Excellent Veggie Resource

One of my most useful, free :-) resources is the Indiana Vegetable Planting Calendar from the Purdue Cooperative Extension.  This free resource divides Indiana into four planting zones based on typical last frost and first frost dates. Indianapolis is in their zone C in which the 50% last frost date is April 26 and the 90% last frost date is May 5. The publication also includes date ranges for planting 57 different vegetables and fruits.

This Year's Tomato Lineup

I have 13 different varieties of tomatoes that I'm planting this year.  I was planning on 14, but one variety didn't germinate.

Sweet Tangerine
Black from Tula
Russo's Sicilian Togetta
Chocolate Stripes
Japanese Trifele
Patano Romanesco
Azoychka
Red Alert
Mr. Stipey
Islea
Amish Paste
Early Chatham
Rutgers

Last year, I grew
Sweet Tangerine
Chocolate Stripes
Fred Limbaugh
1884
Yellowstone
Bloody Butcher
Blondkopfchen
Henderson's Wins All
Wolford's Wonder
Napa Grape
Italian Heirloom
Japanese Trifele
Black Cherry
Orange Russian
Stupice
Principe Borghese

I did a little taste and productivity test on all the tomatoes. I want to find the best tasting, most productive tomatoes for my garden. Last year, I tried several varieties and was won over by three different tomatoes:
Sweet Tangerine
Chocolate Stripes
Japanese Trifele

I saved seeds from all of my tomatoes. I kept a package each of Sweet Tangerine, Chocolate Stripes, and Japanese Trifele. I sent the rest of the seeds to www.wintersown.org. Trudi at Wintersown sends out free seeds, including tomato seeds to gardeners. I also asked for some tomato seeds. She allows requesters to choose 10 seed varieties and she tries to give them at least 5 packets of what they want. It's great to trade seeds for the cost of a couple of stamps rather than having to invest in several seed packs at the store for a much great amount of money.

Propagating Rosemary

I want more rosemary plants for my garden, my sister, & Gaynell, my neighbor. I decided to try starting some from cuttings.

I bought a rosemary plant that with several branches. I cut off each branch, leaving about a half an inch of green on each branch on the plant. I want to still use the mother plant.

Then I cut each branch in half and stripped off the lower leaves from each section. I dipped the leafless stems in rooting hormone.

Finally, I placed each rosemary piece in its own wet peat pellet and put the rosemary plants in a plastic shoebox. The rosemary box will join the other plants on my growing light shelves. I made 15 starts because I know that not all the cuttings will take root. I'll take the extras, if there are any, to the Central Indiana Plant Swap.

My Growing Light Shelves

I use grow lights to start my seeds every year. I'm cheap frugal, so I decided to make my own instead of paying $100+ for a pre-made one. I bought a shelving unit, four fluorescent light fixtures, and eight grow fluorescent bulbs. I assembled the shelves and tied the light fixtures to the bottoms of the shelves with rubber coated wire. I put the lights on a timer because I can't remember to turn them on and off consistently. I've had great results with this set up for the past four years.

Central Indiana Plant Swap 2010

I haven't written much for the past week. I was out of town on business. When I returned, I had to prepare for the plant swap. I had most of my plants dug up and ready to go but I still had a few to finish at the last minute. I finished the potting on Saturday and Sunday morning, and then I labelled the plants with popsicle sticks marked with the plant names. I ended up taking about 180 plants. I had several in gallon pots, but most were in 4" pots. I managed to fill my trunk, back seat, and front seat. It was a tight squeeze, but I got all the plants into my car. 

There were about 30 traders at the swap.  The picture above was taken near the end of the swap because I was too excited to remember to take photos for most of the swap. We had everything from Jack Frost brunnera and daylilies to birdhouses and old gardening magazines.

I stopped getting plants after several rounds because I already had or didn't want what was left. I have many different perennials in my garden, so I don't need a lot of new plants. However, I chose some lovely plants.  I choose coral bells, shasta daisies, dwarf yellow reblooming iris, pink asters, lavender bearded iris, pink anemone, scented geranium, and lady's mantle.  I also snagged a dozen or so English gardening magazines, a birdhouse, and a garden-themed tote bag. I'm pleased with my haul.

