Tick Tock, A Year Has Passed

My goodness - how can it be?  I guess a career as a blogger is not for me.

Well the low down skinny is that I've recently taken up employment in the organic garden over at Summerfield Farms, and as a result, my own garden has languished some.  In fact, in a recent visit my grandmother observed, in that slightly disapproving way that she has about OPGs (other people's gardens) - "Hmmmm, looks like this is turning out to be more of a flower garden than a veggie garden….".

That's right Granny - no time for my own veggies, and petunias don't need much care!

I have, however had some luck with lettuce, a few tomatoes and cucumbers, and bell peppers, so we therefore eat fresh salads quite regularly:

Dear Lord, is it really 1am?  Ok, more later.  No really - I promise!

My beautiful shed!

At last, at last!  I feel like Martin Luther King of the veggies.  My wonderful two man crew (Jim and Jim) have finished building my shed.  Isn't it beautiful???

Now in case you're not properly impressed, let me remind you of what it looked like three months ago:

 Yes - that very large space in the fence, otherwise known as the Great Deer Highway.  Which is the main reason that four months after planting my green beans, this is pretty much the result:

Hope no one's hungry.  One green bean is not going to feed the masses, as in the story of the five fishes and two loaves, or two fishes and five loaves.  Whichever.

Okay quick garden update.  My family and I ate a MOUNTAIN of squash and zucchini over the summer.  It was insane.  If I left for a day they doubled in size.  We just couldn't keep up.  Everyone who came within five hundred yards of the house got saddled with squash and zucchini.

Zucchini/squash fritters became the favorite:

At the end of the summer I was left with a mountain of spaghetti squash.  Thankfully, these can store for up to six months in a cool dark pantry.  These are so versatile!  My favorite and quickest recipe is to cut one in half, lengthways, plop it face down on a cookie sheet, bake at 385 for about 45 minutes, and then add fattening stuff.  Butter/cheese, or butter/brown sugar.  YUM!

But now that temps are starting to dip, it's time for the fall garden.  The girls and I planted this bed on Sunday and it includes spinach, kale, cabbage, beets, radishes, peas (yes, why not try again?).

I planted a crop of kale and spinach two weeks ago, but they don't seem to be in a tearing rush to feed my family anytime soon:

This is otherwise known as the big pumpkin FAIL.  What the heck?

I have a bounty of late summer tomatoes, although that ripe one in the pic got ravaged by something:

Well folks - that's all.  Here's another pic of my shed.  I love it so much!  Can't wait to paint it!  Oh, and it still needs shaker shingles on the front, but guess what - I'm out of money.  Again.  Ha!

One final note - always take time after gardening to sit back and relax :-)

Time marches on.

I have forgotten what has happened since my last post.  I guess I could talk about squash?  Do you ever have that slightly sick feeling in your stomach, resulting in a message to your brain, that says "uh oh"?  That would be my experience with squash.

I planted my squash from seed.  Little tiny seeds!  Allow this pictorial to tell the rest of the story.

Hello.  Here we are about three weeks after landing in the dirt as little tiny seeds.  I planted six seeds.  They said 4-6 feet apart, but hey, how bad can it be, really?

We went away for a week, and came back to this.  Not alarming yet.  And after all, I was thrilled to discover this:  

Woo hoo - squash!  So exciting!

But then two weeks later, this is what we look like now:  

Yes!  We are the mighty squash plants that will stop at nothing.  It is growing through the fence, and into the sweet potato beds.  And I'm pretty sure that squash doubles in size every day, because we are now eating squash EVERY SINGLE DAY.  I'm not really interested in knowing if anyone in the family actually LIKES squash.  It has become a family duty to Eat Squash.  

Bon appétit!

The Moving of the Fountain. And GRAVEL!

I know the date of this post is sometime in July, but the story that I'm relaying happened on June 15th.  My memories of it are somewhat foggy, but certain things do stand out.  The husband was annoyed with me.  Really annoyed.  It had to do with my stubborn insistence to move 4,000 pounds of gravel in my brand new car, load by load, and do the spreading myself.  This was infinitely more hellish than the moving and dumping of the dirt.  But having had my finances erased to zero, this to me was my only option.

