We ordered a Nichols plum tree and Goldrush and Williams Pride apple trees from One Green World.  They came in last week, but I forgot to call to get the lines marked beforehand so we had to wait to plant them.  They sat in the crawlspace and the plum tree decided to flower.  All are semidwarf and disease resistant varieties.  Goldrush ripens late and William’s Pride early.  We planted them by our crabapple trees in the front yard – hopefully they’ll get enough sun!

I didn’t think the asparagus was going to come up, but all the rain recently must have done it some good.  Its planted in the far corner my my garden plot next to the compost and past the strawberries.

So I’ve been busy this spring and my garden plot and seedlings aren’t what I pictured before we started this year. But thats ok. You can see the row I’ve had planted for quite a while.

hey this space has been dormant for a while. i’m going though seed catalogs for this years garden. i’ve also been reading gaia’s garden a book on permaculture and rereading the one straw revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka.

It’s one of my favorite books which I am too lazy to talk about right now, but hopefully I’ll find time every week or two to put something in this space as we start year 2 of our garden.

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.

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.

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.

There hasn’t been time to properly plan or prepare for our big garden. I am graduating from college this weekend and need to study more yet. The other day I found a tray of peppers had been neglected and well over half ended up dying. No picture now – no time. So the new motto is, “Lower your expectations.” (I might yet switch it to “different strokes for different folks” which is also an important lesson for all of us.)

Looking at seed catalogs made me a little excitable and its always easy to talk myself into doing something unmanagable. I may have bought more seed than I needed to. Our plot still hasn’t been tilled. After lowering our expectations and reminding ourselves we have no idea what we are doing we can remain positive. The goal is still just to learn and to decide if this is something worth doing and maybe sell some stuff along the way.

We are going to get everthing plowed and disked and then tilled this weekend or early next week. I just got row covers in the mail to protect some of our crops from pests and warm others up. With this hot weather it might be too hot to put row covers on brassicas – I don’t know. I also got some groundcherries which are fruits in the nightshade family. There are 12 of them and they are supposed to taste a bit like pineapple.

We are going to have lots of okras this year which is exciting and slimy. I hope there enough people willing to buy and eat them. We don’t eat gumbo ourselves, but I like fried okra a lot and we’ll have to find some other relavent recipes. Here is a picture of the some of the okras we have that are thriving.

As you may have saw in an ealier post we had more okras prout that we knew what to do with. We ended up planting extra and giving some to Morning Sky Greenery.

Sadly, with my finishing up college, (sadly, I have to finish up college) I haven’t had time to devote to our seedlings. I haven’t planted any lettuces or herbs either and I know we are WAY behind. I have to keep telling myself this is a trial run and we didn’t even know we were getting into until a month and a half ago.

We have lots of tomatos that need to be replanted and have resorted to the quick and dirty solution of plastic cups from the grocery store. We also have some sad okra that won’t make it due to neglect:

Good news is we may have finally found someone to plow our garden for us. More as that develops…

(picture of dandelions here)

So I had to pick up some fuses at one of the hardware stores in town because we blew through all ours again and I picked up a little earthway grass/fertilizer/etc spreader while I was at it which I plan to use for cover crops. I thought folks might want to read the conversation I overheard:

Customer to employee, “Whats the best thing to kill dandelions?”

Employee, “Well…”

Other employee nearer to me, “POISON!”, then after some manaical laughter, “they are about the most annoying things ever.”

I think I will just file this under ‘we will have to agree to disagree’ and leave it at that because I can’t let the destructive culture that this language springs from make me upset. The reason I can’t is because I can’t do a whole lot about it AND it is everywhere I look. It is the dominant culture and it is why I ought to be a farmer.