January & February from 52 weeks gardening

Dear Big Diggers,

After reading Carolyn Herriot's great book "A Year on the Garden Path - 52 weeks", I summarized the main items for each month into an easy-to-read, colourful document.
It's three double sided pages in pdf over at our P.I. email group.
CLICK HERE and sign in to see the pdf, if you'd like to print out your own copy. It has already been updated once thanks to Jim, and can continue to be updated by you if you have ideas to add.

Here are the first two months to look ahead at:
January

1st week– relax, read seed catalogues, plan, design, build. Test soil if unsure of acidity.
– make new, paper mason bee tubes for our bee houses that go outdoors in March.
2nd week
- use dolomite lime on beds where needed, leaving several months time for the lime to break down
- order seeds that do well in our west coast climate (Note: avoid Monsanto seed companies).
3rd week
- green pea and summer cabbage seeds can be started in cool greenhouse; grow peas to six inches in height before planting out.
4th week
- top dress soil and feed with organic mulch. Add layers to existing compost piles.
- in the greenhouse, remove dead or mouldy leaves. Watering: Keep winter mesclun fairly dry.

February

1st week– clean and maintain all tools; wipe wooden handles with oil (linseed/turps) 1-2 times per year.
– clean out/sterilize the greenhouse and get trays/pots ready for new seedlings
2nd week
– tend fruit trees (dormant spray; prune out diseased wood or cankers.)
3rd week
- can speed up rhubarb by covering with an upended terra cotta pot to force growth.
- sow fava or bell* beans from Feb. to early March for a July or August harvest date.
4th week
- in greenhouse sow onion, leek, lettuce, peas in pots, early cabbage, summer cabbage, spinach. Plan spaces for flower seeds.

I'm a novice gardener myself, and I really think these are handy lists to have. Please comment if you'd like to.
Best to all,
J.

*The fava beans are edible by summer (if you like them) but the bell beans (I just looked it up) are a cover crop that gets weed wacked and tilled under. Good for a fallow bed rotation before another pea crop, apparently. Useful info.

Welcome to D.I.G.S. Garden blog!

Welcome to the D.I.G.S. garden blog!!

Any and all of our gardeners and friends can add to this blog!
We'd like to create a place for photos and ideas for our garden, and alert those who are away, or busy in their own gardens, as to what's going on in the big community garden.

Book titles, tips and green-thumb tricks, planning guides all welcome.
We are putting together a few handy charts and time-tables for planting seeds in our area, and will have those up soon.

All vertical growing ideas and thoughts on how to create more fruit and vegetable production are welcome.

Here is a sample of a gardener's timetable from the U.K.
Look how simple it is to make a jpeg large enough to read, just double click on the chart below, and then use the BACK button to come back here again.



We are all looking forward to knowing the latest news and also reviewing past plans and successes.
By keeping a quick jotting of what we did each week in the garden, perhaps we can create a gardening journal of our ideas and projects, so looking back, year by year, we can see by date what was done.

Anybody may contribute! The more the merrier! Especially your photos of growing things! Love to see who's got what plants doing well in their home gardens too!



Send suggestions, ideas, and your plain text gardening notes by email with j-peg photos (small size) attached to: m.e.harris50@gmail.com and we'll post them here.

I don't think we can post Word or PDF documents here, but if they are sent as j-pegs and plain text, they're easy to post on this blog.

NEWS- Free gardening mags!

At the harvest table these days you'll see free garden magazines to take home and read. Please help yourself.

And hey, now that we have coffee (and often cookies - thanks to L.!), perhaps we can unthaw ourselves and we'll see you all in the New Year on Saturdays at 10 am by the coffee pot in the "social shed". All diggers welcome!!! Wear your gardening parkas.(grin!)

Comments are welcome on any post (just click on the word COMMENT below) and you can comment anonymously or by using a gmail account, your choice. It's fairly easy to figure out; and if for some reason it tells you it didn't work, just click one more time. Sometimes it has to go twice....why? Who knows?

Also, the slight delay in the appearance of your comment gives time for a moderator to see and approve all comments. Thanks for your input.

Meanwhile, happy seed decision making and catalogue reading (and cookie baking - click the COMMENT word below to see recipe!)

Best, J.