The morning of the first load, I stumbled around the yard heaving forty pounds of gravel while the husband yelled very emphatically from the patio, "I will NOT help you with that!  Do you hear me??  I will NOT help!  You are so stubborn!!!  You need to hire someone to do that!!"  I won't lie when I say that my inner Greek woman came out and told him to shut the F up and go back inside the effing house.  It was hotter than Hades, and I was sweating like an ox.  This is a picture of gravel hell:

You see, at first I was influenced by the non-gardening husband to lay down that black landscaping fabric before putting down the gravel.  But late the night before I started, I lay googling in the dark and found every single gardener on the planet bemoaning their decision to use that stuff.  The reason being, there is not a single method on this planet that will stop a weed, including landscape fabric, and weeds actually get choked in the fabric, making it impossible to pull them.  I am not afraid of pulling weeds.  So laying newspaper won my vote.

However.

In the satanic heat, punctuated by biting flies, I was following this protocol:

1.  Remove the weeds from a small area

2.  Lay newspaper

3.  Break open 40 pound bag of gravel and dump.

In a moment of reconciliation, the husband appeared somewhat tentatively at my side and offered water.  Bless him!  But when our eldest suggested he HELP, he said "Mom said she doesn't need my 'bleeping' help".  

And so the day continued.  At about 2pm, I was starting to see double.  I staggered around and rested by the gate for a moment.  A hallucination appeared before me.  A beautiful apparition, in fact.  JOSE!!  

"What are you DOING?"  he asked, in sheer amazement.  I was so happy, I felt like I'd been saved from three weeks out at sea.  I don't know if he really was just there to cut the grass, or if the scolded husband had called him, but I mentally cashed in my daughters' secret fund and accepted his help.  Within an hour, though he said to me, "next time, don't ask me!!"  Because, besides the gravel, I had Jose and his two guys Move The Fountain.  And that was a job for no mortal man.  But here it is!!

I am not lying when I tell you that it probably weighs around 600 pounds.  But huzzah!  It is now moved!  I could go on and tell you how angry the husband was when he saw that it wasn't EXACTLY equidistant from all four corners, etc, etc, but then I'd have to relive that moment, and I don't care to.  Engineering science does not play into my garden vision, after all.

At the end of the day, Jose, Hector and Juan almost finished the job.  Bless them.  I love them!  

But of course I was about 10 bags short.  Blech.  I instead, triumphantly planted some tomatoes.  Finally!

Meanwhile, in other parts of the yard, things continue to bloom.  Thank goodness!

Oh, did I mention?  In the very civilized front yard, my daughters discovered this guy.  There was a lot of screaming and terror, and I admit - I was not thrilled, despite the known fact that garter snakes are not poisonous.  I still do not like seeing them.

Until next time - more was done today, but I had to do this catch-up post!

What not to do.

We dumped all our supplies in the veggie garden, and within minutes, the skies opened up, and rained non stop for almost a week.  Now looking back, I should have thrown on a raincoat and just got out there and worked in the rain.  In fact, every day that passed I mourned that I had no seeds in the ground to benefit from such a long wet spell.

But instead, on the very first day that the sun reappeared, I headed out to begin work.  What I found was a hot muddy mess, and a brand new crop of grass and weeds in my previously cleared area.  That's what is known as One Giant Step Backwards.

I spent the better part of a day digging up weeds and grass.  With the rain clouds gone, it quickly climbed close to a horribly humid 88 degrees.   At some point the husband took pity on me and came out to help.  Bless his heart!

And his "let's get it done" attitude.  Quickly doing the math, he resorted to renting a truck from Home Depot.  Yay - only two trips needed to deliver 150 bags of top soil, garden soil, and cow poop!

However.  The big however.  Unloading 150 bags weighing 40 pounds each became a soul destroying exercise.  What "fresh hell" is this, to quote Jen Hatmaker???

But we shouldered on.  Determined to get all the raised beds built, and filled with soil in one day.  Har har to that crazy dream, I say.

