Another Season Begins

Most of the garden is now in the ground:

Tomatoes!



Potatoes, carrots & parsnips, planted in April

 I didn’t remember to photograph the main garden, because we were headed out immediately to plant the back 40:

From this angle, it doesn’t look so bad.  Hunched over the rows, planting peas, beans and corn, it seemed like the worlds loooooongest field.  Where you can see the furrows above, we planted corn in one half of the right hand side (we are planning a successive planting over the weekend of June 16-17 if the weather holds) and on the left-hand side, we planted 1 1/2 rows of pole beans, 1/2 row of green bush beans, 1 row of purple bush beans, and five rows of peas.  I must have put in more than 200.  J claims to like peas – we’re about to find out just how much.  We left 2 rows empty to do successive plantings of green and purple bush beans.  About the middle of the field you can see some very thin stakes sticking up – J planted barley in that area.  Behind the barley is where we will be putting the pumpkins, watermelons, winter squash and radishes.  We don’t actually like radishes all that much, but J read that they repel the bugs that eat squash and pumpkin plants, so hey!  Let’s grow some radishes.  I bet the woodchuck will love them.
Our newest concern is how often it rains.  Unlike the main house garden and raised beds, there is no water source out by the back-40 field, and it’s quite some distance from the house:

Standing next to the field, looking back towards the house



In fact, you can’t even see the house from the back-40 garden.  Fortunately today it is raining, and it seems like we got a pretty good soaking rain last night.  We’re hoping the overcast/drizzly weather last through Thursday, as predicted, while J investigates the possibility of rain barrels for out back.  Otherwise it’s a really long way to haul 5-gallon buckets of water, even if we put them in the trailer that attaches to the tractor.

Good Morning!

This is the sight that greeted me as I came downstairs just after 5 AM this morning:

I did come thumping down the stairs this morning – I am always delighted to reach the first floor in one piece without having any coffee – which caused him to turn around and try and see in the windows next to the door.  Fortunately I managed to avoid being seen; when I am spotted there is lots of meowing and a lot of sad looks.

Many of the seedlings have been brought upstairs and put on a rack.  It started raining so we couldn’t put them outside earlier this week, but they’re going out today:

J has also planted the hops in pots outside below this sun porch:

We are growing three types (and by “we” I mean, of course, J and I am just taking associated credit.)  The vines grow 18 feet high, on average, so they’re on the ground underneath the highest wall of the sun porch so we have a spot we can string trelises from the top to pull them up.  (I also hope that it will provide a little bit of shade on a room that is hard to sit in during the height of summer, even with all the windows and doors open.)

The area around the hops is pretty much empty since they go up rather than out, so J decided on Monday to plant more herb seeds – cilantro, basil and dill.  He of course had help:

He said it would have gone much faster without a cat climbing into his lap.  I’m still trying to figure out when exactly I turned into a cat lady without actually owning a cat.