Well, the rats are back in our garden. We have not been able to pick a red tomato yet this season. Just as they ripen, we find teeth marks in them. {{{sigh}}} Since I don’t want a repeat of 2 years ago, they can just have them.
Category: garden woes
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Herbs- again
I also am attempting to grow herbs again. I have been successful at chives and that is it. Wade uses them all the time to cook…I would love to pull them out of our own garden.
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The Garden 2011
I say this every year, but here we go again. This is like my 14th year planting a garden. Hopefully this time we will actually get some produce this time! We got some dirt from the soil supermarket. This was a first for us, as we usually get bagged dirt. Wade heard it was “cleaner.” Clean or not, dirt from the soil supermarket is cheap…and we will buy from there again!
Not exactly a before picture…this was after moving almost a yard into the garden. (And no we never did level the garden out).
The random cabbage is Sydney’s. Never in a million years would I have thought that we would be able to grow cabbage. Every 3rd grader got a cabbage plant to take home and grow. The biggest cabbage gets $1000 for their school to start a garden. Sydney’s plant had 2 in it and now, even after the frost, we have 2 cabbages growing. I can’t wait for April to turn these in! (And in the fall we might try to grow some on our own!)
After our luffa experiment last year, I figured out that the bees did a great job of pollinating (as much as I hate the stingy things!!!). In an effort to attrack {{{cringe}}} more bees, we bought flowers to put in and around the garden. Not sure if these are the bee attracting types, but it is worth a shot.
I also broke down this year and actually bought tomato plants to start. I did start a bunch of seeds as well, but the plants will get us started and they already have fruit…so that means I have succeeded in some ways! 🙂
Stupid me for thinking Daisy would stay out of the garden this year. I had to put up the fencing again…she was already knocking down my mounds!
One of the things I have thought is that this area of the yard is very shaded in the afternoons (one of the reasons we picked this lot…we have a wonderfully shaded backyard in the heat of the day!). I am going to experiment this year and put some pots of tomato plants on the patio that will receive full sun the majority of the day.
I bought just cheap plain white pots and some red and yellow plastic spray paint. I must have done something wrong because the paint scratches of EASILY! I am so disappointed in it.
One last thing…we planted onions…and lots of them. I found a bunch of 1015 bulbs at Home Depot and was pumped to try my hand at them! I love 1015’s (an onion that A&M came up with) broiled with a little sugar and Worcestershire sauce. Yum!!!
Wish us luck!!! -
Our Garden Friend
I am not sure why I wait so long to weed the garden. It makes for a painful (literally) experience when I put it off until it is so overgrown. I can’t believe that I did not get one edible thing out of the garden this year. 🙁 I am thinking I might plant fall tomatoes and see how that does.
As I was weeding and cussing Eve for eating the stupid fruit…the whole reason we have weeds to begin with… I mean really, I can handle child birth…it is a one time thing (or 2), but weeding…it happens several times a year! Seriously! Anyway…I ran into this guy. The funny thing, DD#2 could not stop checking him out. High heels and all… Such a tomboy for being a girly-girl!
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The Luffa Experiment
I found THIS website last year and thought it was kinda interesting. After poking around for a while (and found that you can even use luffa for toilet paper!) I decided I wanted to try to grow some. My mom and I ordered some seeds and waiting until the spring to plant. I planted mine mid-March (since the harvest time was so long). I planted 8 seeds and attached lattice work to the back of the garage. I did not know what to expect as we patiently waited for the stuff to start growing. It was it sprouted WAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY later than everything else in the garden, so I was thinking it would not work.
This picture was taken May 15th.
This is how the current garden looks:
There are BIG HUGE YELLOW flowers that bees and wasps just LOVE! I HATE…HATE….HATE those things. All of them! There were some BIG HUGE black and yellow BUMBLE BEES today. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! When I get brave enough I might take a picture of them because they look cool…but I’m still scared of them. Yes, I am a big weeny.
