Lettuce,tomatos,and peas...oh my!

This is a prolific time of year for the garden. Planting is done until fall, so all I do now is weed,water, and harvest! The garden is doing well, some plants better than others. Here is a report...or a spot of  bragging, take your pick:

The early crop of lettuce is now so prolific that I am giving the stuff away . The peas are unexpectedly slow; they are just now developing pods. The broccoli is positively huge,and I am waiting for those baby florets.The tomatoes are growing fast, although they have developed a bug problem,and just I sprayed them with insecticidal soap.The peppers I thought were dying have bounced back with enthusiasm, and the cucumbers are growing well too. GO garden!

Caning Preparations

Several days of heavy rain have restrained my garden activities, so I have begun preparing for caning season.Caning can be economical IF you do it several seasons in a row to make up for the initial costs of supplies and equipment. The best reason to can, though, is to make those recipes that you will never find on the supermarket shelves.I made a new recipe (for me) last year called pear cranberry chutney which is nothing short of amazing. My best advise: get the Ball book of caning entitled "The Blue Book of Caning. " for a great how-to guide.

Internet garden?

I am about to date myself by  observing how the internet has changed gardening. Puzzling over why my favorite lilac tree is not blooming , I searched my favorite web site (It's you bet your garden,I have a link for you), looked up lilacs and found my answer (not enough sun) in a few minutes flat. When I first started gardening, I would have had to visit local library, and spend at least a half an hour trying to find an answer. Amazing! BUT I still have to go out there and trim the tree near the lilac myself, don't I? Thank Goodness, I do!

Row cover review & update

I started the spring hunting for more economical alternatives to row covers. You see these things in garden magazines, seed catalogs; half moon shaped wire covered with cloth. They are placed over crops to warm the soil in the spring, extend the season in the fall, and protect the crop from insects. Sounds good, right? Only trouble is, they are expensive. I decided to buy yards of  cheesecloth, drape it around the plants, using left over wooden stakes from an old fence to hold it up, plus clothes pins and landscape fabric pins to hold it all in place. The good news; it is working like a charm! It has kept out bugs and rabbits, too. But after being in the garden in all weathers, it is starting to unravel in places, and I suspect it will not last more than one season. Here's hoping!

Lettuce Eat!

So yesterday I gathered the first real harvest in the garden. A basket full of lettuce, all plucked from the outside leaves so there is plenty more where that came from. This stuff is so tender, sweet, and gorgeous that I could honestly have eaten the whole basket full in one sitting. The most successful are the ones from a variety pack entitled "mescalin," so what I really got was a variety of lettuces unaffordable in the grocery store. Looking them up, I find I have Mizuna,Oak Leaf, Arugula,and Ruby. I also have Boston, Iceberg,and Romaine in another row. Plus, I got a few small spinach leaves, too. Last week, I started some more baby lettuce indoors to see if I could get another crop in before the heat of summer comes. If not, I can eat the sprouts,call them micro greens, and feel like a real gourmet!

Hardscaping Adventures

Hardscaping is the name given to non-growing things put in the garden. And I discovered exactly why. It's HARD! this year I decided to try to make a permanent path to my garden as an attempt at beautification. At first,  I thought I would get some free crushed oyster shells, having remembered that on one of our many drives , my husband and I had seen house-sized piles of them in a town called (I am not lying) Shellpile. So I made several frustrating phone calls to find exactly who was in charge of the shells. Eventually, I was told that the shells were all owned by the state of New Jersey, which uses them to restore oyster beds (again, the honest truth). Oh,well. I then scrounged some patio bricks from my long suffering son, read a bit about how to install them, and was off to the races.Two weekends and sore backs later we had installed a small path through the herb garden . I love the result, but so far, lack the fortitude for the bigger project out to the main garden. I comfort myself with the thought that it may be pretty, but I can't eat it! 

I'm hunting wabbits...

