Weeding

The garden is going strong and so are the weeds.

Last night we got out in the garden for the second weeding of the summer. The first weeding was pretty light and consisted of hoeing and running a cultivator through the corn rows. This time, it got personal. We got down on hands and knees and started pulling. A few before and after shots of the evening.

There are carrots and onions and beets in there somewhere

Oh, there they are.



Alan hit the potatoes and green beans.





I hit the corn a second time and also got all the pesky stuff coming up in the rows.

Flood Insurance?

As the photos below show care should be given when planting in a known flood plain -- granted it only floods when more than 4" of rain falls in less than a 24 hour period. Of course blame global warming or my opinion just the natural progression and change of the earth's weather patterns but this flood pattern seems to be more and more prevalent.

Note: the potatoes, onions, beets and kohlrabi are safe! The peppers and tomatoes would be too if we hadn't had a late May frost!

Most of the pumpkins and squash seem OK too.

Not that you can see it in these pictures but it doesn't help that the drain intake over by the tracks sits up two feet higher than the garden and surrounding land - seriously whats the point of having an intake drain? So, all the land to the North drains into our beautiful garden and sits.

Tomato Tornado

Well not exactly a tornado but really strong winds wreaked havoc on all of our tomato plants. We were being smart( we thought) putting weed barrier down around them but apparently we did not fasten it down quite well enough as the wind picked it up and basically decapitated all of our tomato plants! Here is where our tomatoes used to be, that black draping on the fence would be our weed barrier:(We had a lot of tomato plants too. We have since purchased new tomato plants but because of minor details like a baby being born (see here) and our house being in desperate need of a paint job they have not gotten back in the ground quite yet, hopefully soon. In other garden news our sweet potatoes are not looking so hot, they appear to have been frost bitten or something so we will see if they come back or if we will be replanting those as well. The rest of the garden however is looking good. The corn is peeking through the soil The peas are up and looking good(and so are the weeds beside them)and teeny, tiny sprouts are starting to spring up in our watermelon, cantelope, and pumpkin hills. We are definately learning!

The Goose, The Gabe, and Jungle Gyms

It has been fun to have Gabe out to Andrea and Alan's to run around in a larger setting than our small back yard at home.

He gets to drive his brother and cousin around in the gator, play in the bucket of water, and just generally run around. The other night he was put in charge of a new task: goose wrangler. This is the resident goose.

This goose is one tough hombre. He is the last goose standing from his entire clan, and he is kind of a cranky old cuss who does as he pleases.

It is a shame he's beyond his prime to be sitting on the table at Christmas. Goose decided it was time to get his feet wet in the garden tromping all over the mounds of newly planted pumpkins and tramping through the newly planted corn.

So the other night Gabe was put to work wrangling the goose, helping to keep it out of the garden. Gabe thought it was hilarious to chase down the goose and soon found out how quick it could move.

The other job I put Gabe to work doing that night was container pick up as I planted the tomatoes and herbs.

I chronicled his fine work and he was soon asking for his picture to be taken, resulting in this cheese hound.

Alan started constructing our industrial strength custom tomato cages.

As Alan placed them around the tomatoes Gabe asked what they were as he was picking up discarded containers. I described them as best I could to a three going on four year old.
"Gabe," I said, "those are tomato jungle gyms."
He figured it out right quick as he asked, "are the tomatoes going to climb them?"

Newspaper Decline

Newspapers are not only doing poorly at the newsstands these days, but also in our garden. Andrea has been boning up on some serious garden reading as can be evidenced by the literature represented to the left. However, one book idea is being thrown out due to practicality. We placed newspapers as mulch over the sweet potatoes, and had planned to do so for the tomatoes.

Well, practicality won out and having more rocks than mulch resulted in going back to the drawing board and coming up with a new game plan. For the tomatoes we decided to go with landscape felt to control the inevitable weeds.

This worked much better for the scale of garden we are dealing with, even if it isn't granola. Andrea decided to replace the newspaper in the sweet potatoes with shredded paper, so do not lose heart we are still recycling.

We also covered the peppers with shredded paper while the beets and newly replaced kohlrabi received grass clippings.

Newspapers may work well for small urban planter beds like the square foot gardening some of my friends are implementing this year, but it does not work well on a large scale windswept rural garden. The landscape felt installed like a charm and should work well for the herbs and tomatoes.

Grow Garden Grow

We finished planting last night(besides moving the strawberry beds over and getting those in) and now hopefully everything will grow and grow abundantly! We put up a fence around some of the vegetables to hopefully keep the chickens(and any other little critters) from eating the kohlrabi and anything else they find to their liking. Sunday night Alan used the tiller to make hills to plant the watermelon, cantelope, pumpkins, and squash. We also planted lots of sweet corn! Last night we laid down weed barrier and got all the tomato plants and herbs in the ground. Gabe helped by taking the pots from the tomatoes and putting them on the concrete to be thrown away(this helping bit didn't last too long, mostly he and Clark played in the water and got themselves incredibly dirty:) We also finished re-planting kohlrabi, mulched the fenced in area, put in a few more peppers for salsa, a few more sweet potato plants, and finished putting in zucchini, winter squash, pumpkins and melons. Now if we could just keep this guy out of our garden and from stepping on things. We finished off the night with some strawberry shortcake cake.

Kohlrabi Catastrophe

OK- before my fellow gardners come out tomorrow so we can plant the rest of the garden (or at least as much of it as we can get in) I have a small confession to make:



Hollie -- I deeply apologize but my chickens ate your Kohlrabi to the ground. No fears -- we plan to stop after church tomorrow to pick up another group of plants. Seriously they haven't touched anything else out in the garden except the kohlrabi -- maybe it's better than Carl and I think. Meanwhile the hens laid some beautiful eggs the next day!