Gardening is not as easy as people make it look. It not just throw some seeds in the ground and bam you have veggies! Nope it’s a huge amount of work.
I started doing clearing of an old garden spot in early spring; the garden is located on the side of our hill which years ago my dad tiered out for gardening. Being that it been so long since I had a garden there was a lot of clearing to be done. This included cutting down small trees, clearing of blackberries, bamboo grass, honey suckle and several other weeds. Once I got the surface cleared off I had to dig out the roots. All of this was done with a shovel, rake and hoe. I don’t have a tiller and wouldn’t know how to work one anyway. This was absolutely exhausting work, but when we (my sister helped) got it finished I was so proud of the work. The next step was the planting.
We started peas, cabbage, green beans, onions, potatoes and radishes directly in the ground. And Yellow squash, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and butternut inside to be planted at a later date.
Here is what I learned about cabbage and radishes.
They don’t like heat. We had an unusually hot April and May.
Cabbage has a pretty little yellow flower and radishes have pretty little purple flowers.
Flowering isn’t a good thing in these plants it means they are done and ready to go to seed. So I just let them, there wasn’t much else I could do, so no cabbage or radishes this year.
I also figured out that going up and down a steep hill isn’t the nicest thing for my knees so decided to dig out some steps and put flat stones down for stepping stones. That helped a lot and thanks to my dad for helping me finish them after I dropped one of the stones on my foot and had to stop because of the pain. My foot was bruised but it was nothing major and got better in a few days.
The green beans are flowering right now, and the onions are about ready to pull up. I got a handful of peas, but they are not fond of the heat either so I didn’t get many.
As mentioned above our soil is not great. it’s very heavy and dense red clay without much nutrient so it’s not the best for planting, but it’s what we have so we do the best we can with what we have, yes we fertilize an I have mixed in some garden soil which helps but the added black dirt ultimately takes on the weight of the red clay.
On a brighter note though the soil does host earthworms, we have lots and lots of them. I keep hoping they will improve the soil and they probably do help so I always get a bit giddy when I find a cluster of them in my digging. Go, go little super heroes!
Now on to the squashes.
It rains a lot and so that means the bees are not always out, especially in the mornings when the squash blossoms are open. I realized I needed to start hand pollenating to increase the amount of yielded fruit. I only just started this a week ago so hopefully it will help. We have several squashes that didn’t get pollenated but on the other hand we have several that did and there are a lot of baby squashes.
Plus today we got our first zucchini!
It won’t be long before we have a bunch of them coming in. I just have to keep remembering to pollenate them, and the cucumbers, we have a few little cucumbers coming in as well.
The potatoes are doing well and I am going to do a separate post about them because they have a neat story to go along with them.
It’s pretty exciting to see all the hard work turn into something we can eat. Next year I would like to try an even bigger garden. There is a flat space at the top of the hill that can be cleared for a garden but that plot is even more over grown then the hill side.
All I can say is Hello winter project, because I need the poison ivy to be dormant before I go stamping about up there.
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