Gardening

DISCLAIMER: We are not expert gardeners and have rarely gotten much from our gardens, BUT we have learned a few things along the way.

First, start by finding one of these...beg, borrow, steal....it's worth it. Ok, maybe not the steal part. Anyway, a tiller is a must have to save your back and hands from all the manual tilling. We borrow one every year. When I say "we", I mostly mean Glade because he does all of the hard work. He tills it up, pulling all the roots and dead stuff out as he goes.



Then he adds a few bags of fertilizer/mulch. We were told that our ground is fertile enough that we didn't need it, but we weren't getting much fruit, just a lot of plants. A bag of Miracle Grow sort of spilled onto one of our tomato plants and it did great. Now we just use it because it really does make a difference. Any kind will do, it needs to have nitrogen in it.

I should have taken pictures along the way, but it was too hot and dirty to think about much else other than "let's get this done". Glade made our rows with a hoe in line with our automatic sprinkler system. By the way, I would never have a garden without a sprinkler system. It was really easy to put together and we just tapped it off our existing system with pvc.

We have started planting on top of the rows instead of down in the trenches. This makes it easier to keep weeded. You can just hoe out the trenches and pluck what grows on the top. Still not good at that weeding thing, totally stinks to do it. We started by laying a seed down on top of the mound and then poking it down with our fingers. Not good on my nails and it was hard to always remember exactly where you put the last one. About half way through, Glade started "furrowing" the top of the mound for me and I would just drop seeds in. Bo followed me covering up the seeds. Easy and fast! The picture below shows the "furrow". Basically just dragging your hand down the middle of the raised mound creating a crevice. Then you just pull the dirt back together once the seeds are in.

After all the seeds were planted, we turned on the water to make sure all the trenches would fill. Glade had to make little adjustments with the hoe to allow water to flow in all the areas, but it soon was and the water soaked right into the berms. Now we wait and pray. Don't the scriptures say to pray over your fields and flocks???

We always have issues with grass crawling in, so this year Glade made a pretty good drop off from the grass to the garden and then we sprayed it with grass killer all along the edge of the dirt.

Hopefully in just a couple of months we will have corn, tomatoes, snap peas, broccoli, carrots, lettuce and cucumbers. We planted more of the stuff I can "can" than of others. This isn't really the right season to get much to can. I'm hoping we get good cucumbers so I can learn to make pickles. I will be picking Grams brain when I get back there. We also stopped planting things we didn't really like just because it was the season to plant it. I know...duh.