The list of morning garden tasks has been completed. Bed Two is now fully planted with the first round of plantings, and Bed One has been filled out with the next round of plantings in it. Both beds are now full! Not that there’s anything much to show for it yet. A few seedlings here and there … a bunch of radishes and lettuce … a lot of immature carrots, onions, and beans. In an hour or so, I’ll be planting the peanuts and parsley. Then the only planting decisions to be made is whether or not to plant anything in my containers from last year.

The Aphid War of 2009 began last night. I was making a sunset trip to the garden to see how my transplants were doing, and stopped to look at those pathetic radishes I planted in an Earthbox way back in January. They were looking even more pathetic than usual, so I inspected them more closely. Just last week? No aphids at all. This week? Completely covered with aphids. I sprayed them down with soapy water, and did so to the radishes in Bed One as well, since there were a few aphids there too. This morning, the radishes in the bed were aphid free. The ones in the Earthbox were still covered in living aphids. I decided to cut my losses and pulled them all up. The ones that were large enough to eat are currently soaking in soapy water. The ones that weren’t large enough are now wrapped in newspaper in the trash can.

I am becoming convinced those Earthboxes are cursed. I completely cleaned them out in January and put in all new dirt, and still nothing much wants to grow in them … except aphids. Even the lettuce I planted in the other one is puny and sad. So sad in fact, I decided to take the risk of transplanting them into Bed One. Lettuce doesn’t transplant well, so I’ll probably lose all three plants. It’s no real loss, as the things are over two months old now and still look like they just came up last week. If they die, I’ll just plant more from seed. No sense wasting time on poorly developing plants or seriously infected ones. I don’t think I’ll be planting any vegetable crops in the Earthboxes this year. I’ve just had no luck with them at all. Tomorrow, I’m going to get Lin to help me move them back to the front porch, and I’ll just dump all my ages old flower seeds in them. Maybe something will come up. Maybe not. I’m tired of the Earthbox failures I have had. I’m doing much better just planting things in the ground.

But I do have a lot of large pots sitting around unused. I might get another tomato plant or two, and maybe plant some herbs in the others. I’ll have to think about it. The main garden is going to be a lot of work, so maybe I’ll just leave the pots barren for the summer and dump the dirt in the compost heap to go through the process of killing nasty organisms again … just in case.

In other garden pest news, the original nest of Ghost Ants has apparently begun to get the idea that living in my garden isn’t such a grand idea. Yesterday, after I did the thorough post-planting watering, they started moving all their baby ants all the way out of the bed to a nest elsewhere in the yard. Good. I suspect I will eventually buy some ant traps/poisons for use in the yard. These Ghost Ants are coming up everywhere, and they are verging on what I would call a problem. I do not want them getting any ideas about coming into the house for vittles or water, and when the heat of summer lays on, they may very well get that idea in their little ant heads. I’m serious about their numbers growing exponentially. Our back yard is overrun with them. It’s not good.

Oh, and guess what I learned? Those gosh awful wild pear trees we finally eradicated yet are still coming up everywhere in the yard like a plague? All it takes is a piece of root in the dirt and you have yourself a wild pear tree. My gods. Just like Bermuda Grass! I’m having a bit of a battle with them in the garden area, because we didn’t know, so there are definitely pieces of root in the garden. The ones in the bed I have been digging out when I can or cutting off below the soil line when it’s too close to a plant I don’t want to kill. The ones around the garden area I chop back every day with my hand hoe. Chopping them back does not seem to kill them. I hope if I keep it up long enough that once it gets hot this summer, being cut back below the soil line every day will finally do them in. Otherwise, I don’t know what to do about them. It isn’t like we can remove all the soil in the yard and replace it. I do know that if I am still having problems with the pears and the Bermuda Grass this fall, when my garden winds down before taking a direction toward winter plants, I will buy some fine hardware cloth and and use it to sieve out anything larger than a grain of dirt in my garden beds. It’ll be a pain to do, but it may be the only way to really solve the problem. We’ll just have to see if I can kill the crap off without all that work first.

Time to put on afternoon work clothes and go plants some peanuts and parsley. Then I think today’s garden work will be done … aside from weeding, taking notes, doing research, and checking for nasty bugs, of course.