Last week I gave a progress report for May. Not a whole lot had happened since I planted everything, which was why I hadn’t updated throughout the month. I’d basically decided that a Monthly Update was how this series was going to go.
What a difference a week makes!
Apparently, it takes a garden a bit to get started, but once you see the first sprouts it’s ‘off to the races’ time!
In the three days I was gone to work last week, my pole beans went from this:
To this:
Yowza!
And my sad little lonely loofah from last week? Now has two friends! All three of them have started growing. Yay!
So last Saturday, when we finished with the Farmer’s Market and headed to Home Depot, we got some supplies.
The BEST part of Home Depot, of course, is all the cool things the kids get to ride on!
Since we now plan to trial Basil on Zac at some point, I went ahead and bought some more basil to plant.
Since the weeds were just OUTRAGEOUS and I could not keep up with the weeding demands, we bought some weedblocker and mulch. Hopefully, that will help.
For the boys to play with in their sand table, and to fix the stepping stones leading from the house to the yard, we bought some sand. The stones had sunk in places over the last three years and needed to be leveled out again.
That afternoon, we got to work.
I cleared out the rest of the flower bed and planted some more basil. Then I mulched the whole thing. It looks so pretty now, doesn’t it?
We put up these nifty string trellises we found behind the pole beans, cucumbers and loofah. Then I laid down weedblocker in front of the plants, and mulched that area and around the plants themselves.
Maybe next year I can turn that into another raised garden bed! I’ve got a step up on next Springs work!
Darrel pulled up all the stepping stones, dug up all the weeds, smoothed it out, laid down some weedblocker, and added more sand. Then he put the stepping stones back down. It’s so much nicer to walk on a flat surface there!
The boys were little angels the whole time Darrel and I were working so hard, because they had two bags of sand in their sand table and were busy seeing who could get dirtier. Ah…kids.
The one flower I grow on purpose is a Knockout Rose bush my Mom convinced me to buy three years ago. I was such a complete idiot about gardening back then that I didn’t know tillers even existed! I dug out the entire area around that rose bush by hand with a shovel.
Just about tore my back out doing it, but that rose bush has been doing very well these last three years – especially considering we’ve been in drought conditions for all of them!
It’s a little silly, but since I planted that rose bush when Jed was just a year old, I have connected the two in my mind. As he grows, so does my rose bush.
I can’t wait to see what they’ll both look like in ten years!
Anyway, I prune that rose bush and tend to it, but the weeds around it are a constant battle. So I laid down more weedblocker around the rose bush and mulched the whole area. That should help!
Plus, it just looks prettier now, doesn’t it?
That was all the work we could handle that day, and as we were cleaning up, Jed came up to us yelling “Look at the rainbow!”
We turned around and saw one of the most beautiful rainbows I’ve ever seen!
Y’all may think I’m weird or silly for this, but since that was Zac’s birthday, I felt like that rainbow was God smiling down on Zac and promising hopeful things for him.
I know the scientific reason rainbows exist, but still. It made me feel a lot more confident about the cauliflower trial that night!
The next day we hit the garden again.
I spent over an hour weeding my raised garden bed. One thing I never knew about gardening was how much it hurts your back! But in the end, it was worth it. Darrel covered it in mulch, so hopefully that sort of weeding is in my past!
The next step was to go to work on the potato towers. They needed another board put on, and to be covered in straw.
I went ahead and screwed the next level in place, but before I added the straw I had a nifty project to do.
One of the comments I’d read on a blog post about growing potatos in towers suggested that potatos are a “thirsty” veggie, and said they insert PVC pipes with holes drilled in them to aid in proper watering of their tower potatos. They further suggested that many peoples lack of success with this method of growing potatos was due to inadequate watering.
Sign me up! The whole thing is an experiment, after all. Why not try it?
So I had Jed hold the end of a PVC pipe steady while I cut off lengths with a hack saw.
Then I drilled holes about 3/4 inch apart all the way up each pipe. Jed wanted to help. He was actually really good with a drill! Well, as long as I stabilized it and applied pressure for him.
When they were all cut and drilled, I just pressed them in between the existing potato plants into the dirt.
And yes, I know that one tower has poles the proper height and the other tower has poles that are too short. That’s one side benefit of having your kids playing nearby when you’re doing such projects. They ran off with my “correct length” pipe that I was using to mark the second pole with, and left behind the leftover piece from cutting the first full length PVC pipe.
Consequently, I marked the entire second pipe wrong! Oh, well.
When that was finished, Darrel fetched some hay for us (we didn’t have any straw, but hay will work just fine) and Zac helped me cover the potatos.
While this was going on, Darrel was busy with a project of his own.
My biggest complaint about our yard has been how nasty the grass is. Coming from Suburbia, I’m used to even, smooth, manicured grass. This country wild lawn stuff has taken some getting used to!
But even Darrel agreed that it would be nicer for us all outside if the yard was a bit more level and not full of the nasty Bermuda grass that runs everywhere (including my garden, which irritates me to no end).
So he tilled up a plot of lawn and seeded it with some grass seed. He’d already done that in the front yard on a spot of “dead grass” with a different grass seed. So now we’ll see which one we like best and he’ll slowly transform our yard into something more pleasant to be on!
I know I mentioned that I wasn’t sure if my carrots were growing last week. Turns out, I have a TON of carrots growing! Now I can spot them. It was so encouraging, I went ahead and planted three more rows of carrots.
By the end of the weekend, we had transformed my backyard!
Here’s the basil bed last week:
And this week:
My climbing crop bed last week:
And this week:
And I didn’t even dare take photos of the entire raised bed last week; it was just too ghastly to share. But here it is, in all its finished glory:
How I FEEL about this bed now is more like this, though:
One small miracle is that my seedlings have sprouted! I, uh, sort of forgot to water them for a while. Like, a week. Or two. (I’m not sure.) Oops.
But those little tomato seeds decided to come to life despite my inattention!
The least I could do was give them a little more room to grow, right? So I transplanted my tomato seedlings so there were only 1-2 per pot. I’ve got 17 Amish Paste tomato seedlings started:
and 17 Chadwick Cherry tomato seedlings started:
Honestly, I have no idea where I will put 34 tomato plants! I really didn’t think these seeds would “take” at all!
It’s an amazing week in my garden. What’s going on with yours?
