Tomatoes, Peppers, Blackberries and Wildflowers

Gardening was in full swing this past weekend.  It was up to me to get the remaining areas of the garden and wildflower meadow tilled up one more time so Neta could work her magic.  She had close to 60 tomato plants, 30 pepper plants, a couple of eggplants and some marigolds to get in the ground.

Potentially there is a boatload of salsa and other delights in that wagon.

On top of that she had a five pound bag of wildflower seeds, a couple of smaller 1/4 pound bags of other wildflower seeds, a 5 gallon bucket of sunflower seeds from last year's dead-heading and a whole bunch of zinnia seeds also from dead-heading last year.

Looks like a lot...but once you start spreading them...

Let the games begin!

Saturday morning I made a second tilling pass on the wildflower meadow.  The wind was at my back and the soil tilled up dry and fluffy, almost like powder.  When I finished I looked like a real farmer as I was covered in dust and sweat.  I needed a good hosing down, but settled for hosing down the tractor instead.

After lunch, I made a final pass on the parts of the garden that weren't planted yet.  In the meantime Neta was working on the flower garden she'd begun the weekend before (from the last blog post), putting down cardboard to suppress the weeds and grass and mulching with the tons of shredded pecan we have left from the tree we had taken down.

Before

After

We spent the rest of the day getting grass cut and doing other stuff around the place in preparation for a full Sunday of planting.  Oh yeah...and chasing geese.  That's right...they're back!  We're guessing it's a pair from last year raising 3 new goslings.

The goslings are tucked up next to the adult on the right.

Goslings are next to the goose on the left.

They are undeterred and don't seem to feel unwelcome, no matter how many times we run them off to ensure they stay out of the garden.  We've tried to convince them that the big pond is much nicer, but they seem to prefer the little pond, no matter how many times they've been herded away.  But enough about geese.  Let's get back to gardening!

Sunday was planting day!  Let me begin by mentioning that the bulk (at least 50.1%) of the dirty work was done by Neta, while I had the easy job of using the tractor to do my bidding.  Neta planted all those tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, marigolds and other flowers (Borage) to help with pest control.  She did it all by hand, down in the dirt in the hot sun.  She put cages around them all, mulched the tomatoes and added a labeled stake to each cage.  I gathered pine straw (in the shady woods) to mulch the tomatoes and used the post-hole digger to put up an old gate and plant a couple of blackberry vines (that part was in the sun).

Each tomato caged, mulched and lovingly labeled.

Beans to the right (planted a couple of weeks ago) and peppers to the left.

The eggplants.

While Neta was planting the garden, I was putting up an old gate for the blackberries.  We have a lot of old gates and pieces of fence around the farm in the big barn and goat barn so we figured we could use them as accent pieces and let plants grow in front of or climb on them.  Despite the plethora of blackberries that grow wild...everywhere...on the farm, we bought a couple of thornless varieties for this particular gate.

Digging holes for the posts to hold up the blackberry "gate".

The finished product.

Once Neta and I were done with all of that, it was time to spread some love over the wildflower meadow.  I carried the ten gallon bucket of seeds out to the field (it was the least I could do after Neta worked so hard in the garden) and she and I spread the seeds by hand after the handheld spreader wasn't quite up to the task.

Field of Dreams

It really is a "Field of Dreams", though not of the baseball type, despite its diamond-like appearance.  I tilled up a large "V" in the field, probably about 100' - 150' in both directions.  Our 10 pounds of seeds probably only lasted about 30' in each direction, so we'll (hopefully) have a lovely wildflower meadow "corner".  We'll see.

As for progress in the rest of the garden, we have some hits and misses.  Neta used seeds from our inventory and some are older, but we thought we'd try them anyway.  We didn't have a single eggplant sprout which is why we bought live plants.  There isn't a carrot in sight and our okra and sunflowers have been spotty.  So far, no pepinos and we've also had a couple varieties of peppers that didn't make an appearance.  Despite all of that, we still have plenty of sprouts and plants.  Here's a sampling of what we have growing:

A row of zucchini

A few sunflowers.  We'll need to plant more.

One of our okra plants.

Radishes.  The pinwheel is a volunteer.  Damn weeds!

Planted last year, our artichoke is beginning to form.

A row of cucumbers.

All we are saying...is give peas a chance.

A sprinkling of zinnias at the front of the garden.

That's it for now.  We'll keep you posted as we have progress or if any surprises pop up.

