January Week 4

Organic Gardening Calendar
12 weeks to frost free date in zone 6
By: Kathi

This week plant a few more seeds and clean up the flower and vegetable beds. And Bonus Time! We’re going to start a new bed. Yes now, why not?

Things you will need:
.........Gloves
.........Compost /Manure
.........Rake
.........Garden Hose
.........Lawn Mower

Again this week you should inspect you seed packets and plant the seeds using the timing methods described in the January Week 3 post. Check last weeks seeds for sprouting, and as soon as you see green, get them in front of a sunny window. Rotate the seed tray every day. More often if you can.

If the weather was too bad where you are, there’s still plenty of time to build those row covers and get that plastic on. The sooner you do it the sooner your soil will warm up to a toasty 60o. That’s the magic temperature to plant seeds or transplant slips. Buy a soil thermometer; guessing will just cause you to screw up. Been there done that.

By this time we will assume you have your compost pile set up and you are turning it as often as you feel like it. (I’m loose on rules) The more you turn it the better. I never turn my small one that’s in a plastic bin, but I get out the tractor tiller and turn my very large bed every time I use the tiller.

Get out in the yard and pull up last years annuals that are dead. Be careful…some of those little boogers will come back if you don’t have severe winters. Snip off tops of perennials that have died back. Put all that dead plant material in the pile. Always. Never waste any of it. Don’t put sticks in it that are bigger than small twigs unless they are rotten. They will take a much longer time to compost than your everyday plant scraps. Put those in their own pile, or if you have a chipper…have at it. I use my small sticks, anything 4 inches and smaller for firewood in my chimineas.

In January Week 1 we briefly talked about getting the vegetable beds ready for spring. Likewise now is a perfect time to decide where you want your next flower bed. Feel free to go ahead and make it big.

All the books will tell you to go out there with a shovel and dig the bed up to some ridiculous depth and add, add, add….Don’t do that! Good grief, why make something very easy so hard?

Get out your hose pipe (garden hose to you Yankees) and use it to lay out where the edges of your bed will be. It should form a complete loop or back up to something like a fence or a driveway for terminating the border…..

OK go get the other 75 foot hose…I’ll wait.

The trick is; the curves you put in the hose have to match the curvature of the turning radius of your lawn mower. If you can get out the lawn mower, and set it very low, mow around the perimeter. Do this mowing with the mower on the side you intend to mow later, rather than the flower bed side. Be sure there are no turns where you have to adjust the path of the mower, and that you are using the side of the mower that is closed to form the edge (not throwing grass clippings into the bed). Long smooth curves. If you do this correctly, mowing will be a snap. No weed eating the edges either….

Once your bed is laid out, do what you did to the vegetable beds in January Week 1 Spray every thing in the bed you want to get rid of with a 50/50 mix of vinegar and water. Take your sprayer and get the nozzle about 4 inches from the hose, hold it steady, and spray the hose as you walk the perimeter. This will begin the edging of the new bed.

Mulch. Compost or leaves are the best mulch if you have them now (next year you will). If not, go to the big box store and buy an equal amount of compost and manure. Get enough to put down a layer 1 inch thick. Don’t bother mixing them together. Just spread one the first half inch deep, and then spread the other. Sequence does not matter. Anything green that pops up, spray it with vinegar. Diligence. It may take several times to kill some tough weeds.

Now is the hard part. You are not going to plant this bed this spring. The earliest you can plant this bed is late fall. But it will be easier the longer you wait. This year you are going to let the bed rest. As the year progresses we will go over the individual steps you need to take to get this bed ready to plant.

The other chore you have with the new bed is to watch it carefully all year long. Notice where it is sunny and where shady. Also pay attention to when it becomes shady in which areas. What is blooming when it gets shady right here? Where does it get blasted by mid day heat? As the year progresses, you need to mark on a diary, (I use a five year diary) what particular things are blooming when in your area. As time goes on, this will be the most valuable little book you have.

With this information you can plan the planting for your bed to be suited to the micro climates within it, but most importantly, to have things coming into bloom from the earliest spring days until the first hard freeze.

So back to the catalogs. Pay attention to bloom time. They probably won’t bloom exactly at that time in your yard, but relatively speaking, you can determine bloom sequence. For new beds, concentrate on the back bone the first year. Plant those things that will grow into the largest items first.

Next Week we’ll trim the monkey grass. Continue planting with next week’s seeds, tend to the sprouts, and discuss starting an apple orchard.

Next Week; Things you will need:

Lawn Mower