Mid May Is The Time Of Year

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Bob Bauer
May 14, 2018 (Last Updated: ) | Reading Time: 2 minutes

May 14, 2018

Mid May is the time of year you can plant out all your summer crops. It's been so warm this year I had to take the cold frames off my zucchini hills because they were wilting from lack of air circulation. The frames did a great job keeping the pill bugs and slugs away from my transplants, I've had no damage at all. Hopefully they will all be bug resistant by the time I need to remove the rest of the frames..

The zucchini plants are huge, filling up the entire 2' diameter of space, so their stems are covered in prickly hairs that repel the pests. The cucumbers and melons will grow these hairs too as they get bigger..

May 16, 2018

Picked a couple dozen artichokes this morning. They are small because I haven't divided my plants for years, but we seem to eat more of the small ones, because they get cooked to tenderness throughout. We peel the first few leaves off and then eat almost the whole thing. I now know why I haven't seen many earwigs this spring.They were all hiding in the chokes. I had to double wash..

I guess some are good at holding their breath. I also cut back the perpetual spinach in the greenhouse because it had bolted to three foot high stalks. As I mentioned before using a hand held pull saw makes this task simple and easy. You grab a handful of stems and saw them through. If you put each handful down beside you as you work along the row you'll end up with nice little piles of mulch to put around your artichoke plants, on top of last week's mulch that has turned brown..

May 17, 2018

The cordless weed eater I got as an early Father's day gift went through the garden for the third time today. It's cool that a lot of the weeds that got their tops wacked off before, went ahead and died. I got to go along this time and clean them to the ground. Having three foot tall weeds in your garden is depressing. Digging them out is labor intensive and time consuming..

Spraying with a weed killer contaminates your garden and the weeds stand there dying forever. The weedwacker spreads shredded weeds everywhere, but if you don't get around to raking them up for a few days they dry to a tan color, and look like your mulch. I've always spent an inordinate amount of time hand weeding but now I think those days may be over..

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