Here's what one of four corners looked like at around 3pm (the earlier part of the day having been spent weeding and heaving wretched bags of dirt):

An important note here is that all this lumber had been sitting in the week long rain, and now became another hellish task to put together.  These are "no tool" veggie beds that are supposed to just slide in place, but there was a lot of pounding and jumping and stomping, and let's just say that the instructions to "make sure each bed is level before filling with soil" was cast out with our last ounce of waning energy.  

  These look fairly level, don't they?  The correct answer is YES!

At about 4:30pm the husband suddenly felt the need to take the kids to the pool.  And I continued on with what I consider to be worse than childbirth.  Breaking open dozens and dozens of f*cking heavy bags of soil, and dumping them into the beds.  

Here's my do-over piece of advice:  Forget raised beds!  Put those veggies in the ground and wish them good luck!!

Here they are, with soil.  Cursed raised beds!

Sadly, only about a third of the beds got built and filled with soil.  So much for getting it all done in one day.  It simply cannot be done.

At about 6pm I crawled into the house for a much needed shower, and curled into a whimpering ball on the sofa.  Farming is not for anyone over the age of 25!  And on a side note, my kids were utterly and completely uninterested and useless during all of this.  If this had been Little House on the Prairie, I would have taken them to town and traded them for a mule.

Meanwhile, in other corners of our property, little notes of joy are popping up in various colors:

Ironically, this is what the hubs made for dinner.  I feel like I'm being taunted.

No money, no time......

A little time has passed, and nothing has happened in the veggie garden.  I feel the year's planting season passing me by.  Sadly, the cost of the fence has prevented me from moving forward in any organized fashion.

I sat down and planned out the space:

Looks good on paper, right!  The green areas are the raised beds.  The grey is gravel (actually so is the white in between).  The fountain is salvaged from a corner of our house and I plan to plant the herbs within its tiers.  The shed is supposed to be custom built by someone called Jim Corneghie - but I've lost his number, and he's not in the book.  Drats!

I took a drive out to the local granite quarry to purchase gravel.  That got me nowhere.  They don't deliver small orders.  Honestly, the thought of wheel-barrowing three tons of granite up the hill did not appeal to me.

Ho hum, drumming of fingers.....

Here are some pics of various things blooming around the house!

  Rhododendron and azaleas....

  the arbor rose.....

  dwarf zinnias....

Alrighty, enough of the diversion.  Back to work.  Here's my little squirt, turning her back on my seemingly endless project.

  Whatever, mommy - see ya.

So, when in doubt about how to do things economically, easily, and practically - turn to Home Depot!

Off we go - because my past experience tells me, that it might not be the most wholesale way to go, at least everything you need is under one roof.  My two unwilling shoppers accompanied me this morning, and here we are with the supplies for ONE QUARTER of the veggie beds.  Oh my goodness.

The kids just cannot fathom that I'll be willlingly adding cow poop to the place where our veggies will grow!

Next up - having to reconfigure my layout (the garden boxes are 4x4, not 6x4 like my plan shows), and getting down to building the first two!  In the mean time, my radish, bean, and pea seedlings are busting out of their little plastic bins, and itching for a place to grow......

Progress!

I am so happy to report, that as of 6pm today, the fence is complete!   There was a stage last week that the husband rained buckets on my parade by claiming he hated how big it was, and that it had completely ruined our back yard.  He has slightly changed his tune now that it is complete.  That might be "coping", but I'll take it.

Getting the double thumbs up!  Yes, why yes, it is a very large garden.  The internal size is 32 feet by 27 feet.  That is 864 square feet.  My god, that's bigger than my first house!  There will be a lot of vegetables, methinks.

Oops - I think they forgot to use my vintage garden gate, but it's probably good.  This works better.  Can't wait to plant a climbing rose on that pergola!

I had water plumbed from the house to inside the veggie garden.  No dragging fifty feet of hose for me!  This was not expensive to do.  I am thrilled.

This space has been left open for a shed.  My shed quest has been almost as frustrating as my fencing quest.  Hopefully I'll have answers soon.  However, I'm completely out of money - this fence broke the bank.  So guess what deer - you have open access for a while.  Egads.

The veggie garden at the top of the hill.  Huzzah!!!