Saturday, May 24, 2014

Garden Time


We started  yesterday morning with a thunderstorm sweeping in from the north --rain is welcome to keep the pastures growing . . .


As soon as it passed, John was out with the weedeater, working around my box beds where herbs, lettuce and spinach, rainbow chard, white radishes, and purple carrots are trying to survive the onslaught of rabbits (which have pretty well done for my snow peas.)
 .
The rain was perfect for the asparagus (above the rock wall below) and the beds of peppers, eggplant, broccoli, cauliflower, collards, and three kinds of kale (Black Tuscan, Red Russian, and plain old curly kale.) I'm trying to keep the cole crops covered to foil the bugs but the wind  has other ideas.


  Of course I've sowed zucchini and yellow squash -- unenthusiastic though some family members are about these veg...

And the tomatoes went in -- Romas and Cherokee Purples and Mr. Stripey and Better Boy and Grape tomatoes -- the soil is beautiful and dark with large helpings of litter from the chicken house and the crimson clover cover crop tilled into it.


We can only keep our fingers crossed. The blight hit us bad last year and we had very few tomatoes.  But a garden is an exercise in faith and hope. 

(Yes, that's John with the lawn mower above -- he hardly sat down all day. )

 And down there, under the orange plastic netting, lots of sweet corn being kept safe from crows.

Not much to see yet -- but to a gardener's eye, ah! the potential!


9 comments:

Sam Hoffer / My Carolina Kitchen said...

Your garden looks great, but what an incredible amount of work goes into it. Kudos to you both.
Sam

Barbara Rogers said...

Blessings upon your garden to be blight and pest free, and abundant in delicious nutritious goodies!

Frances said...

Vicki, it's been grand to see all the photographs of the beautiful flowers, but seeing this post really showed me the amazing other sides of your garden.

I have to keep reminding myself that you all actually do have a working farm.

Best wishes for a bountiful harvest! xo

NCmountainwoman said...

I just love zucchini and yellow summer squash. But why is it that no matter how few you plant, you end up with more than you can use?

Jime said...

Nothing like being in your own garden of eden. I would come help John just to keep my hand in but being 2000 miles away just won't cut it so to speak.

Brian Miller said...

my my how does your garden grow...smiles...its the deer that are eating ours...and nothing we have tried will keep them away...oh well....

Inger said...

I now enlarge all your pictures to better enjoy them and the mountains take my breath away. Just gorgeous. Good luck with the garden, it should be pretty good in your climate where everything just GROWS!

Vicki Lane said...

It's been a busy week -- the garden and weeding for me but John has been building fence and dealing with cows, along with all the weed eating and mowing. Today Justin and our friend Dr.(Will Work for Food and Drink)Bob built a little retaining wall at the back of our house while I made some fancy Spicy Fried Chicken and Nectarine Salsa and Corn and Pepper pudding for dinner.

Tomorrow we butcher chickens ... so much to do but we're fortunate to have this pleasant weather to work in -- and fortunate to be able to do it.

Darla said...

Wow. I'm always impressed. It seems there at least two types of how "earth child" manifests in us … the domestic gardeners (the extreme pole of this would be farmers, eh?) and the wilderness walkers (with overlap to varying degrees, of course) … I'm only 10% the former and 90% the latter. ;-)