Sounds good to me:

“I don’t have time to garden well. I garden anyway.

Gardening is one of those activities like caring for children or learning about the past that rewards you for every little effort, no matter how small. It’s an infinite game.”

You can’t lose or fail is what I’ll keep telling myself.

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I never thought I’d see it! We have about a dozen broccoli and cauliflowers forming. As you can see the leaves are getting eaten up. I’ve picked off a good number of cabbage moths. I’ll probably get BT for the kale and turnips and things I’m planning on putting out soon.

Last week I watered on account of the lack of rain and I also applied some liquid kelp to the brassicas and tomatoes. I also spread some clover and vetch around the plants hoping they’ll germinate and provide a little nitrogen boost.

Still no tomatoes besides a few cherries, but there are lots of fruits we just need a decent rain. Who knows, maybe it’ll rain in august sometime.

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Lack of labor? I haven’t been out to the garden much recently – I’m swamped with my other jobs. Chris has been spending a few days a week out there, but the weeds are starting to take over and we haven’t gotten rain for a long, long, long time…

He did haul a hose over and water as much as he could. We keep hearing of rain storms both north and south of us, but nothing ever seems to fall here.

Last Thursday I saw lots of flowers on our squashes, and a few small summer squash fruits as well. Chris picked three for dinner Tuesday – two small zucchinis, and a fairly good sized sebring summer squash. Unfortunately, my camera batteries were dead and we couldn’t wait for them to charge to eat dinner. So you get this lovely picture of an okra plant to look at instead.

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Yesterday Jessi and I weeded around the tomatoes. The ground is quite dry and compacted. We added some compost on all the tomatoes and brassicas, but I am not too optimistic. A few rows still need some straw. Things haven’t gone how I imagined they would in my head, but I still think we will get some tomatoes out of the deal if little else. A lot of our tomatoes look really small while others are bearing fruit.

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I went on vacation and the garden became a bit… neglected. It was actually hard to tell where the weeds ended and the vegetables started. Unfortunately, just about zero three sisters (corn, beans, and squash) came up. I think it’s because of the soil – if the seeds did actually germinate, they probably died trying to push their way through the clumps of clay out to the sunshine. There are a few random melons and squash, and we’ll see if we can keep a few of them alive.

Last week we got a truck load of compost, which we shoveled onto most of the transplants. I don’t know if we’ll have a chance to pick up more, but a truckload really doesn’t go that far. Back to the weed issue. Here’s what we are doing about it:

The bale was just a bit taller than me. We picked it up on Tuesday evening, and just had it plopped into the back of my pickup. Fortunately, the tree it’s under is just crooked enough that I was able to simply drive my truck under it and the bale caught on the trunk and slid right out of the truck. It was pretty neat, and I wish that we had taken a video of it.

Today was a pretty long day. Many passes of the tiller followed by hand weeding finally got things looking a bit more normal.

We got most of the brassicas mulched and started on the tomatoes. Hopefully we’ll be able to spend some time out there tomorrow as well.

Our plants are quite a bit behind where we’d like them to be, but we’re going to focus on the broccoli, cauliflower, and tomatoes. Hopefully our summer squash will work out – if not we may still have time to plant some more this season.

Mostly it is difficult because we decided at a bad time (early spring) to do this. It took way too long to get the ground worked, and optimally a project like this would have been prepared for at least a year in advance. Also, because it isn’t our land, it’s hard to really get into it. It’s a 20 minute drive out, and almost seems pointless working with and amending the soil when we’re not going to be working with it for years to come. Experience, experience – that’s the key word this year.

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If my counting is correct, we got in 280 tomato plants and 300 brassicas this weekend. We still have eggplants, peppers, and okra transplants to put in. The southeast corner of the garden tilled up the nicest, so after the hard work digging holes and planting tomatoes, we planted a lot of seeds: onion sets, lima beans, and various squashes and cucumbers.

Lisa came on Monday to help us again, and the work goes by so much quicker with a third person. Unfortunately, she is moving back to Duluth this week!

I leave for a workshop in Utah on Thursday, and I’ll be gone until June 11th. So hopefully Chris will have time to keep this website updated… I want to see pictures while I’m away! It’s up to him now to finish the transplants and decide if any more seeds will be going in. Oh, and figure out where to get a lot of compst and mulch!

Today we are hoping for rain. The forecast says 70%… but that really doesn’t mean much any more.