My sister brought home red monarda, sweet william, daylilies, obedient plant (I warned her, but she won't listen to me....), and columbine, among others plants that I can't recall right now.  She also stopped after a couple of rounds because she had gotten all that she wanted.

Some gardeners who needed more plants, were able to take more plants home:

A guy named Russ is organizing a fall plant swap.  If you want to find out more information about the Central Indiana Fall Plant Swap, go to the 'get togethers' forum at the www.gardenweb.com plant forums later in the summer.  He shall have posted details by August.

Potting Up Plants for the Plant Swap

Earlier, I wrote a post about the Central Indiana Plant Swap, which is an opportunity for gardeners who live around Indianapolis to come together to give away their extra plants and receive new plants.  There is no charge for this event.  This year it will be at Holiday Park in Indianapolis on May 16th at 2pm.  For more information, click here.  Please join us.  The more people that come, the better the plant selection will be!

As I'm cleaning up my yard this spring, I am potting up divisions for the swap.

I just load up my wheel barrow with potting supplies

and dig up stray and overgrown perennials as I encounter them.

Since my garden is maturing, some of my plants are 

growing in to each other.  Here you can see my hardy 

geranium and a viburnum sucker spreading into my iris.

I'm taking the geranium and viburnum sucker to 

to the plant swap.

So far, I have potted up
3 lamium (either pink pewter or purple dragon)
6 sweet woodruff
3 hellebores/Lenten Rose (either pink or cream)
6 monarda/bee balm (Jacob Klein-red)
2 purple coneflower
1 salvia (May Night-purple)
6 short bearded reblooming iris (yellow, purple, or light blue---probably purple)
3 hardy geranium (pink)
1 stargazer lily
1 daylily-probably blacked eyed stella, but I'm not certain
1 snowball viburnum

I'll post a list of the plants that I dig up for the swap and maybe some photos of them in their summer glory after I dig them up, so check back over the next month to see what new additions I will bring to the swap.  I still have my back yard perennials to pot up and I'll have some extra vegetable seedlings.

Here's what I have for the swap so far.  These plants are 

from my front yard.  I haven't started on the back, yet.

Marci reminded me to water the plant swap plants.

Here are photos some of the plants that I will take to the plant swap:

These iris are about 18" tall and bloom 

in both the spring and fall in Indiana.

You can see the red monarda that I'm bringing to the

swap in this photo.  I haven't seen how the other plants

are growing yet, because some of them are just starting to 

emerge, but I will likely also bring some liatris (bottom 

left), some Helen Von Stein lamb's ear (bottom right), and 

heliopsis (top right).

Purple coneflower
I'm not sure which variety the cone flower is,
because something, probably a bird, sowed
several of them in my yard.  They were a
wonderful gift, but enough is enough :)

Sweet woodruff (on the left)

Hardy geranium

Edging the Beds

Today, I spent some time edging my flower beds after work. I needed to edge them to keep the grass from taking over the beds and give the beds sharper definition. I edge the beds every year before I mulch them, so that the trenches will hold the mulch back from spilling into the yard.  I'm not a big fan of artificial or stone borders.  I like a nice, clean edge.

I had grass encroaching on my plants.  It was a 'joy' to reach into my rose bush and pull out the stray grass.  Thank goodness for garden gloves.

I also had grass growing into my beds.

Here's the trench that I made.

First, I make a trench along the edge of the bed.  I usually do this with a hand trowel. This year, I did it with my large spade, because I want some extra dirt to put into the raised beds that I am going to build in the hidden garden at the end of the alley. After I made the trenches, I patted the sides smooth to pack in the loose dirt clumps.  

Here's all the dirt that I collected for the raised beds.

