A Garden Update & A Great Paul Revere Impersonation
After all the the crazy Spring weather I thought I would give you a quick garden update. Remember all of the lengths I went to, to start my garden?
I started everything from seed.
Hovered over each seedling as it grew.
Carefully hardened the young plants in order to prepare them for the big wide world.
Although, nothing can really prepare a plant for baseball size hail and 35″ of rain.
So, I faithfully and meticulously covered each plant with tubs and buckets to protect from potential hail storms.
6 hail storms and almost 3 feet of rain later, and my garden may be a little stunned, but it is still growing. Well, the garden AND the insect population are growing. I am afeared the insects may win out.
The tomatoes have already had several bouts of red spider mites, white fly and aphids. The eggplant leaves look like they have been used as target practice thanks to a strong-willed flea beetle population — and my least favorite garden pest has finally arrived on the scene: the SQUASH BUG.
In spite of all the adversities, my tomato harvest looks very promising!
The beautiful black & purple heirloom varieties are showing up in great numbers!
My Korean eggplants will be ready to harvest while we are away on our annual lake vacay – so hopefully mom & dad will make something yummy with them and send me a photo.
The peppers are just now starting to produce. I know they prefer dry heat, so hopefully in the months to come they will kick into high gear.
My beans are blooming, or as Shep and I hooped through the garden at the sight of blooming beans: “The beans are blooming!!! The beans are blooming!!”, in our best Paul Revere impersonation. Have you ever hooped? It is different than yelping, or hollering, or cackling, or screaming. You should read the Urban dictionary’s definition of hooping it up. Um – that isn’t exactly what we did in my little garden, but we did have maximum fun in a SUB-urban environment for 1 or 2 minutes at the sight of bean blooms!
Shep also spotted this purple carrot peeking through the soil and was so excited. The carrots look to be thriving and will soon be ready!
If I can keep the dreaded squash bugs at bay, my squash plants are just about to go crazy. I can see baby squash all over the place ((I planted 8 varieties of heirloom squash)). I have a “funny” squash plant story, I may as well share. It isn’t really funny, but it does give an accurate glimpse into the way most of my daily efforts go…
After taking care of the seedlings, planting, labeling, hovering, hardening etc., I finally decided it was time to stick the tiny, new plants in the ground, so I arranged the seedlings onto a tray for transport. As I turned the corner, walking from my potting shed to the garden, a big gust of Oklahoma! -style wind caught the lightweight tray. The rushing wind lifted the tray off my hands and up into the air my little seedlings went. They all blew a few feet ahead of me as I strained to catch them like a clown who just dropped his juggling balls. Then, just as suddenly as the gust blew in, it disappeared, causing my precious squash seedlings to crash to the ground, hard.
When I gathered them all up and inspected the damage, several seedlings were mortally wounded — and as if that weren’t bad enough, I quickly realized the variety identification labels were all mixed up. All that work and it was gone in seconds. Oh well. I stuck what was left into the ground and hoped for the best. So, every time I see a new little baby squash growing, I can check off another variety that survived “the fall”. It really is like Christmas!
The radishes ((French breakfast radishes)) were GREAT at first, so sweet and mild, but too much rain really messed them up. Now they are bitter, too peppery and mealy on the inside. Bummer. But the bunnies are sure loving the radish leaf snacks they get, so I am just letting the rest of my bitter radishes stay in the ground.
All in all, I have learned a TON and feel very blessed to have had the time and money to build my garden. Even though this season’s harvest has yet to come, I am already making plans for next year. So is Lily, I think. She is planning for chickens, haha.