March 7, 2010 Clean Up Day

What a beautiful (almost) Spring day!  Sunny and in the mid-50's, just how I like it in March.

After being out of the garden for some time now I was a bit fearful of what I would find today. Man, what a mess! I had a huge amount of work with the clean up today.  There were broken posts, stumps of old plants, and weeds galore to all take care of today. Somehow the weeds can grow under several feet of snow, who knew? So I weeded most of the garden and removed all the old pepper and sunflower stumps that I should have taken care of in the Fall.  There were also several root clumps to rake up, and when it was all done I hauled all the debris into the trees. Progress...

As I suspected, the trellis is going to need a little repairing.  The wooden center post has cracked with the weight of the snow.  It was only there to provide a little stability (I had an extra post), but now I think I need to replace it with a steel fence post to make sure the whole structure is sound.  All those beans and cucumbers are going to hopefully put some weight on it!

The old smaller wooden trellis used for the peas last year has now been completely dug out.  The only wooden posts left were supports for the tomatoes last year.  I plan on leaving them for now as they seem to be in decent shape.  However I think that I'm going to get some cages to help support the lower branches of the tomatoes.  It kind of worked last year without them, but I think that it would have been better in retrospect to have had cages too.

After I weeded and raked a bit, I covered the area where the lettuce, spinach, and peas are going to be planted with plastic.  My hope is that with the next week or so foretasted to be sunny and in the 50's the sheet will help warm up the dirt so I can start tilling sooner.  I don't know if it's worth covering the whole plot with plastic, but since I had this big piece left over from last year I'd give it a shot.

I still have lots of work to do if I'm going to meet my 3 week deadline - I haven't even begun to tackle the annex or the stone wall yet!