Summer squash

Got seeds today: zucchini, yellow squash and a bush variety of butternut. Total cost (including donating the change to charity): $4.

Nightshades

Purchased 24 Ace peppers, 6 banana peppers, 6 cherry tomatoes (variety: Sweet Baby Girl; decided that while I love grape tomatoes, I don't like the only variety available locally -- Juliet) and 6 Jetstar tomatoes.

All but the Jetstars were planted today.

Total cost: $16. Even.

Onions planted

This year's plant count: 188. Planted about a week later than last year, partly because I've been busy and partly because the weather has been cold.

ETA: Apparently there was a crop failure for the shallots I was planning to try this year, so that part of my order got cancelled. So, no shallots this year. I think we'll be okay with 188 onions and what was it -- 60 or so garlic plants (not counting all the volunteer garlics).

Corn gluten meal

I read about using corn gluten meal to prevent weeds from sprouting between the onion plants, and it sounded like a perfect thing for me. It's organic, and it helps reduce the weeds that grow right up close to the onion plants, where it's almost impossible to use a hoe on them, without also pulling up the onions. I get so frustrated trying to weed them, because I can't bend or kneel well enough to get up close and personal with the weeds, so I'm stuck with whatever I can do with the hoe alone. I'm pretty good with a hoe, but there are limits to its use.

I couldn't find it locally last year, but I managed to find it this year. The manufacturer put a fancy name on the package, that had nothing to do with corn or gluten or  meal, but I found it in the small print, "ingredients: 100% corn gluten meal." Bingo!

The onion plants arrived Thursday (April 18), and I'm hoping to get them planted before the rains are due on Wednesday. Their arrival took me by surprise. The spring is so late in arriving that I thought I had a couple more weeks before onion planting time.

Add another $15 (approximately) to this year's expenses.

Garlic futures

I thought I'd planted around 55 garlic cloves last fall (last weekend of October), but I didn't write down how many there were. We apparently lost a few to the particularly cold winter, perhaps exacerbated by my not mulching  them in as thoroughly as I'd meant to. The official count of the survivors is 52.

Plus, I transplanted a dozen volunteers. They were from a bed where we grew garlic two years ago, so they would have sprouted the fall/spring of 2011/12 and formed what's known as "rounds" last year. They should produce at least a couple cloves each this year, but the heads (and cloves) will likely be smaller than the ones produced from cloves planted last fall.

Sixty heads of garlic is a good number for us. That way, even if we lose a few over the summer, we still have at least fifteen for seed stock (producing at least 60 cloves for the next year), fifteen for me, and fifteen or twenty for my co-gardener (who has a bigger family).

Fifteen doesn't seem like all that many, but these are mainly for storage, for after the gardening season. During the growing season, we have other sources of garlic, like the bulbils that we use in pickled banana peppers, or stir-frys, and the smaller, single-clove volunteer garlics that we harvest as needed during the summer.

Something new, something blue

We're doing shallots this year, as something new. Shallots and red onions and Bright Lights chard -- ordered the bulbs, plants and seeds a couple weeks ago. Got the seeds already. Bulbs and plants in a few months. Total expense, a little under sixty bucks.

No sweet potatoes this year. The bunnies like the vines too much. We ended up with some tubers that looked like they'd already been sliced small enough for stir fry, like water chestnuts. No real substance to them. So, we'll try again sometime in the future when I've got the time and inclination to get serious about bunny exclusion.

Nothing blue. I lied about that.

Purple peppers!

Finally remembered to upload the promised picture of a purple pepper. The green one's for color comparison.