Spring chores and the a-mattock-ing man!

It’s been a quick spring coming! While I was working Monday, I saw a flock of butterflies flit around the garden. The weather keeping me thinking I should be planting the cucumbers and the peppers soon. As this rate, we may be able to plant early, but you never know. North Carolina weather is notorious for those late cold snaps.

Anyway, there is no way this wacky weather can hinder my excitement at seeing the blueberry bushes budding out Saturday! I think I did a mile-long circle around them admiring the creamy blossoms. Nothing says “it’s time” like

blueberries. I’ll keep you posted about when they open up!

I spent part of Monday’s work day fertilizing the blueb

erries with 6-4-4 from Happy Frog and adding compost and peat around the bases, just for that extra boost. I also fertilized the blackberries and raspberries with the same fertilizer. Those bushes have come a long way from the little canes they were last year.

N.C. State has a world-renowned blueberry breeding program and they’ve released quite a few new cultivars in the last few years. We are also fortunate in the Triangle to have quite a few blueberry growers east of here. Look out for the blueberry festival in June.

I am pleased to announce that the sweet potato sharing partnership between Drs. Yencho and Pecota and the Duke Lemur Center has begun again. The sweet potato breeding program at N.C. State is the largest in the country and North Carolina itself is the largest sweet potato producer in the country. Majority of the sweet potatoes you find in the grocery came out of N.C. State’s breeding program. The professors harvest tons of potatoes each year to analyze the dry weight, uniformity and color, just to name a few characteristics. They have graciously agree to donate leftover Beauregard and Covington varieties (the two varieties you most often get in the grocery store) to the lemurs. Tune in in a couple of weeks for an interview with the researchers!

It’s still not planting time yet, despite how convincing the weather tries to be, so that means more soil and hole work. I spent Saturday and Monday turning new soil into the new area of the garden and chopping up the cover crops (pictured above) in the old area of the garden. It’s important to incorporate cover crops early so they can decompose and release nitrogen in time for your plantings. Check out this wonderful resource by Debbie Roos, extension agent for Chatham County in North Carolina.

The garden made a lot of headway Saturday thanks to Justin Durango, a fellow N.C. State student in landscape design, rescued from engineering. He came out to turn soil and do some mattock work in the garden. He is much more gentle than this post-mattock-ing photo (check out the photo album on the left), but he'd just finished making more than 30 holes. Sadly, I am not coordinated enough to use a mattock and I am okay with that. I respect the tool and those who can use it, but I am not one of them. Lucky for me, Justin proficiently tore through the hard soil in a new area of the center so we can establish some areas for melons to stretch out their vines. It will be called the Justin Durango Garden henceforth!

Thanks to Diane Mays at the N.C. State greenhouses in Marye Anne Fox Labs, the Duke Lemur Center has bench space to start seeds. On March 2 I spent a couple hours sowing almost 250 seeds of pepper, herbs, melons and squash, just to name a few, for the garden this season. I checked them Monday and they’ve exploded. The cucumbers and squash have their first true leaves coming through. Just one more thing making me want to get out there and plant!

Lucky for us at the garden it’s been warm enough to sow some more lettuce, so we sowed two jam-packed rows of it! We should get our first harvest in six weeks, if the weather stays mild enough. The small lettuce patches planted over the winter have yielded almost 10 pounds after two harvests.

We’ve had a productive year. In the next post I will remember to give the totals of produce we’ve recorded since November. Needless to say it’s been more than 100 lbs.!