I waited ten days after the latest frost date I've seen here, before I started planting out the beans and corn that I had prestarted. I guess I should have waited a few more days, because we had a very light frost four days later, and I lost over half of the beans I had planted out. The corn fared much better, with only 4 or 5 plants out of about 700 being affected at all by the frost. I also lost a good percentage of my squash plants in my hoop houses, as I had no heater going (there was no frost warning). Surprisingly, I only lost two melon plants. I would have thought they would be even more susceptible to frost than the squash, but apparently not.
Any varieties I lost that I have enough seed for to plant out now, and still have some left for another try next spring, I will try direct seeding, and hope to get enough to save seed from. The beans that I can't replant, I will direct seed some other variety as a replacement = I like to see the teepees filled out.
Now, how to "cheat" on making new garden beds.
I started by tearing the turf out along the border of the new bed section I wanted to create, and throwing the beaten out turf on top of the bed I was making. It looks like I have done more digging than is actually the case, as I beat the soil out of the roots, to help kill the weeds and break them down a bit quicker. I have actually only dug out about an 8" (20 cm) border around the bed.
Then I covered the bed with a couple of layers of cardboard. If you don't have cardboard, newspaper will do, but you will have to put it on at least 5 pages thick, and heavier would be better. Don't use glossy colour magazine pages, as the inks and dyes often have heavy metals in them, and you don't want to incorporate them into your soil.
Since this bed is going to have a melon in it for this year, I only manured the hole the hill is going to be located in. Some of the soil that is on the cardboard will be pulled up around the base of the melon plant when I transplant it.
Then, to make it a little less ugly for the summer, and to help break down the turf under the cardboard, I buried the cardboard in mulch. This mulch happens to be recycled from the top of another bed. Make your mulch layer at least 3" (8 cm) thick, heavier than that if you have mulch to do it with. Almost anything organic will do for this, as you can scrape it away later, if you don't want to add it to your soil.
The way I have done this is a bit more labour intensive than it has to be, but that is a matter of personal choice. The cardboard could have been laid directly on the sod, without digging the border, and just the hole for the melon dug out and manured, and the mulch added. I wanted the bed to already have an established border when I dig it out this fall or next spring.
There are other ways of creating new beds without having to fight the turf while it is still alive. Probably the best known of these, is "lasagna gardening" http://ourgardengang.tripod.com/lasagna_gardening.htm
I'll post a couple of photos next time, making a new bed without digging the border first. It is worth noting that you can do this on areas you don't intend to plant this year, and even leave it to be done until early in the fall if you don't have the time to spare now. Of course, the longer you have for the cardboard and mulch to kill and break down the turf, the easier it will be to turn the soil next spring.
Until next time, have fun in the dirt.
Cheers
Dan
