The Hills Are Alive...

Once I got all the tomatoes, peppers, corn and beans planted, I started phase II.  That consisted of straightneck and crookneck yellow squash and zucchini.  Those seedlings were started in hills in the garden as soon as they put their first true leaves on.  Then I planted some other items that we transplanted.  I'll show you those today.  In the seed trays on the back patio, I started two varieties of cucumbers - Suyo Long Cucumbers and Boston pickling cucumbers.

What we'll focus on today are some of the vegetables in the photo below that we'll be transplanting:

• Butternut Squash
• Spaghetti Squash
• Green-striped Cushaw Squash
• Tahitian Melon Squash
• Georgia Candied Roaster Squash
• Moon and Stars Watermelon  

These plants were all started from seeds and the germination was fantastic - even the Moon & Stars Watermelon seeds which were saved from back in 2012 all popped up.

Spaghetti Squash

To give these seedlings a good head start, I dug holes and lined them with some biochar we made.  The photo below shows a big tub that we made last year.  It consists of homemade charcoal mixed with cow manure, hay and shredded paper.  This was put into a tumbler and tumbled over a year.  The bacteria in the cow manure inoculated all the microscopic holes in the charcoal.  Now all this will go into the soil and will give the soil fertility to assist in growing healthy vegetables.   

Here is a hill of spaghetti squash.  It was time that they get put in the ground.  The leaves were just starting to turn a bit yellow.  It will green up in no time now that the roots are in the soil.

In the very back of the garden I have a huge pile of wood chips that we use in our Back to Eden Gardening method.  We had 24 truck loads in all delivered to the house - for free!  I kept hauling it to the garden by wagon-load and stacking it high.  We compost directly into the wood chips.  There is one downside.  The hill has taken away some space that was formerly planted.

But then again, as I thought about it, I can still grow veggies on the hill.  I planted all of the squash and melons around the perimeter of the hill.  As all of the squash and melons listed in the bullet points in the second paragraph above begin to grow, they'll vine over the hill.  The brown hill of wood chips will be transformed into a productive green hill of squash and melons. That's a good use of square footage in the garden that might otherwise been fallow.