Because of the bees, I told Wade I think we need to take the whole thing down…even though this seems to be the ONE thing I can grow!!! I decided to pull a couple of the luffa and see what has come of them. I pulled an “original” one that has been on the vine for about a month now, as well as one that has just grown. I took them inside and cut the ends off and began peeling. This is what I ended up with:
Pretty COOL! Next I opened the one that just grew in the last week or so. It was TOTALLY different. I am afraid I am going to have to wait until they get a bit “older” before I pull them from the vine. The website where I found this said that they wait until the first frost before pulling them off the vine. That means another 5 months before I could get them. I can’t have bees until then!
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The Somewhat Controlled Garden
Not sure what possessed me, but I decided at about 8:15 yesterday to go outside and weed the garden. It was bothering me THAT much! I found that in a day the tomato horned worms were back with a vengeance. Every year, they come…I never know when, so I just have to watch for them. In a day they will eat all of the leaves off of an entire tomato plant. And let me tell you…they leave BIG poop behind! If they weren’t such a menace…they are very pretty. I pick most of them off by hand, then I resort to Seven dust. I have tried natural things, but nothing KEEPS them off.
I mentioned my luffa in the last post. After looking at it a little more closely, I found that I had 2 HUGE fruits! They are well over 12 inches long. I just might get a few luffa scrubs out of this crazy plant!
I found this guy hanging out in the corn. He was pretty big. Not sure what kind of spider he is.
And after 2.5 hours is the humidity and heat…this is what I ended up with. I swear I lost at least 10 pounds just from sweating. I am pretty sure I had a mild case of heat exhaustion when it was all said and done. Felt pretty dizzy and had a headache. I still need to pull the corn, but I didn’t want to disturb the spider. We have too many flies in our backyard right now to get rid of ANYTHING that will help with that! (Not to mention the bug zapper is hidden in the luffa.)
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The Uncontrollable Garden
We went on vacation. The girls and I were gone for 15 days. Wade joined us for 4. I asked that while we were gone, he pay attention to the garden each day, pick anything that had grown and PLEASE water it. I know for a fact he did not water the herbs, because those are all black dead. I can’t tell about the garden because towards the end of our trip a tropical storm moved through we had lots of rain.
This is what I came home to.
The cucumbers got a fungus that pretty much destroyed them. All the tomatillos fell over into the carrots (they were little when I left). And the cherry tomatoes all busted from the rain. The corn is all dried up and the large tomatoes had been eaten by birds. But it looks like my yellow gooseneck squash might survive. Of all of it…that is the one I wanted the least.
On the other side of the yard is the luffa. Ever seen Little Shop of Horrors? That pretty much describes the luffa.
I also brought back this weird plant from my grandfather’s. He said it was garlic, and the bulbs do look like garlic…but after chopping one up it has a very strong onion smell. Not sure what it is, but it looks cool!
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Garden May 2010
Here is how our garden looked mid-May. Not too shabby. The trellis is for luffa. I will let you know how that goes! since I have such a green thumb! (kidding…)
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More Garden Work
We have been diligently working in the garden. Wade helped me double it in size and I am SOOOOOOO excited. When we put it together 3 years ago, we built it right up to the fence. Not good. The fence will eventually rot at the bottom and the garden there was not helping. We knew this when we did it, but no one was living next to us at the time. We have neighbors now. So we pulled the garden away from the fence and made a very narrow walkway behind it. We then separated it down the middle since our yard drains right through the garden. Before, we had the timbers up on a brick and lined the middle of the garden with rocks. Now we have a rock pathway. This will make it easier to get to the middle of the garden.
Here are the girls helping pick up some random rocks to put in the middle. I am so glad they are not afraid to get dirty!
Here is the new garden area. I knew that it would be slanted when we put the timbers down…but I had no idea HOW MUCH until I stepped back to take this picture. I will level the garden in another 3 years…
This is our new vine garden. We still have to put the trellis up on the wall. Here we are going to attempt to grow loofah (yes, that is a plant), grapes, blackberries and raspberries. Whichever doesn’t work, I will pull up and not plant next year. Surely one of those 4 will work! But then with my luck…there is no telling. I had no idea that you cannot grow just 1 plant of strawberries (which I have tried to do the past 3 years). My co-worker told me they can’t self pollinate. We bought 10. They better work this year!
