The Garden

You may get sick of hearing about the garden before this year’s gardening season is over but right now, the garden is where I find solace. I love being out there. I have an old lawn chair where I can sit and watch things grow. Tuesday it was right at 100 degrees. Vince walked out and said “Are you crazy?” . . meaning . . why are you sitting out here when it’s so hot? I simply said “probably!”

We still have time for hail and grasshoppers but right now, things are looking good and I’m optimistic.

This was the tomatoes in the shop on April 12. Here they are as of yesterday!

Only a few of them have tomatoes. I’ve been using a mostly nitrogen fertilizer to boost the plant growth so we end up with strong plants. I think it’s time to switch over to the next fertilizer – the one with more phosphate. I think what we have is 0-15-0. I’ll continue to use a bit of nitrogen – maybe fish emulsion, which is 5-1-1.

The peppers were being scorched in the sun. That 100 degree day came way too quickly. I’ve moved them over to where they can get a bit of shade from the elderberries.

Speaking of elderberries, they’re going to be in full bloom within a week. I think I’m going to try to make a scarecrow to see if that works. I think if I put long floppy sleeves on him, the wind is always blowing. Maybe that will scare the birds away.

It was just a couple of weeks ago that most of the zucchini I planted in the keyhole froze. Some of it looked worse than others. I started to pull it all out and plant more seeds but decided to wait and see what happened with it. I’m glad I left it alone. Look at the size of those leaves. Yep, time to switch fertilizer on that one too.

This is the view from my chair. There are 13 potato plants from potatoes I had sprouting in the kitchen. The freshly tilled up area is where some of the beans are planted. In the background, you can see the onions and some of the buckets that have things like celery, sage, parsley, cilantro, and a few peppers that didn’t seem to be burning up in the full sun. There are also buckets with seeds that may or may not be sprouting – eggplant, peppers, tomatoes.

Vince has been working so hard! We had places where he had trenched for water lines and some of those weren’t filled and some were filled but the dirt had settled and they were places we’d both stumble across if we weren’t paying attention. When they put in the internet tower, they dug a hole that was about 15′ x 15′ and 3 – 4 feet deep (I can’t remember the exact dimensions) but there was good, rich looking dirt with no rocks so he’s been using it some in the garden.

And, there’s the view of the tower from the garden. Every time I see it, I’m thankful that we now have decent internet!

Yesterday Vince cleaned out this area. This is one of my favorite parts. You can see the chicken fence to the right and the garden is to the left. It’s shady enough that I could hang ferns or hanging baskets of blooming flowers in there but that’s just something else to water and something else for Vince to have to deal with when I’m off to MO so . . for now, it will just be trees.

There’s so much to love about this place. I may need to be reminded of that when the snakes are overtaking the garden; when the scorpions are everywhere and the grasshoppers are eating my garden!