Project Primavera: Part 4
I was right. All the seeds needed was a little love from old Mister Sun. I didn’t realise how little they needed.
After just one day of blue skies and sunlight the watermelon finally sprouted. Eggplant followed a couple of days later and now I even have some oregano and basil shoots showing.
Saturday was the big day. I raked out the excess pea straw from the garden and knocked down the few clumps of manure to smooth things out. Wetting the soil down proved to be a bit of a problem. I dumped around 20 litres of water into the garden n preparation for the seedlings, but it only managed to soak down around 3cm or so. I ended up digging holes for the seedlings with a trowel, then pouring another 10 litres of water into them just to prevent the roots from drying out.
Something else I didn’t do with last year’s garden was properly space out the plants. The garden is now a uniform 5x3 grid. Five zucchini plants run along the entire right hand side, three eggplants sit in the front left quadrant and three watermelon plants are up the back.
The zucchini placement is an experiment. I still don’t know how much sun is too much when it comes to them, so each plant gets a different level of sunlight depending on placement. The one up the very back stops getting sunlight around 2pm each day, the rest follow as the sun dips below the fence line. The eggplant thrived up the front of the garden in full sun last time so there was no question about where they’d be. The watermelon died off fairly quickly once the summer heat started blazing, so I’m hoping that keeping them shaded for half the day will keep them alive long enough to get some fruit this year.
I should note that the garden still smells terrible. Three weeks on and it smells like a petting zoo. My Dad says: “The worse it smells the more plants love it.” If that’s true then this garden will be amazing once it’s fully grown.
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