Teresa was cleaning out the garage the other day and she came upon a milk crate of sweet potatoes we'd put out there last fall to keep them in a cool dry place. We'd forgotten about them because we were eating on another crate all winter and spring that we had in the pantry. The ones in the...
Several of us were sitting out on the patio area outside our office building at the picnic tables having lunch the other day watching the geese and their little goslings come paddling across the lake. They got out of the water and went up the hill when all of the sudden a flash came out from the...
No. The bed really isn't raised at this point. Right now it's just bordered in with landscaping timbers that I've 'nailed' down with rebar rods through hole that I bored out at the end of each timber. First I used my tiller and pulverized the soil down about 6 inches or so and then I added a...
Oh, and the sweet corn will go down behind the chicken run. We don't each much corn but the chickens love it and we'll give a lot of it away at work or to our daughter. You ought to see what's left when I make a corn pinata of three or four ears tied together and hung from a cord in the...
Mary, each year we add a new box or two to the garden. This year I added a large 4x8x12 box that we have planted sweet potatoes in. We also have a 48'x4' kind of a box that I've framed in a few years ago with one course of landscaping timbers. I'm going to go another level up this fall and...
When I was going around the garden fence with my Red Dragon killing weeds I came upon these little daisies in the last pic. I didn't have the heart to flame them so I left them alone. I showed them to Teresa and she's going to take them up and put them in a vacant corner of one of the boxes.
Well, I think I'm done, at least for the moment. I hate to brag... well, that's like total B.S... I love to brag on my garden. Now you sit there and look at these pictures I took with my little brownie box camera:
Well, they seem to work. Dick Raymond said there should be rocks in the soil to provide aeration and drainage. I guess this goes a way to prove his point. Nice though.
Teresa planted two varieties of mint in one of our boxes a few years ago and I'm still fighting that stuff. It's really hard to get rid of and it will take over and crowd out whatever else you might have in the box. It started spilling out of the box and that's when I took my Red Dragon to it...
We lost both of our fig trees (bushes) over the winter. They were enormous too, standing over 8 feet tall. It wasn't a really cold, frigid winter here either. I only remember a couple of nights in the high teens of cold but they're dead. I'm going to have to go and cut them out and replant...
What they say. We started getting big, fat spears almost a month ago and I don't see them quitting any time soon. We have one 4'x8' box that Teresa planted I think 20 crowns in four years ago. There are still some of the thin ones we let go to fern. I guess there always be some that do this...
I can't say I've seen them but there are multiple yellow-billed cuckoo birds in the woods around us. They were at one time on the endangered species list but I think they made a comeback in recent years. My Mama used to call them rain crows because of their call. I went to a web site that had...
Ours are in a raised bed too. It's a 4'x8'x12" box we filled with a homemade mixture of a truckload of garden mix that we added some vermiculite, sphagnum moss, manure, and a bit of creek sand. I amend it each year with three bags of composted manure that I work in by hand with a small garden...
The tomatoes were grown indoors since mid-February and all the others were seeds. The cukes and butterbeans are all coming up, as well as the potatoes and shallots. We went from cold, wet winter, no spring, directly to summer. Temps were in the high 80's yesterday and mid 80's today.
Well, we have big speckled butter beans in the ground now. That's Giant Speckled Lima beans for you folks up north. They's just butter beans down here though. Got the 'maters in, bush beans, shallots, onions, 'taters, sweet 'taters, carrots, burpless gourmet cucumbers, yellow summer squash...