Monday

Family Garden 101

April 19th

The theme of this gardening-week is No Rain.  As in none, nada, zilch.  It's been the driest April I can remember.

The week was not without false alarms though.  Saturday morning we were supposed to get thunderstorms so I drove over and spent an hour frantically planting Lavender, fennel, dill, swiss chard, chamomile, leeks, stock, and giant zinnia seeds.

Alas, the sky cleared; no rain.

 Hope's hoses to the community garden spot were damaged.  Let's just say 700 feet of neatly coiled hoses don't fare well when they are inadvertently run over by a tractor pulling mowing equipment.  So... bring out trusty teens and water buckets.

I love these girls!  I know that the watering was more fun because they got to ride in the back of the pickup from the water spigot to the garden.  I just hope we start getting spring showers before the novelty wears off.


Under the top layer of the dust-bowl look the earth is still a bit damp.  Surprisingly, in all that dust we have seedlings coming up especially the beets, and turnip greens.

Besides the watering we spent a bit of time weeding and planting bush beans.  I put in 2- 40 foot rows that were 2 plants wide.  I plan to plant 2 more rows in 2 weeks to stagger the harvest a bit.  I also started the sunflower house.  The seed packet didn't hold much; so far the house has 3 walls.

Our onions are doing well.  We have several patches of both purple and white.  I forgot to take a photo of the potatoes but they are up and pretty.

Totals for the week?

2 trips out to the garden and 3 hours time spent working/riding around in a pickup.  No $$ spent this week.



7 comments:

  1. The stock and zinnias are for cutting. I want to plant a bunch more varieties of flowers for cutting as well.

    I have this mental image of having mixed flower bouquets to fill my house and give away. We'll see:)

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  2. We planted flowers, potatoes and onions last week. We didn't get any rain yet either.

    http://debbiellbriskincare.blogspot.com/
    MBC

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  3. We got some rain here in Texas though, and the day it wasn't raining we went to the Dinosaur Museum. We are just watching things grow for the moment. We managed to nurse our biggest tomato plant back to health..Paola wrote a short summary this week.

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  5. Susan,
    I wrote a blog post about natural gardening and it has the dilutions for garden sprays using essential oils. I use less water than the original recipe most of the time..

    http://joshealthcorner.blogspot.com/2010/02/essential-oils-for-garden.html

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  6. Visiting you from TT. I like this blog=) I will try to subscibe......beautiful pics!!! FUN

    ReplyDelete