It's Summer Gardening Time

[Tidybuoy]

Nice weather is here and so I planted my vegetables last night. I don't have a lot of room that gets sun so space is limited. I made raised beds out of barrels that we have at work. They have a 4" false bottom that has a French drain (like a donut) that acts as a water reservoir. I did this last year and it worked out great.

This area gets sun from about 11am till 5pm:

[Otter74]

Not over here it's not! In my part of the country if you plant before May 1st you're asking for it.

But your planters look great. I wish I had a spot in my yard beds that got that much light - if so, my garden would do even better.

[Scott Douglas]

Nice.
We've had an over abundance of amaryllis this year.

[Tobra]

The ground is drying out enough to get some stuff going, though I usually will grow starters in a pot until they get some size on them. Should have bought some last weekend, but was busy with little league games and what not.

[VincentVega]

Still a couple weeks away here and really a month to be safe. I have seeds going, a little envious of your weather.

[john70t]

The Canna Lily bulbs are waiting in 5gal buckets in the kitchen.
Below freezing this week in Mich.

60deg in January.
Snowing in April.

[Bill Douglas]

The only thing I grow are tomatoes. But what a pleasure eating your own home grown tom's.

[wdfifteen]

Not quite summer here, but I'm getting started.



Mrs. WD and I put out 250 onion plants Monday.




The garlic we planted last fall is looking healthy.




We planted 36 strawberry plants this week and have 18 more to go.





The radishes have sprouted and are already being chewed on by some damn bug.





This morning I planted 9 tomatoes, 2 habenero, 3 jalapenos, and 4 bell peppers

[wdfifteen]

I wrote this for our local paper.


When I was a child growing up on the farm, food was all around me. It was our business to grow food, and the desire to grow was instilled in me at an early age. Although I haven’t lived on a farm in 50 years, I never lost the instinctive need to grow food. These days I take my obsession out on a small patch of dirt behind my house. I call it the “Back 40,” even though it’s less than 1/2 acre of ground.

I eagerly look forward to January when the garden seed catalogs start pouring in. Over the years I’ve bought seeds from a couple of dozen places and I’m still on the mailing list of every one, so I collect a considerable stack. I have this vision of myself, sitting by a roaring fire while the wind howls and the snow swirls outside, smoking a pipe as I leisurely pore over the catalogs, carefully selecting the seeds that will grow a bounty of food to sustain my family through the winter.

In reality I don’t live in a Norman Rockwell painting. My family would prefer to be sustained by pizza and I don’t have a lifestyle that allows me to do anything in a leisurely way, but I persist at gardening. I order the seeds in frantic fits and starts over the course of a couple of weeks and invariably double order some things and fail to order others at all. I get carried away by the descriptions in the catalogs and always order more seed than I can possibly plant. The catalogs’ vivid, mouth watering depictions of the food their seeds will bring forth are so masterfully written they tempt me to skip the whole gardening bother and just eat the catalog. Every year I’m taken in by the pictures and descriptions of some new and exotic plant that someone invented, as if God hadn’t given us enough to begin with. Last year I got taken in by kalettes. Kalettes are the result of some demented botanist’s forced marriage of kale and brussels sprouts. I don’t like to eat kale or brussels sprouts, and I am at a loss to explain why I worked so hard to grow such an awful plant. It must have been the pictures.

I have friends who speak of growing food as some kind of spiritual experience. These are people who write books about the “bounty of the earth” and can be heard on NPR talking about the miracle of beans and whatnot.
We obviously haven’t had the same gardening experiences.
For me, gardening is an annual battle between myself and Mother Nature. I come to the battle equipped with an old Troy-Built rototiller that I inherited from my dad, a rake, and a hoe. Mother Nature throws deer, moles, voles, rabbits, and hordes of vicious insects into the fight, and that’s just her ground attack. She hurls down torrents of rain, wind, and hail from the skies, or defiantly withholds water and bakes the garden with a blistering sun. I am so overmatched I don’t know why I keep trying.

But hope springs eternal, and every year I change the oil in the old Troy-Built and grind up a perfect rectangle of brown, fragrant soil. I carefully sow perfectly straight rows and vow that this year I will keep my garden neat, clean, and free of weeds all season. I’m pretty successful until about July, when the weeds begin springing up overnight and arrive full height, in full bloom, and ready to go to seed. I struggle to keep up, but by August I have to hack my way through towering weeds to harvest the surviving green beans and cucumbers. By September I have harvested enough food to declare my efforts a success and I mow the garden flat, and for another year Mother Nature and I have fought to a draw.

[ckelly78z]

WD, it looks like you will be having alot of salsa, and strawberry daiquiris this Summer !

[wdfifteen]

^^
Come down about the 3rd week of August and we'll have LOTS of salsa and strawberry daiquiris!