We’ve been remiss in posting recently so here are the updates as to what is happening at MWG:
The big news is the entire garden is in! We spent a couple days getting the transplants and seeds settled in and all is well. The hard part is behind us — now we just keep an eye on everything, make sure there is plenty of water, and soon we’ll be picking fresh veggies for the table!
Sunday and Monday nights we had a frost event. Sunday was the worst of the two nights by far. Of course, we had JUST put out a bunch of plants the day before… We covered everything with sheets and that seemed to prevent any dead plants. Two of the tomato plants got nipped somehow — the top couple leaves on each plant are brown. And a single eggplant decided to turn purple overnight. Yes, purple!
Harvests have begun on a very small scale. The lettuce is doing amazingly well and we have been letting it grow a bit before we do a larger harvest. Radishes are getting big and are pretty much ready to go. Fresh radishes taste amazing and are SO easy to grow!
The peas are another story. They are doing fine and everything — climbing the trellis and healthy. But somehow we thought we’d have a pea harvest by now, and from the looks of things that won’t be happening for at least a few more weeks.
OK, we got a bit ahead of ourselves. Before everything got planted there was a huge amount of work done to get the garden ready. If you are a regular reader you might recall that we had framed in our raised beds earlier this year. Last week we used the topsoil we had left over from last year to fill up the existing beds. We also created two new beds with the leftover lumber and soil.
In addition to the soil hauling there was some weeding to do. Last year about half the garden was left as grass — we dumped some soil in the middle of it and grew melons and gourds on the mounds. So this year we had to remove the mounds, kill off the grass and get rid of it so we could place the new beds there. Most of the grass came out with a rake, and we borrowed a MANTIS® TILLER to make short work of getting rid of the rest.
Speaking of weeding, before we could fill the frames with soil we had to weed a bunch of junk we let grow at the end of the season last year. The good news is the soil is so loose we were able to dig in with our hands and make short work of it. BUT,we also learned a lesson about letting things go at the end and this year we plan to till all of the beds just before winter to eliminate the weeding issues.
The Hillbilly Sprinkler is set up and working fine!
Today we purchased two more feedlot panels (prices went WAY up on those!). One will be used as a support system for the tomatoes we’ve been scheming about. The other will be set behind the workshop and used to support some gourds and maybe melon vines.
So what is left to do? The big project will be to cover the garden paths with landscape fabric and some sort of limestone or gravel. We still need to fill in the bed that we had already planted, but that won’t happen until everything is harvested from it later ths year. We need to get the tomato support set up and photographed for everyone, as well as the gourd trellis. And there will be some ongoing succession planting throughout the growing season.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Lets see some pics. It would be cool to see the garden changes over time in pics. We are gardening vicariously through your site. Our garden is a large container with bamboo, one parsley and one basil plant.
@Braden — Working on the pix — will try to post a bunch before the weekend. Came across a gardening site from your area. Will try to find it again to share with you.