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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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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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.

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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…

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(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.

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Since it was Sunday we tried to take it easy, but I planted some potatos in straw next to the garden. Nigel ate a few when I wasn’t looking, but there are still plenty.

We decided we’d plant all the potatos in straw on account of how clay-y the soil is. This is a picture from the other day so you can’t see all the old logs i put to mark the potato plot.

Apparently, what you do is just put more and more straw on top of the plant and the potatos keep making more tubers. This appeals to me as I read One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuokaa few months back and that guy uses straw for EVERYTHING.

My hope is to follow they way of natural farming and try to avoid doing stuff. Thats when you get into trouble. I also learned never to use bare hands handling really dry grass.

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This was from last summer. I never did complete what I was going to do here:

i know all our readers have been clamoring for another one of my posts. in between studying analytic philosophy and relearning german again i’ve been reading Epitaph For A Peach which i picked up at the salvo for a song. its about a third generation japanese peach farmer whose old-fashioned peach farm can’t break even.

just as the bulldozers are about to do what bulldozers do (bull? doze?) he decides to give it another go. he farms less for profit than family, the land, and deliciousness, but as my father would say “we aren’t running a charity here.” since getting big or out have been eliminated as options the plan is to get small and get better. he has been slowly incorporating organic techniques for years and he hopes he can find a niche for his Sun Crest peaches with a short shelf-life, but (apparently) great taste. i’m not sure if i have ever had a great tasting peach, but now i think i’d like to.

another farm journal/book i’ve been leafing through was written by a conventional beet and small grains farmer from the red reiver valley during, i think, 1987 (bad drought year). quite a contrast between the two. the organic peach farmer talks philosophy with entomologists and the beet fella eats free steaks from pesticide salesmen. one thinks like an artist and majored in sociology and rural studies and ones a scientist (thats not to say there isn’t a lot of common ground either). i’m about halfway through both. i hope it all turns out ok.

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Here is a bed in the back I tilled under. I planted rye late last summer (or was it fall?), but it didn’t take too well. I think I should have watered. Over to the left is a bed of garlic which must’ve died with the weird weather we had. I stupidly forgot to put any straw on top. Oh well. I talked to Herman the allium man a few weeks ago and I plan to do a fair amount of garlic this fall. UPDATE: I saw what I can only imagine is two little garlic sprouts when I was out today.

Thats the compost. For those of you that aren’t all that acquainted with compost I can assure you it doesn’t smell. I mean it used to smell really bad, especially when I put a bunch of flour in there, but if you do it right it is an aeorobic process and not an anaerobic one (like remember in gym class how they said jogging is aerobic and lifting weights is like anaerobic? it has something to do with oxygen, I guess).

Speaking of oxygen, I am also going to use some of this stuff to make compost tea, which believe it or not entails me putting some compost in a cloth bag and putting that in a bucket filled with water. Then you run one of those oxygenator deals you see in a fish tank and some time passes and you sleep and eat and everything, maybe a couple times, and then you’ve brewed yorself some nutritious tea*.

I have been slowly learning the dos and don’ts of compost and I think we’ll truck this stuff out to the big garden to start a new compost pile. I need a good compost book. I am reading Sir Albert Howard’s book
An Agricultural Testament about the indore process and whatnot. Maybe that’ll help.

Update: we planted some blue potatos in the bed pictured above. We are going to plant all our potatos at home.

*The tea is for plants. I probably won’t drink any.

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Ok so Jessi has been razzing me for not posting on here and I can’t fall asleep so here goes. The picture is because every post needs to have its own picture, its night as I write this, I have been listening to REM lately and the EP pictured, in addition to having a gargoyle as the cover, happens to have a song called “Gardening at Night”.

The weather has been fantastic the last few days and I feel that my seasonal affective disorder is finally descendent. Its spring from here on out! After I wrote a paper about film genres or something Jessi and I checked on our seedlings at Morning Sky Greenery. They have been doing well for themselves. What worries me is when we have to put all our tomatoes into bigger soil blocks! I’ve also been trying to grow some parmex carrots in the front yard and they haven’t germiinated yet. I’ve been trying to keep them moist and everything, but they got snowed on last week during the cold snap. There is no chance they’ll be ready for my grad party now, but hopefully they’ll still become carrots someday.

We went back out to Claire’s and more accurately measured out our plot which is just about exactly 200 x 100 which Jessi said was closer to 1/2 an acre than 2/3rds. This makes me think we ought to dig up some more land thats available on the other side of the driveway because we want to grow lots of corn even though we know its not all that profitable.

We also met with some folks that live around the area. One fellow has a tractor which used to belong to the people who lived on the land were farming (if that makes sense). And he seemed to think we’d have absolutely no luck getting rid of the sod thats on our plot right now. He advised Roundupping. Then the next neighbor who is a real farmer said we should just till it all up a couple of times and we’d be fine. I”m inclined to be optimistic and believe the latter guy and not the former. I have to say everyone seems so nice and helpful and supportive about our vegetable endevor. I’m inclined to be pessimistic and was expecting more confusion or hostility or something…

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