Garden

Since March I have been working on enlarging my garden plot from a 12’ by 18’ to 12’ by 100’. The process though not difficult has taken longer then expect to the point I had too wait to plant some of my early veggies till all the prepping was done.

In March we of course started with the layout of the garden. Since the garden is placed in a nursery row the width is 12’. There is not much we can do about that until we decide to remove some of the old nursery stock. This would give us a total width of about 30’ give or take a little.

After staking out the garden we wanted to till it under add compost and till again. The area hasn’t been worked in several years about 25 to be exact and a couple of years ago when I had a garden there some of the produce did very poorly for a number of reasons so this year the addition of compost will correct some of that. We added a total of 25 cubic yards of compost to 1200 square feet of garden. So with that amendment and some other tricks of the trade there should be no problems with the lack of nurturance.

We wanted to get all the tilling done before we put up the fence it just made it easier to till and add the compost to the garden. This was all fine and good until we got a cold snap and the rains came. Making it very difficult to do either chore, so finally we were able to get the garden tilled, composted and fenced. This was all completed on the last day of April not to bad, I did want too get the early veggies in a couple of weeks prier but that wasn’t going to happen.

After all the work to get the garden ready and protected for the new seedlings I started this year, it decided to rain, and rain, and rain and yes rain some more a full seven days of rain to be exact. If it wasn’t raining during the day it rained at night so the garden was too wet to work in.

After it did stop raining and we had a couple of days with no ran and sun, the earth dried enough to be able to work and I finally got my early veggies planted. So I was able to get the cabbage, cauliflower, celery, broccoli and cotton in the ground as of Friday. Thank God because I was getting worried I wasn’t going to get them in at all or at least too late to produce before they went to bolt.

I do have to get the early seeds in which I will probable do tomorrow. I was more worried about the plants since they were becoming leggy. While I was playing in the garden some one brought me a gift of tomato plants, all thought it is early to plant them for this area I decided to go for it. I figured they had a better chance of surviving in the ground then in a box. So I had to do some quick thinking on were to plant theses little guys in an already planned garden. I figured out a good spot and got them in I was given several plants of heritage and roma, I was also given some fun tomatoes such as black, pink, yellow, gold, purple and green. So I should have a lot of fun with them and a very colorful salad.

One last thing on this very long post when I had the garden a couple of years ago something had gotten in and was taking a bite out of every thing. Never eating the whole fruit or veggie, so I tried to figure out what it mite be. But nothing was coming to mind and I found nothing livening in the garden or even an escape route. Till one day I found the culprit it was a box turtle. So I removed the little guy and sent it on his or her way. Well while getting every thing together this year the turtle is back and I have decided to make it the official guard turtle of the garden. So there should be no more thieves in the garden with this little camera shy guy around. Well as long as you don’t take its picture anyway.