Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Planting Day

Today, actually April 6th because I’m delaying these posts a bit, was the first 65 degree day of the year here in the Seattle metroplex. The sun was very nice, even for an indoor troll like me. I got an early start and mowed the lawn, after fighting with the mower for nearly 20 minutes. It’s always a pain to start the first time after the long winter, but this year was worse than usual. It probably needs a tune up . . .

Anyway I got the lawn mowed. Here’s a pic of my garden plot after mowing.



The plot is 13.5 feet by 8.5 feet, about 115 square feet and on the north side of the property. It gets good morning an afternoon sun, but is blocked in the midday by a big evergreen tree and a rundown shed.

It wasn’t breezy yet (we often get a very nice easterly wind coming off of Puget Sound in the afternoon) so I figured it would be good to get the newspaper down fast. The first problem I was faced with was how much newspaper. One layer? Seems really thin. Two layers? Also seemed pretty thin. So I went with three. I started running out of the two weeks worth of newspapers I had saved near the end, so the last row was only two layers thick. It went without any problems (though with several “oh, I missed that article, let me stop and read it” moments). Here are a few pictures of the progress.





For the next step I took one bag of top soil and one bag of steer manure (each bought the week before at Lowe’s and each equivalent to 1 cubic foot) and mixed them together in my old, rusty wheelbarrow.



After mixing, I spread it as evenly and as thinly as I could across the newspaper. I wanted to weigh it down, give the seeds some soil to start growing in and as the paper broke down, give some nutrients to the soil. Then I did another bag of each and added it to the plot.



The newspaper was resting on the grass like a man lying on a bed of nails. Adding the thin layer of soil was enough to push the paper down in some places, but not enough in other places so I got a strange, “rolling hills” effect.



I watered the whole area thinking it might weigh things down a bit more and even out the newspaper with no luck. Here’s a picture after watering:



Now I was ready to seed. My process was to dump a small pile of seeds into my hand and then toss them out over the damp soil. It worked well close in, but farther than four feet or so my accuracy really suffered and it was hard to get an even covering of seeds. The directions of the seed packets said that each packet was enough for 100 square feet. I used a packet and a half to get what I considered a “reasonable-looking” coverage. I then sprinkled the entire plot with fresh grass clippings and watered again. The clippings are there to protect the seeds and to absorb and hold in moisture (the weather forecast now shows a week of rain showers coming in a few days).

In the end, it all looked like this:



Not a bad day’s work, if I do say so myself. Now let’s hope it actually grows . . .

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