Second Plantings

Weather was super great this weekend, so we spent some time in the garden, cleaning up a few beds and replanting some garlic in one. Garlic has a two-season cycle, so these should be ready to pick and eat next fall. They will hopefully sprout this fall, die back over the winter, and then come back in the spring.

Garlic is about as easy to grow as can be: Take the individual cloves, stick them in the ground about an inch deep. Cover with soil. Stand back. Wait. Water, Etc.

We also got some bare lawn patches over-seeded. We've had some trouble-spots on the terraces where the sprinklers have a hard time reaching and in one area, we've had a snow plow or school bus go over the curve and really make a mess of things. But this is a great time to sow grass: Temperatures are lower than in mid-summer, but the soil is still nice and warm. And usually there's dew at night to keep the seeds moist until they can sprout. You can usually count on some rain as well. Even so, we'll keep the sprinklers going on the area as long as possible.

Over Labor Day weekend, we planted some more lettuce. You can plant lettuce every 2 weeks over the summer and then have a continuous supply. We had started some lettuce indoors over the winter that was planted out in the spring and produced nicely - 5 or 6 heads, but we hadn't doen any successive plantings, so we've had to buy lettuce. This late planting is a bit of a long shot - will we get enough to harvest before the frost kills it all?

Another long shot was sowing some buckwheat in a couple harvested beds as green manure. They really should have been sown in July according to package directions. Next year we'll have to research a little more to find a more suitable winter cover that will be able to sprout if sown in September.

Lawn watering

Quick! What's the best way to water the lawn?

If you answered 'Deep and Infrequent' you are following what a million web sites (actually 1,030,000 but who's counting?) and countless County Extension offices have been telling you to do for decades.

But there's some research out of Michigan State University that indicates that light infrequent watering in the middle of the day is the best approach. I first heard about this listening to the Environment Report. The research is conducted at the Turfgrass Institute, and is covered in two different publications.

The guideline for the strategy is as follows:

1. Determine how much water your lawn needs per week (typically 1-2 inches, but varies by grass type).
2. Divide amount by seven.
3. Figure out how much your irrigation system delivers in a specific period of time.
4. Water your lawn for this period of time every day just at the beginning of the hottest period of day (around 2:00pm).
   

What this does is helps keep the grass cool, and only waters the fairly shallow area that grass roots actually grow in. There's no sense to watering a foot down when grass roots only grow down 2-3 inches.

We switched to this strategy a few weeks ago and have seen significant improvements in the lawn despite having had quite hot weather. According to the articles this should also save water over deep frequent watering. For us, I think it's a wash, but the lawn is greening up nicely. You would need a timer system for this to work. An in-ground sprinkler system is of course the best choice for this.