This is a photograph of staging a days worth of work. Beans getting sown, beds getting cultivated of weeds, spot watering for transplants, rolling out new irrigation tape, and preparing beds for their sowing...all while weeds in new beds are suppressed by some plastic mulch.
Tomatoes are the only crop I plant in the same bed year after year.
Typically, plants do best when rotated, but tomatoes are known to thrive when growing out of their own re-incorporated residues.
In order to complyu with organic rules (which stipulate that every bed must have legumes sown in them once every four years), and to follow the number one rule for building soil fertility, I rotate crops that are under sown in the tom beds.
Following the same pattern I use in the rest of the field (Legumes followed by leaves followed by fruits/bulbs/tubers followed by roots/cabbages), the tomato bed pattern is dutch clover f/b green onions and celtuce f/b marigolds f/b radishes. Clover fixes nitrogen, green onion and celtuce take up excess nitrogen, onions ward off various types of insects and condition the soil, and radishes thwart nematodes.
Lot's of food is growing in the field. The first two rounds of potatoes are in, the first three rounds of carrots are sprouting, the peppers and eggplant are transplanted out, and even the parsnips are germinating despite the heat.
The peas are getting taller, they should be getting their first line of twine to cling to today.
However, the 'extra work' I have been awarded with dictates that the butternut squash must be planted out, and that cannot happen until the unplanned for beds are developed.
Last year's compost is ready to go into the leaf beds. However little there is, some must now go to the unplanned for beds. This is what someone else's mistakes do...now I have to decide weather to give my tomato plants that side dressing of compost in mid summer or give the weak soil in the unplanned for beds a boost.
The full story of developing these unplanned for beds will be documented open the page 'curious food'.
I start the season with fast growing Napoli carrots, then do a second round of Napoli a week later to ensure their is enough should the first round fail.
Two weeks after that, I plant a mixture of colored carrots. I'll keep which colors I chose for this season under my cap for now...
And now some time to prepare the bean bed for late summer. These are beds I started in my second year. Owing to a number of mistakes (over a two year period), I have had to redevelop these beds a little at a time. This season, they are ready for taking cleaning crops - potatoes and beans.
The rest of the beds in this block (reserved for fruits, roots, and cabbages) will need some fertility boosting, so I'll be planting filed peas and oats.
The peas will fix nitrogen in the soil, the oats will nurse the peas and build soil mass. When these crops reach fruition, some will be cut off and fed to the pigs, and the rest re-incorporated back into the beds. Then I'll plant buckwheat, a crop that has a deep tap root which brings up leached nutrients, particularly phosphorus.The blackbirds know this is one of the two places I have been planting oats. Whenever I start working in this block of beds, they watch.
The earliest lettuces are looking great despite the heat. Some of the more recent transplants might not look so good at the same age, the heat has really been a challenge for them.
I started teh lettuces back in the cool of April. Recalling last year when I started my summer lettuces too soon (they suffered in the cooler parts of May last year), I opted just to focus on the spring lettuces.
Next year I'll be planting both heat tolerant and cold tolerant lettuce next season.
By the way, this has been the driest May in sixty years.
This rock garden is getting a lot of use. A few extra lettuces will provide me with some 'field salad' in a couple of weeks.
Harvest starts next week...talk to you soon.