Keeping Us Humble

The first year of our expanded garden is definitely keeping us humble for a number of reasons, one of which you can see above. This is what we came back to after three weeks of being away. I'm not sure why the photo ended up like I did but I'm guessing it was humidity build up on the lens after just stepping out of a nice air conditioned vehicle.

Humble lesson one has just been the weather which we can't control. It was a very unusually long cold spring and so what we did get planted early was stunted at best and in some cases never came up. We lost a couple rows of beans and my dad lost his first popcorn planting. All the squash, tomatoes, peppers, etc were very stunted and only now in recent weeks seem to be gaining ground. 

Humble lesson number two was our mulching choice. We got some oat straw that unbeknownst to us was chock full of oat seed. So full that every time it rains, another round of oats commences to growing over every square inch of our garden. Fortunately these oats never really root into the dirt, instead rooting into the wet straw, so it is fairly easy to pull and not have to worry about coming back. Compared to normal weeds rooted in our wet garden soils that no matter how hard you shake the root ball, the wet dirt remains stuck to the roots and unless tossed completely outside the garden boundary, just re-roots itself back into the soil the next rain.

So upon seeing the above mess, we decided that we were going to cut losses a bit and worry about just preventing the weeds from seeding for next year instead of trying to pull them all up and shake the dirt off the roots. So I hopped onto the lawn mower and proceeded to mow the areas not yet filled in by squash and pumpkins until I buried the lawnmower twenty feet later. A half hour later, with about every chain on the farm and a tractor, I had the lawnmower freed and instead resorted to a weed eater. After that, we just pulled what we could up close to the plants until we were tuckered out and called it a day. You can see what we accomplished below.

Since we have a week with no rain in the forecast, for probably the first time this year, I plan to let things dry out a bit and hopefully go back and mow the rest of the garden area that I didn't get to this past weekend.