6/12/11

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.

4 comments:

Deborah in Atlanta said...

Wow! You're going to have such a wonderful harvest from all you've planted. You're going to be loving all that wonderful output when winter arrives. You've got a wonderful garden going there. Wish I lived near you so I could help with the harvest (and the overflow of food ha-ha)

What is the purpose of the marigolds for the tomatoes?

ElfRenee said...

Wow, that's a huge garden!! The wildflowers sound amazing!

Amy said...

Impressive garden! You guys are working hard. Hope that you reap lots of goodies from it.

Mommarock said...

Just look at that luscious soil! I could only wish to have that delightful soil. My first crop of the season is almost done now as the weather is getting too hot to grow anything new. I found a great square foot gardening site that helped me figure out exactly when to plant each seedling inside, outside and transplant for my area. Thank goodness. I had to buy a little booklet, but for me it was worth it to weed through all of the information. Now next year I won't be months too late in starting things. I had no idea since moving to this new zone and was starting things far too late.