Even though the row covers I have over my lettuce seems to be keeping them at bay, I still resent rabbits. It is so disheartening to raise plants from seed, put them out in the garden, watch them grow, and then- disaster. The furry beasts eat everything down to the roots. Every time my dog chases one out of the yard I let go an evil chuckle. Hee-hee-hee. Go find your food elsewhere,you wascally wabbit!  Those veggies are MINE!

In the weeds

As scripture says, God rains on the just and unjust alike, and so it is with gardens. The same rain followed by sunshine that has been encouraging prodigious crops of lettuce has also encouraged weeds. Lots of 'em. Bunches.Armies.This year, I am trying a tip I think I heard from Whyy's "You Bet Your Garden," newspapers. The idea is to uses them as a mulch between plants to prevent the weeds from getting any sun. I laid down a double or triple layer of paper and anchored it with landscape fabric pins. Here's hoping!

Encouraging Words

After a couple of days with out a visit from me, the garden has (forgive the cliche') blossomed. All the plants I have out there have grown. So have the weeds,of course. Some of the lettuce is ready to harvest! I feel like having a salad party...is there such a thing? While weeding today, I found some little dill plants which have sprung up where I planted seed last spring. So I am going to try to transplant them to the cucumber section of the garden. Anyhow, this is all by way of proving that nature will have her way, and that a gardener's job is to

get out of her way whenever possible. What a relief!

Garden Envy

Perusing this month's Mother Earth News I was struck with the wrong kind of green thinking...it is envy. This is what happens when I see photos of other people's gardens, especially the pretty ones! It is also what happens when I am not actually IN my garden for a couple of days, as happened this week due to the weather and my schedule. Pretty gardens are nice, and I have nothing against them. But I am trying to have a low cost garden, and lots of the prettier frills are things I will need to hunt for for free, or buy on clearance at the end of the season. Just like I did for my essentials (shovel and rake bought on sale. fence gotten for free, etc.). I think I will trot out to the garden in spite of the rain today. The plants will still be growing, even inside my ugly fence!

Garden gadgets

How much stuff do you really need to have a garden? Not much, really. Start with a spade. A spade is a shovel with a pointed end. If you can only get one tool, you need to dig, obviously. And I have found that the pointed end of the spade to be quicker penetrating earth than a shovel. Of course, they usually are a bit smaller, which means more digs. For short people like me, with small arm muscles, a spade will keep you from lifting too much at once.
Next, get a rake. Not a flexible leaf rake, but a metal one. You will use this to even out the soil, weed between rows and between plants. This will save your back, believe me!
Lastly, you will need a hose and access to a spigot. Every gardener runs across a bit of dry weather. If your soil is dry a couple of inches down, its time to water. Water as early in the morning as you can to keep your garden happy.
 For my first garden , my kids and I used spoons to dig the holes for our plants. Our plants grew anyhow. The family still jokes about it eventually became difficult to eat our breakfast cereal because all the spoons were in the garden!

Gardener's brains

Even though I have had some type of vegetable garden of my own for many years now, in some ways,I feel like a beginning gardener. Take for example,roses. I don't grow them. They are beautiful, and I especially love the fragrant varieties, but after reading about the maintenance...diseases, planing requirements, varieties,and so on, I am still too intimidated to give them a try. I am already busy with my yard; my veggie garden, my much smaller kitchen herb garden, my few flower beds, and my fruit trees keep me busy already. Plus I am still working on clearing the outer edges near our fence, which were overgrown with mysterious vicious leafless sticker vines when we came to this house 20 years ago. These things are pure evil,whatever they are, and have caused many a wicked cut. So I have avoided roses.
All this is by way of saying that it is easy to be intimidated when beginning to garden. And it doesn't help that the image of gardening is so-what's the word- uncool? Gardeners are dirt poor hippies, or rich yuppie hobbyists, or garden club geniuses. They use Latin, for goodness sake. They have gardener's brains. A beginning gardener can feel as if there is too much to learn, and that it is impossible to succeed with out encyclopedic knowledge and an infinite budget. But as someone I know recently pointed out, they are only plants, after all. If they don't work, you can throw them out, learn a little, and try again.