Going into surgery in a few days, so hadn't planned to put in much of a garden this year... but the weather cooperated, so I was able to plant at least the plots around my home. Counting my blessings in that regard, its been years here since it was warm & dry enough to plant everything in May. Wife & daughter helped plant, so with me marking rows & them following we got it all done in one day. Plenty of snap beans (Emerite and Bosnian Pole), scarlet runners, bush limas, yardlong beans, and two edamame soybean varieties. Okra, white eggplant (Gretel), and white bitter melon. Tomatoes Brandywine, Grape, and Roma. Swiss chard and water spinach for greens. Zucchini will go in later, after the SVB egg laying cycle has passed (about July 4th), hopefully I'll be somewhat ambulatory by then. Ground cherries are volunteering
everywhere, I'll let a few grow where they will be out of the way.
Quite a few peppers, both sweet & hot... more than I really should have planted in limited space, but I didn't have the heart to throw them out. Bacskia, Elephant Ear, and Greygo are sweets. The hot peppers are Purple Jalapeno, PI 315008 (a short DTM habanero type), Pizza, Pizza sport (a breeding project), Red Chile, and Thai Giant.
No room for sweet corn or tromboncino, but fortunately we froze enough last year to almost make it through
this year.
My rural plot (the main garden, 100' X 100') will be fallow this year, won't be able to do anything to it until I recover from surgery some time in July. There is a silver lining to that, though... I will be able to focus on eradicating the weeds brought in by last year's hay. The "organic" hay (25 bales of it, used as mulch) turned out to be full of ragweed, crab grass, and creeping jenny seed.
It would have been a nearly insurmountable battle to garden in the face of that weed pressure, so this fallow year is well timed.
I'll also take advantage of the fallow year to bring in enough sand & soil to raise up the lower portions of the rural garden, increase its drainage, and build berms to divert the runoff from the adjacent field. Drainage from that field about 5 years back washed out much of the soil from the lower 1/3 of the garden, its basically been a wetland since. Hopefully next years rural garden will be far less problematic, and return to its former productivity.