Better Get Growing

Though we got a little bit of a late start, it's gardening time around here!  We could have started a few weeks earlier as the last frost/freeze was smack dab in the middle of March. Had we been psychics, we would have known that was the last of the cold weather and started planting by the third week of March, but we'll take prudence over getting the earliest start.

The vegetable gardens are mostly planted, with just a few items left to go in.  We have radishes, carrots, zucchini, yellow squash, okra, corn, cantaloupes and canary melons, peas, cucumbers, scarlet-runner beans, bush and pole beans, artichokes, and onions.

Neta made markers from scraps of PVC pipe she
found around the farm for each row/variety of veggies.

The zucchini have sprouted.  Just those few plants will
probably be enough to end world hunger.

The radishes are sprouting.  A pinwheel apparently denotes "radish patch".

The scarlet-runner beans will climb this once we throw some wire over it.
We're using available materials we find in the barns.

Courtesy of our spigot in the distance, and 150' of hose, we can
irrigate all gardens when needed.

Two rows of recently irrigated corn.

Neta went a little exotic this year with some jicama and pepino melon garden berries (which aren't actually melons or berries), plus I'm going to put in a patch of horseradish, which I've done before in a large pot when we lived in VA.

We still have tomatoes, tomatilloes, peppers, watermelon and more cantaloupes to add. Pumpkins, too, but we learned last year that they need to be started much later if you want to have them for Halloween (instead of August).

80+ tomatoes, some peppers and a few cukes still left to be planted.

We haven't forgotten about flowers, shrubs and trees to help us add to the beauty of the place.  Last year Neta signed me up for the Arbor Day Foundation which allowed us to get a bunch of free trees.  We got a mix of forsythias, redbuds, dogwoods, red maples, hawthorns, 2 tartan cherries and others. For Valentine's Day I got Neta three different camellias that we've planted around the house so we can see them from our windows.

Camellia in foreground with a redbud and another camellia in the background.

Two cherry trees.  The second one is barely visible in the background.

Neta has been adding gardens and plants in various places around the house. I'd cut down a dying mimosa a couple of months ago and hadn't gotten around to moving the final couple pieces of trunk, but was going to leave part of the trunk standing to put a potted plant on.  The trunk was hollow so Neta decided to plant Black-Eyed Susan vine inside the trunk and use the other pieces as part of a garden, planting nasturtium in the rotting, hollowed out parts and some coleus at the base of the trunk, along with some hosta.  I think it turned out pretty nice.

Now that's how you make something nice from nothing.
It should be very pretty once it all starts to fill in.

This past Saturday, Neta and I spent part of our morning at a local plant nursery.  We came home with a carload of plants and flowers including: butterfly bush, a peach tree, a red buckeye tree, a flowering almond bush, 2 pink lemonade blueberry bushes (the fruits are pink when ripe), 2 thornless blackberries and a Lady Baltimore Hibiscus (we had one in VA), along with some jalapeno plants and assorted annuals.

Part of the haul we brought back that we've still got to plant.

Once again the tiller came in very handy.  We have a spot in the yard beside the house where an old well was filled in with gravel and were a pile of leftover gravel once sat.  As that spot would have always been trouble for the lawnmower Neta decided I should till it up and make it a flower bed.  Once again, we've taken what would have been something troublesome and turned it into something attractive.

Not too pretty yet as it still needs mulch.  It contains the flowering almond, the butterfly bush,
the hibiscus, some mums and a recently purchased iris.

Neta has also been filling her Grandma's concrete planters that were here on the farm and other pots that we had and putting them around the front and back porches.

The herb bench I built for her

The back porch area.

To top it all off, we have been clearing a spot in the woods behind the house. The trees were thinned last year and we want an area back there that will be nice to walk around in and plant some things among the pines.  Mother Nature gave us a head start as we noticed something coming up next to one pine tree.  We wondered what it could be and then it finally started blooming.

Gift gladiolas!

We do have a few trouble spots.  Our "driveway" leading up to the carport still needs to fill in with grass.  We're being patient.  Lulu loves to run around in the wet, dewy fields in the morning and then plop down on the mostly bare, sandy ground, covering herself with sand.  Our floors are like a beach hotel, and that's after wiping her down as best as we can.

Filling in slowly.

Also our blueberries got bit by the last freeze as they were in bloom.  We have one bush that seems to have made it through unscathed, but the rest only have a few berries as they managed to put out a few more blooms after the cold weather.

