Getting ready for spring in the nursery finds me doing all kinds of little jobs on the side.
Want to hire help? They’ll appreciate a functioning restroom and so will the customers. This is the first time in many years I haven’t had to reach my arm through a foot and a half of ice water to turn the water on for the nursery.
Next, I have to pump out the sales area basement, as one of the two sump pumps in there died a couple of days after the big melt. If you want to buy an upright pedestal style sump pump in town at this time of year, this week doesn’t look good for you and neither does next week. Fortunately, I have learned not to throw away the old ones and can now repair these kinds of devices.
The weather has behaved through mid-March and the orchard is cleaned up and ready for the dormant spray. In the greenhouses, we have begun transplanting. The seeding has gone well and is on time. I try for about 7,500 seedlings each week starting after Christmas through to mid-April.
In my pocket is a pack of peanut seeds, a $2.49 experiment. Peanuts originate from South America in and around Bolivia. They are self-pollinating, indeterminate, herbaceous annual plants. Appa-rently in terms of dollar value per acre they used to rank in second place and are commonly grown through the southern United States. Did you know that Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, was a peanut farmer? Until 1870 they had only been grown as a garden crop and were often used for pig feed. These peanuts are packaged as a 100-day crop but to produce a descent yield you should have 3,000 growing-degree days. In Creston, we probably fall a little short of heat units.
How can a gardener get extra heat units into a crop? My preferred source of heat is a greenhouse. If you haven’t one of your own, you can fashion a miniature one or you could also use a wire hoop frame and use clothes pegs to attach remay fabric to it in order to get the crop off to an early start.
Farmers from the Prairies are familiar with shelter belts. Heat loss from wind can really cool a field off. If you haven’t planted a shelter belt around your garden it might be worth considering. Alternatively, one could plant a fall rye cover crop and then only till in every second row. By leaving the fall rye, a green manure standing for the early part of the spring season, you would reduce the heat loss from wind at the soil level substantially. Later when you till it in, your garden soil benefits from the organic matter and nutrients it adds.
My interest in growing the peanuts is not in developing a new field crop for Creston. I’ll be happy if the girls and I can dig a few out of the ground and roast them. I’d like to cultivate their interest in horticulture. Over the years crops come and go but people still enjoy gardening. Nowadays we like new flower types and new garden vegetables. Often these are plants my grandparents had never heard of, like the amazingly popular calibrachoas, or million bells. Happy gardening!
Evan Davies owns Beltane Nursery at 2915 Highway 3 in Erickson.