This is my favorite part of the garden project. Watering the plants. Stirring the soil. Pulling the weeds (which are very few with this new mushroom compost). Watching the miracles of growth. Watching the plants climb, flower…tiny little vegetables forming. There is something therapeutic about it all – partnering with God…a little.
Here are some photo updates:
We have been preparing for our garden for some time now and Planting Day finally arrived. We always plant on the Saturday after Good Friday, which puts us a little later in the season this year, but no worries. We had to clean out the winter growth from garden bed. Our good friends Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo made a generous donation to our venture this year – a truck load of rich organic mushroom mulch! I snapped a few shots over the past couple of weeks and then set up an interval timer series with my Nikon D200 on a tripod while we were actually planting the garden.
This year, we are just planting basic, staple vegetables – zucchini squash, yellow straight neck squash, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, sweet red peppers and cantaloupe. We may try some smaller raised box beds on another part of our yard that gets full sun nearly all day. Our sycamore trees have gotten tall and are shading our garden bed more than I like, but they still get 5-6 hours of full sun. We’ll post updates as things grow…
We are starting our annual vegetable garden project on time, for a change, this year. We planted some of our seedlings today and will plant the rest in 2 weeks. We’ll probably plant the ones we started today around Dad’s birthday, March 20th and then the rest around Good Friday. The kids are really able to help a lot these days and are very hands-on. We’ll post progress photos as soon as they start sprouting. Our goal is to NOT mix up the labels this year…we’ve found that it’s very hard to tell a cherry tomato seedling from a Better Boy tomato seedling, ditto for yellow and zucchini squash.
Here’s our tentative lineup for this year:
We may tweak the mix a little as we go along, but this is the initial plan. This is our first year trying corn, but we’re going to give it a whirl. We have to plant it in a square pattern instead of long rows to help with pollination. We may replace the green beans with something else – they “run” all over the place and take up a lot of space, but we may run them along the back fence or something this year.