After chopping the leaves, I spread them over the beds making sure to give the perennials a little leaf free space around their crown.  I also pressed the leaves into the trenches to give the edges a finished look.  The lawn still has some finely chopped leaves left and I raked them in as best as I could.  In a couple of weeks, the microherd of bacteria will have broken the chopped leaves down so that I can't see them.  These leaves will serve as fertilizer for the lawn.  If you want to know more about using leaves for compost for your lawn, here's a link to an excellent article about it in Fine Gardening.

Leaves and composted horse bedding have been staples as mulch and fertilizer in my flower beds for years.  This year, I am going to try them on my lawn.  When I moved into my house 5 1/2 years ago, I had terrible clay soil.  Now I have beautiful soil because of the chopped leaves and compost.  I hope that they will perform the same kind of magic for my lawn.  The best part of using leaves as fertilizer and compost is that they are free!

During this whole process, I had to chop the leaves to use as mulch.  I made a mistake last fall.  Usually, I chop up the leaves that fall from my oak tree and spread them over the beds.  This year, I waited too long and I was lucky to get the leaves onto the bed at all.  I didn't get around to chopping them up with the mower.  I just ran over the leaves in the grass once with the mower to pick them up off the grass and I spread them over the top of the whole leaves that had fallen on the garden.  I usually follow this step up by running over the beds with the mulcher function on the mower.  However, I didn't do it last fall.

Today, I raked the leaves out of the beds and ran over them a few times with the mulcher mower.  Then I ran over them again to pick them up so that I could spread them on the beds.  This option was not ideal.     During the raking, I damaged some of the smaller plants.  The chopped up leaves aren't as fine as they would have been had I done all this in the fall.  By spring, the chopped up leaves have really started to break down.  Overwintering whole, the leaves broke down some, but they are not as attractive as they would have been had the chopped up leaves gotten exposed to winter weather.  This fall, I will start earlier.

Rolling in Compost

Compost makes me deliriously happy!  I get to pile a bunch of my house and yard trash together, and in a year or so, I have black luscious, nutritious compost for my garden.  A lot of people fuss over their compost, worried about getting the right mix of nitrogen and carbon, but they are really making too big of a deal out of the whole process.  After all, no matter what a person does with a compost pile, organic matter will always decompose.  I am a lazy, thoughtless composter, and I get wonderful results.

The basics of making compost are simple.  You need green (nitrogen rich) and brown (carbon rich) stuff to add to your pile.  Piles also need air and moisture, but not too much moisture.   Picky compost people try to balance browns and greens with a 3 to 1 ratio.  I'm not that picky.  However, if my compost starts to stink, I add some more browns (like leaves and/or shredded paper) so that it won't stink. Stinky compost means that you have too many greens and not enough browns.

[Today's kitchen scraps]

[Since it is March, perhaps I should toss my Charlie Brown poinsettia into the pile.] 

For green stuff, I add fresh plant-based materials from my kitchen and yard to my pile.  Green stuff generates heat for the pile. These materials include vegetable and fruit scraps, old baked goods, coffee grounds, tea leaves, manures from plant eating animals like horses, weeds (no seed heads or roots from invasive plants), grass clippings, green leaves, and in my case, neglected and otherwise past their prime plants. 

For brown stuff, I add shredded junk mail and paper, leaves, cornstalks, hay, and sawdust.  Be careful with paper.  Anything cheap is usually fine to use because it's either made with soy or clay based inks.  I don't add fancy, glossy printed paper to my compost because there's a strong possibility that the inks contain heavy metals or petroleum derivatives.  I also shred paper because when I haven't, I've gotten clumps of unfinished paper in my compost.  The shredding also makes the compost lighter so that more air can penetrate the pile. Since I tend to have a lot of greens in the summer because of yard waste, I typically keep a couple of bags of leaves from the fall to add to my pile if it starts to smell bad.

I would avoid composting animal products, sticks and branches, fats/oils, diseased plants, invasive plants/roots, seedy weeds, and/or manure from animals that consume meat.

Some people use compost starters, but this really isn't necessary. Organic materials will decompose well with or without the starter.

