Harvest Monday

December 1, 2014

BRRR. Another cold week. It also rained all.week.long. Amazingly, the rain started just as the temperature rose above freezing and stopped just as the temps dropped. Some hail, no snow.

I noticed some of my cloth-covered veggies were getting frost-bitten so I decided to cover everything a bit more heavily this week.

I was able to harvest a pitiful carrot (found all by itself in a forgotten patch)Some lettuceand the kids are inhaling all of the pecans. They are now littering the ground. The kids eat them all day long 🙂

Another unpictured item I have been harvesting quite a bit this week is onions. I have always pulled wild onions as I would any weed but I was asking some fellow gardeners and they said to leave them, especially around trees. We also discussed eating them. They are perfectly fine to eat so…one less thing to buy at the grocery store! I pull a couple and cook them instead of 1/2 of a grocery store onion. They have a stronger taste so that little bit goes a long way!

Other than covering parts of the garden, I worked on putting in a new pathway from our driveway to the brick walkway. Our other mulch pathway was washed away this past spring. It gets really muddy without one. I only had enough cardboard and newspaper for a partial walkway. I’ll finish it when I get more. For right now, it serves its purpose 🙂 I do have one more question for all of you. Anyone know what this berry is? My neighbor has them growing in a hedge, along the woods. There are TONS of them. I would love to know what they are. Their leaves are elliptic and pretty small.

Check out what other gardeners are harvesting at Daphne’s Dandelions!

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Starting Over…

May 7, 2013

Oh. My. GOODness.

Before I share my horrible garden snafu, let me give you some background…

Think back five years ago. It was our first year gardening. We bought some blueberry bushes and decided to do square foot gardening. We built some raised beds and put weed cloth down. The weeds just laughed. We tried for two years to somehow keep the weeds away from our garden and blueberries but nothing seemed to work.

My husband was doing a photoshoot at an arboretum and talked to the grounds person about it. They said the only thing to do is to put down tarps. So, over the course of about a year, we put tarps down all around our blueberry bushes (obviously leaving room around the bushes for rain). It worked! Next step – we ripped up our raised beds, laid down tarp and put the raised beds on the tarp. Again, it worked! No weeds and everything was growing great.

Then, about a year ago, I saw the Back to Eden Film. PLEASE go watch it. It will blow. your. mind. For the walkways of the garden and blueberry bushes, we just put mulch over the plastic. We were not planning on planting anything there – we just wanted it to look nice and for the plastic to not rip up and blow away (what it was doing while uncovered).

We had a large section of the garden covered with plastic that was not being used for anything. We decided to pull up the plastic, put down newspaper, cow manure, mulch and TA DA! our first Back to Eden garden 🙂

I started planting in it this spring and even though I was planting in aged cow and chicken manure, my plants seemed to be sprouting and then stalling. However, the weather has been unusually cloudy and cold so I thought maybe once the sun comes out, everything will take off.

(these should be more green than they are)

Today is the start of a warmer/dryer spell so I decided to plant some tomato and pepper transplants from my greenhouses. I raked back the mulch and attempted to dig a hole in which to put the transplants.

But I couldn’t. I tried with my hands. Nope. I scraped & scraped with my gloves and realized I was hitting weed cloth. We forgot we had weed cloth under the tarp when we ripped it up!!! Two layers of weed cloth! No wonder everything was stalling. There is nowhere for the roots to go!

I am so sad. ALL of those carrots, lettuce, peas, tomato plants, spaghetti squash…all of it…it’s never going to grow if we leave the garden like this. We have no choice but to rip up all of the weed cloth and replant. I’ll post pics later. Mourn with me for a bit over the loss 😦

I know I should be thankful that I put in transplants today – that the whole garden was not just direct seeded – or I would have found out much later. I may have even kept planting, thinking I had just planted too early or something. I’m sure I’ll feel more thankful later this summer if I am actually getting harvests from this section of the garden.

One of the reasons for putting mulch on the garden and letting it sit for 4-6 months is so that as it rains, the soil will be conditioned. Another big problem we will be facing this summer planting in this section is that (I can only assume) the soil under the weed cloth did not benefit from the mulch over these past six months. I hope it will get better as the year goes on (without the weed cloth). Ugh! It’s just so frustrating! Grrrrrr.

Anyone want to share your gardening mistakes to help me feel better? 😉