What a Life!

Remember all the great plans I had for my garden? I did finally plant it about a month ago (much later than I intended thanks to all the rain we had this spring).

Here is a picture of my little plot.

I had all these great plans for all these things I was going to plant, but I ended up planting corn, green beans, and radishes, along with the plants that managed to survive that I planted earlier.

Yes, those dear little plants. Not everything planted came up so I had to replant about half of them. Then I had Ben “The Plucker” to contend with. That’s what they looked like when I moved them out to the porch to “season” them. Sad to say, there were a few more casualties via plucking before they made it out to the garden.

Then that great soil Earl May sold me? That starter soil that I was supposed to use instead of potting soil?

Yeah, that stuff. It was full of peat moss or something so it was really light and fluffy. It wouldn’t hold water. And when I went to plant the plants, instead of sticking with the roots so they had something familiar after being transplanted, the “starter soil” all fell off, damaging the roots and leaving them unprotected. So half of what was left when I finally did the transplanting died as a result of the transplanting. [I started out with 72 slots and less than half of them had plants that I actually attempted to transplant.]

Here is one of the two eggplants (of the four I originally planted in that fancy dirt) that survived:

And here’s the other one. Do you think it’ll make it?

Here is the only surviving pepper plant – 4 bell peppers and 4 hot peppers originally planted, 2 of each transplanted, but I don’t know whether this one is a bell or jalapeno pepper.

This is the lone surviving tomato plant, ironically, about the same size it was when I transplanted it about a month ago.

These are the volunteer tomatoes that came up all by themselves and have not been the beneficiaries of any watering or weeding.

Aren’t they pretty? See, they’re even producing tomatoes.

Here is my corn. I planted two plots of three rows each. I planted radishes between the rows of corn. Here is the first plot I planted.

Here is the second plot, planted about ten minutes after the first.

Note the difference in the size of the radishes. If I didn’t know better, I would think they were planted at least two weeks apart.

This is the neighbor’s corn.

The ladder you see there is six feet tall. Isn’t it pretty?

The marigolds seem to be doing okay, though. Pretty?

Here is how I prepared the ground before I planted everything.

I followed the advice in this book. He says it takes ten years to completely adapt all of his methods. Turning the soil was the some of the advice I followed this year. I must say that it was a lot of work, but weeding is so much easier because the soil is softer and the weeds actually come out by their roots instead of just breaking off at the base. It took me about ten minutes to weed my entire garden yesterday. Last year, the same size plot would have taken at least a half hour and I would have had to do it almost immediately after watering in order to be able to pull the weeds and not break them (which includes getting covered in mud myself).

One thing I did plant earlier than everything else were some peas right next to the back fence. I planted a row about six feet long. Out of probably thirty seeds, only a dozen actually came up. And only four or five plants grew to be fifteen inches tall. The other day I “harvested” my peas – I picked the five pods that were hanging on the plants, and I ate them right then and there.

They were so good! Nothing beats produce picked from the garden and eaten right away! I’m telling you, it made me want to try again next year. I mean, I know my garden is probably the most pathetic thing you ever saw. Even volunteer plants do much better than plants that I take care of. But my garden being so pathetic only means that it will be much easier next year to improve on my success this year, right?

As for this year, if nothing else, I can at least take good photographs of my volunteer tomato plants.