I compost using a three bin system: one bin for adding materials, one for decomposing, and a finished bin for using.  My first bin was made from chicken wire, but I didn't like it.  The compost was difficult to get out of the chicken wire because the finished compost would spill a little through the sides at the bottom and get roots tangles through the wire, making the bin difficult to remove from around the compost.  I bought some plastic-coated wire bins that I like.  I hold the sides together with plastic-coated garden wire that is easy to remove, thereby making the bins easy to disassemble when I need to empty the bin.  

I have an old coldframe top with deer fencing stapled to it on top of the compost bin because of my dogs.  They view the compost bins as a personal snack bar.  Once they eat their half-rotten 'snacks', they come in the house and throw up.  The stapled fencing and coldframe worked for a while, until one of them figured out that he could stand on the fencing and use his weight to break through the fencing to get to the 'goodies.'  That's why there's a chair on top of the bin.  One of my projects this summer is to create a better lid for my compost pile.

After a half year or so, all of this garbage becomes

half finished compost that I may or may not turn. Some people actively manage their piles, turning the piles every couple of weeks. Turning the pile provides the piles with more oxygen and redistributes the greens which in turn causes the piles to decompose faster. The beauty of compost is that it will still decompose if you do nothing.  It will just take longer without the turning.  I'm in no hurry, and I'm not a picky composter, so I usually just throw my stuff into the pile and ignore it until

it looks like this photo.  This compost is finished and ready to use in my garden.  In fact, today, I moved a large portion of it to the lot at the end of my alley so that I can use it in the raised beds that I'm going to build this spring.  The miracle is that this pile was a bunch of junk mail, newspapers, phone book pages, yard waste, and kitchen scraps a year ago.  Now it's this beautiful, nutrient-rich compost full of worms.

Between composting and recycling, I typically only throw one kitchen-sized bag of garbage away a week.

Planting Sugar Snap Peas

Since Daylight Savings Time began, I have a good amount of time after work in which I can garden.  After work today, I really got a lot accomplished.  I planted sugar snap peas, onions, and shallots.  I also got some weeding accomplished in the process.

I mixed my sugar snap pea into my perennial bed along the fence and I also planted some in the hidden garden at the end of the alley.  I have invested a lot of energy (lasagna garden with an annual mulching of chopped up leaves and composted horse bedding) in creating some terrific soil in my perennial bed, so planting was easy:

First, I made a hole with my finger.  Peas need to be planted about 1" deep.  The distance between the tip of my finger and my first knuckle is about 1", so making a hole at the correct depth with my finger is easy.

Then I dropped a pea in the hole and covered it up.

In my perennial bed, the peas will climb the fence. In the hidden garden, they will climb some tree branches that I scavenged from the lot.

Cheap and Easy Seed Envelopes

I like to reuse/recycle when I can.  I've been thinking about how I can reuse the numerous seed catalogues that I received this year.  I also have some extra seeds left over form what I bought, collected or was given. Some of my friends and I are going to trade our left over seeds.  I divided up my leftovers into smaller portions and packaged them up using half pages from my seed catalogues and sealing them shut with sticky labels.  The multiple folds should contain even tiny seeds.

Gardening Resolutions

I commit many, many gardening sins.  This year, I will have better garden behavior.  In recognition of the first warm garden days of the year, here's a list of what I resolve to do better:

1.  I will no longer grow plants from seeds only to see them languish, unplanted, on the side of my house in what has become known as the plant graveyard.

My plant grave yard

2.  I will weed for 10 minutes a day so that I don't have to spend hours removing the jungle of weeds that develop around mid-August because I though it was too hot to weed in July.
3.  I will save heirloom seeds from my annuals, perennials, vegetables, fruits, and herbs.  I will use these seeds next year and I will trade them with other gardeners so that I can get new varieties.
4.  I will not try to grow any more plants that are not suited for my garden.  This list includes anything that needs a lot of moisture, acid, etc (with the exception of the blueberries that I am growing in containers).  I know what my limitations are and I'm really not going to put in all that extra effort to nurse a marginal plant along.
5.  I will follow my mother's 'three years and you're out' rule.  If a plant doesn't perform well (or show promise) after being in my yard for three years, then it gets yanked and replaced with something that will have a chance of thriving.
6.  I will label all my tomatoes and herbs so that I will know which variety they are so that I can save their seeds.
7.  I will save household containers to start seeds in next year.
8.  I will try to propagate as many plants as I can.  I will only purchase plants if I can't propagate them.
9.  I will only buy plants if I already have the hole dug before I go to the store.
10.  I will take many photos and blog about my garden.

