The Garden Will See You Now

This is how the garden looked six weeks ago:

Since then, we've sprayed round-up to kill the weeds and grass.  In case you're wondering, the fence is tall to keep the deer out.  The ends of the fence can be removed so that Mike can get in with the tractor to till it.  When it's planted, we put the ends back on.  Here's what it looks like today:

Mike is setting up the sprinklers on a timer.  Everything gets watered three times per day.  We planted three kinds of lettuce, zinnias, straw flowers, beets, brussels sprouts, pickling cucumbers, slicing cucumbers, two kinds of sweet corn, dill, nasturtiums, parsley, pole beans, lots and lots of tomatoes and not so much zucchini.  I need to pick up some marigolds for the tomatoes.  I'll do that tomorrow.  I always grow nasturtiums because the cucumbers like them.  This year, I have a recipe for some nasturtium pesto.  The nasturtiums grow like crazy, so I'm kind of excited about trying the pesto.

I plant pole beans so that I can pick them standing up.  Here's how we handle the poles:

We get a lot of wind, and so we need something pretty sturdy.  I plant four bean seeds at the base of each pole.

These are my hothouse tomatoes . . . pretty puny.  I'm hoping they'll start growing faster now that they've been transplanted into large pots.

And these are my hothouse cucumbers (in the back), and some lettuce I've been growing seemingly forever. 

It's been too cold for things, but I'm ever hopeful that our weather will turn warmer.  Next week is looking promising.

This is what we call "the wild area":

I'm trying to get wildflowers to grow here.  It's a large area in the field close to the fence that we don't mow.  Mike tilled it this morning and then I threw out a wildflower mix that covered about three-quarters of the area.  It's supposed to grow up in blooming weeds, wildflowers (which are really just nice flowering weeds), and blooming grass.  The deer bed down here, and the butterflies and bees like it. 

Our place is a "certified wildlife habitat,"

which basically means we filled out a questionnaire online, and then bought the sign.  Anyone can do this . . . there's nothing special about us.  It's a project of the National Wildlife Federation.  It was a worthwhile endeavor to fill out the questionnaire.  They gave some suggestions about how to make our place more wildlife friendly.  The wild area was one of the things we decided to do.

So that's been our weekend project.  I'm pretty well worn out on the out of doors for now.  Sewing is next on my list.