Not as prolific as past years, but we'll be able to make a dessert or two.

 

This particular bush has almost no berries at all.

That's it for now on the gardening front.  Coming soon...the wildflower meadow!

Productivity Increase

Neta and I both agree that the new tractor has changed things considerably here on the farm, even in the first week.  Stuff that would have taken us hours of manual labor now takes just minutes and we're on to the next project.  Things are getting crossed off the list pretty quickly, though it is a LONG list and even with the tractor, we've got enough to keep us busy for years.

When we got the new tractor we were going to use the old one for trade-in, but since we needed a few implements we decided to use the value of the old tractor in trade for those instead.  We mentioned in the last post we were getting a tillovator (roto-tiller) and since the old tractor had a bit more value we added a post-hole digger to our list.  It was a good trade!

So long ol' buddy... You've served us well.

Welcome to the family.  You've got work to do!

I see lots of fence posts, birdhouses and tree plantings in our future.

After the equipment was delivered (Thursday) I wanted to test out the tillovator as we'd be putting it to work in short order.  Hooking it up was a bit of a bear.  The hitches on the tractor are brand new and quite stiff so it will take some extra work until things get broken in.  I ran it over a spot from last year's garden that was grown back over with grass and looked like fresh lawn.  As you can see below, the results are everything we'd hoped for.  Smooth!

My test run.  One pass over three widths of the tillovator and it looks ready to plant.

On Saturday, Neta and and I laid out several garden plots to till, along with plans to till up the original garden.  First I tilled up a 15'x15' plot behind the small barn where we'll erect some heavy wire panels and plant cucumbers to climb them.  We'll also plant peas in that plot as they are a good companion plant for cucumbers.

Next I tilled up most of the original garden.  We have a small tree nursery at one end and had a pile of brush and debris burning in another place, so I didn't get it all tilled up.  Then we laid out a larger area, twice the size of last year's garden.  Last year's garden was around 2712 square feet (0.06 acres).  This year with the two new plots of 225 and 5429+ square feet, we have a total of 8366 square feet (0.19 acres).  Doesn't sound like much when you read the acres, but we have more than tripled our garden space.  Big plans!

The new "wedge" of garden.

A panorama of our garden areas.

I'll leave it up to Neta to decide what goes where.  As long as I have some good tomatoes and hot peppers I'll be happy.  The list of what we want to plant is long.  We'll keep you posted as things get planted or seeds sprout.

Another project that we are working on is clearing out the back of the small barn.  I currently keep the tractor and our lawn mower back there.  The "floor" of the back of the barn is approximately 8"-10" higher than the surrounding ground.  This is the result of 25 or more years of accumulated (and now dried) goat, cow and horse manure.  It is well aged!  I started cleaning it out a couple days after getting the tractor.  As you can see below it will be years before we ever have to worry about fertilizing our gardens.  I've been adding it to our ever-growing compost pile in the edge of the woods.

The back of that barn is full of s**t!

You can still see how high it was on the right side.

Along with tilling up garden plots and scooping poop, we also cleared more downed trees.  Along our fence out next to the interstate, we had several trees come down in last year's hurricane.  We have a grass path along that fence, wide enough to drive a car, that eventually leads to both sides of our big pond.  Those trees were blocking the way.  Nothing a chainsaw and tractor couldn't handle.

It looks more like a bundle of overgrown vines.  A wild cherry tree covered in wild grapevine.

Partially cleared.

It was so convenient to cut up a fallen tree and then use the tractor to push all of that debris out of the way instead of having to carry it by hand or load it into a wagon or trailer and unload it elsewhere.

There were two other pine trees that I just cut at the trunk and used the tractor and a heavy cable to drag off into the woods.  The birds and other critters will love the clutter.

The only downside was on the last tree.  It was old and rotten.  After cutting it, I used the bucket on the tractor to push the remaining trunk back over the fence for the state to deal with (which they should have done as they cleaned up other trees that fell over the fence after last fall's hurricane).  I was maneuvering one side, then the other, as Neta was directing me.  I was on my last push and lifted the bucket to get it high enough to clear the fence when a stray (bent) branch popped free from under the bucket and punched a hole in the grill of my new tractor and dented the top of the hood.  It's no longer pristine (dirt and dust notwithstanding).  Oh well...it had to happen sometime I guess.

The next tractor project will be bush-hogging another of our large fields so we can till it up and spread seeds for a wildflower meadow.  More to come on that.  But for now, that's where this work day comes to an end.