Plant Swaps!!!!

For the past couple of years, I have participated in the Central Indiana Plant Swap. Recently, I have begun to coordinate this event. This event has been a terrific free source of plants. Every spring, I save my plant divisions and extra seedlings to trade at the plant swap. I post a notice of the event on the 'get togethers' forum at gardenweb.com and on Craig's List.

These events occur in other states.  If you can't find a local plant swap, you might want to consider planning a plant swap for your area, too.  They're a lot of fun and a great way to give and receive plant divisions and seedlings.

Here is a copy of what I post:

Central Indiana Plant Swap 2010 PLEASE tell all your friends, family, and colleagues! We’re having the annual Central Indiana Plant Swap on May 16th. Over the past few years, the numbers have started to grow. I got some terrific plants the last couple of years and got rid of a bunch of extras. I have a ton of stuff this year to share, and I’m sure that many of you do, too. If you don’t have many plants to share, come anyway. The people I have met at this event in the past have had very generous spirits. Most of us would be delighted to help out a new gardener with some of our extras. THE DETAILS Date: Sunday, May 16, 2010 Time: 2:00 P.M. Location: Holliday Park, 6363 Spring Mill Road, Indianapolis, IN 46260 Directions inside the park: Once you enter the park take an immediate left. Then pull into the first parking lot on the right. We will be under the giant sycamore tree. Bring yourself, plants & trades, family, friends, tables, chairs, beverages and snacks to share. I’ll bring some lemonade and cookies. It would be nice, but not necessary, if others would brings some treats. TRADING MATERIALS plants, well rooted cuttings potted up, bulbs, shrubs, happy seedlings, garden ornaments, extra gardening implements, gardening magazines, etc. PLEASE MARK ALL PLANT MATERIALS WITH THE PLANT NAME AND CARE REQUIRED!!! Also, mark any plants as invasive or poisonous, if known. I just go to an online nursery that sells the plants that I’m giving away and cut and paste the care instructions into a document. I print out the directions and staple them to the plant, a piece of window blind, or container. Since it worked fairly well last year, we're trying the Round Robin swap again: Round One - pick one plant Next Round - pick one plant Next Round - pick two plants Next Round - pick two plants Next Round - pick three plants Next Round - pick four plants And so on, and so on.... This way everyone gets a chance to get some of the plants they really have on eye on. This works well and other swaps have had great success with it in the past. Everyone should be able to take home as many plants as they bring. For folks who only bring a few plants, many of the folks who have LOTS of extra plants can usually be convinced to part with some of their extras AFTER the official Round Robin is finished. Our Swap's motto is KEEP IT SIMPLE, HAVE FUN, MEET FRIENDS. Some tips for the day: Bring a box or container labeled with your name to put your new plants in after swapping. If you have room in the car...bring an extra table to arrange your plants on. Print out pictures of your plants in bloom, so folks will know what they look like in all their glory! If it looks like rain, bring those rain coats, umbrellas, etc. We plan to meet even if it rains. **Post here if you are attending so that we can all see who is coming and can check trade lists. Or email me, so we can get an approximate head count for the swap. E-mail me if you wish to be put on the plant-swap e-mail list or if you have any questions. I can't wait to see you all there! Hopefully we will have a great crowd with all the new gardening friends you may bring along! Katie

Feel free to adapt this notice to inform others of a plant swap that you will host.

Every year, I usually take daylilies, hostas, tomatoes, basil, and a variety of perennial flowers.  In return, I get nice perennials and scented geraniums. Last year, I received some moonbeam coreopsis, daisies, marmalade coral bells, lady's mantle, and valerian.