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When we got out to the garden this morning, the guy who had plowed was out there with his tractor tilling for us. The ground is much more workable than it was before, and we’re lucky to have him helping us out a bit.

Unfortunately, someone came by and ate a lot of the corn and squash seeds we had planted… and we can’t really tell what got eaten – there are just empty shells where pumpkin seeds once were, or pieces of corn with the germ eaten laying all around. SO… I think we’re going to have to add some more seeds back in, and maybe add more rows to the three sisters.

Our transplants are sick of their small homes and are more than ready to go in the ground. The tomatoes are starting to yellow – I’m thinking they may have gotten sunburned. But they seem really healthy, so hopefully they’ll come around.

Today we planted 200 more brassicas and the 20 Great White tomatoes. It’s a long weekend, so we’ll be out there Sunday and Monday – hopefully spending long days out there and getting the rest of our transplants in. We had a new friend helping us today – it was a pretty good time for all!

We haven’t gotten any rain for two weeks, which is really frustrating. We have been watering the transplants, but we can’t stretch the hose any farther into the garden. MAYBE it will rain Tuesay… we’ll see.

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These last four days have been frustrating, exciting, skeptical, frantic, depressing, energetic, and hopeful.

I told Chris that when we were done with this year he would be prepared to write a new book entitled something like So you want to grow vegetables on an acre of land, and decided to do this in the spring? Of course we didn’t think of this giant project in the fall, which puts us in an interesting situation. The ground would have been much easier to work if we had plowed last year, planted a few green manure crops and tilled them under, planted a winter crop, and then reworked it all again this spring.

But, we are complete novices and stuck with what we have – about a thousand seedlings that need to go in the ground.

The problem is that the soil is thick clay – when it dries it forms huge clumps and even the best tiller can’t break it up. We’ve found that the best time to till is actually when the soil is wet – contrary to most advice about working soil. The clay needs to absorb enough moisture to break up, but not so much that it’s just a sticky mess. Ideally, we’d be adding a lot of compost and peat to the soil, but since we don’t own the land, don’t know how long we’ll be working there, and don’t have a ton of money to throw around, we’re just working with what we have. We’ll be amending with compost and organic fertilizers eventually but right now we just need to get things in the ground!

Saturday we started our three sisters planting and got about 40 hills of squash and 40 hills of beans/corn in. Sunday we put in 50 broccoli transplants, and Monday 50 cauliflower. Chris spent today working the soil but incredible winds made for a tough day.

We’re hoping for rain tonight but the skies have started to clear up. If it does rain, the moisture will make the soil more workable so we can get more plants in this week. If not… well, we slave it out and do with it what we can! Our expectations have been lowered a bit, but even if we only get our transplants in we’ll have an incredible amount of food at the end of the summer.

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That’s about a third – maybe even less than a third – of our seedlings. They have become family, and I hope they all make it into the ground. (Except for the okra in the very front left corner – Puck snapped it in half while running too close… oops!). I always forget the camera when we go to Morning Sky Greenery, but I’ll try to remember to bring it tomorrow.

We started hardening off the tomatoes, peppers, okra, eggplant, and brassicas. They spent about 1 1/2 hours out in the sun and wind – sheltered as much as we could shelter them. Now we increase their time outside every day, and hopefully get the brassicas in the ground next week and the tomatoes by Memorial Day.

Very unfortunately, the hand tiller that we had planned on borrowing for the summer needs to be repaired. So I reserved the biggest tiller that our local hardware store has for rent, and tomorrow Chris is going to spend the entire day – 8 to 5 – tilling as much as he can possibly till. An acre is A LOT of land to hand-till in one day, and the tiller is also fairly expensive to rent… and since it runs on gas, there’s an added expense.

I hope Chris can survive the day! Unfortunately I have other work to do, and quite honestly I don’t think I can manage a tiller of that size very easily. But the land has been broken, so it won’t be as tough as it was when we tilled up the back yard for our home garden. The immediate plan is that enough of the garden will get tilled for our three sisters planting (corn, beans, and squash/melons): our weekend project!

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This is a bit odd. All of our okra seedlings are covered – very thickly – in these little clear gelly spheres. They seem like eggs, but the strange thing is that none of the other seedlings (including tomatoes, peppers, sunflowers, papaya, and eggplant) show any signs of the “eggs”.

Also, we haven’t seen any insects. And these have been inside since they were planted – we’re just moving them outside to harden them off for the first time today.

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