Seeds in the ground

I cranked up the tiller at 9 a.m. and got busy.  Three and a half hours later, I'm sitting here in the cool, a little sunburned, but showered and shampooed and feeling accomplished.  Between me, Nanny, and The Husband, the garden is made. 

What went down was 4 rows of purple hull peas, two rows of Fordhook butter beans, three short rows of Marcotte green beans, 12 hills of cucumbers, six hills of butternut squash, and a row of okra.  I have space left for more crookneck squash, but I don't have any seeds.  I may run get some before the day is over, for it is supposed to rain in the next few days. 

Although I'd intended to do half of the garden in the "no-till" method, it turned out that only the tomatoes, squash, zucchini, cabbages, and peppers got that treatment.  I tilled the rest of the garden as usual.  I'd hoped to plant one row of beans in the no-till zone and one row of the same kind of beans in the tilled area so that I could compare their growth, but it didn't work out that way.  Long story.

When we prepared to dig holes for the plants in the no-till zone, we flipped over every other hay patty, and dug holes where they'd been.  After we planted, we put down more newspaper (HINT: wet newspaper is soooooo much easier to work with), separated the hay patties, and sprinkled loose hay around the plants.  This resulted in having about 1/2 of each hay patty left over to sprinkle atop newspaper and cardboard that we laid between the rows to keep down weeds.  I am crossing my fingers that we won't have to do much weeding in those areas.  Stay tuned to see if it works.

I am also hoping that this newspaper/hay treatment will cut down on blight infestation.  For the past few years, half of my gardening time has been spent fighting blight.  Hopefully, this mulching will separate the plants' leaves from the soil and keep down the rain-splash transfers of fungus from ground to plant.  As soon as the tomato plants settle in, I'm going to dose them with the mixture I used last year, which seemed to work as well as (if not better than) any commercial fungicide I've used:  one gallon of water, and a 1:1 ratio of baking soda and vegetable oil.  (I used 2 tbs. of each per gallon of water).  The baking soda creates an alkaline environment that the blight fungus doesn't like; the vegetable oil helps the soda stick to the leaves.