby throated hummingbirds are back!  Before I left on my trip a couple weeks ago, I spotted the first one zipping past me on the porch and immediately put out a feeder.  While I was gone, Johny noticed a second and put out another feeder.  We still only have two (I'm sure more will show up eventually) and they are already battling to protect their territory around the feeders.

Back to gardening...I decided I wanted to "plant by the moon" (an old timer approach to successful planting...ma tante [French for my Aunt] Luci used to plant by the moon and swears by it and every time I'd tell her about a garden problem she'd ask..."well, did you plant by the moon?  Uncle Roy and I always planted by the moon!"  So yes ma tante Luci, I'm planting by the moon, thanks for the encouragement to do so!) this year and am using the Farmers' Almanac gardening by the moon calendar as a primary resource.  I've also looked at the Old Farmer's Almanac calendar but they aren't always the same...I figure when they are the same, that date is surely a winner, when not the same, I go with the Farmers' Almanac gardening by the moon version. It is interesting to compare them both. 

I've previously shared many of the things we've done to prepare the land this year (click on the link to read more) and today we were ready to plant (with the moon, LOL).  This is how things looked when we started this morning...

 ...and this is after weeding, creating rows, and then planting a row of each: costata romanesco summer squash, 1/2 row of mixed lettuce and 1/2 of redina lettuce, broccoli, celery, tyee fi spinach, carrots, turnips, rutabaga, beets, radishes (1/2 pink beauty, 1/2 crimson giant).   We also created several walking rows for easier access to the plants. 

We took a little break to recoup some of our energy, and came back in the late afternoon to plant two rows of pole beans, 5 1/2 rows of sweet corn (by half rows I mean they only go 1/2 way across the width of the garden, the other half of that space is for tomatoes and beans) and 2 1/2 rows of bush beans. The good news is they got planted, the bad news is today was NOT a good day to plant them, but I had already set the bean and corn seeds in some water to soak and soften up early this morning and only later realized my mistake.  We didn't want to waste those precious seeds, so in the ground they went...I guess it will be a good experiment to see how well they do!  We'll plant the tomatoes (the space is ready for them) and the watermelon (we still have to prepare that area, which is the newly tilled and never planted area you see back in the upper right corner of the pictures), following the moon planting calendar.  We also have 2 rows that we are saving for whatever seeds we might happen to come across that we just can't do without!

You many notice a frame looking thing at the far end of the garden, that is the beginning of the fence (to keep all the scavenging critters out) we are building, which we plan on completing next week.  You also may wonder how we water...you can see the green watering can in the second garden picture...we take a bucket over to the creek, fill it, carry it to the garden and then use the watering can...it's a little labor intensive, but we like it.  Which brings me to the other reason we really wanted to get things planted today...it's supposed to rain this weekend, not torrential downpours but a nice long lasting rain...good for the seeds and much easier than moving buckets of water!

Have I told you yet that I'm glad to be back?  

Thanks for reading my blog, you are the best f/f/r/s/f's, see you tomorrow,
Lise