Veggie Tales

We tilled and prepared the two large garden beds Monday. The weather has been wonderful so all the weeds are out in full force, lol. I can’t believe it. We haven’t even mowed the lawn yet, but we’ve had to weed already. Grr. Here’s the play-by-play.

Weeds are out in full force already!

Both beds are tilled and raked and ready for the next step– “stringing,” I call it.

My beds have wooden boards around them (boards taken from the attic floor– they are 150+ years old!). I screwed in small screws every foot all around. I then string the beds with twine, twisting the twine around the screws to hold it taut. You can see I have a few screws loose (hardy har har), but that’s OK, as long as I have a general idea of a foot of space between each row.

I do try to make the garden beds as attractive as possible. I find that if I label things and make my rows straight and neat, I am more likely to weed and keep the place maintained. I am slowly adding shrubs and other flowers around the perimeter of the garden fence. The fence needs replacing, but I haven’t got the cash for that this year; maybe next year.

I have mentioned how we have a ton of junk that burps up from the soil every year. I guess previous owners used the entire backyard as their garbage heap; there are tons of broken dishes and bottles we find. The garden beds are filled with broken glass shards.

So almost all the veggies are planted. We have typical stuff– snow peas, yellow onions, yellow squash, pumpkins, watermelon, etc. I’m trying seed potatoes this year. In previous years, I’ve bought a bag of potatoes from the grocery store and let them age a little until I saw eyes developing. I then chopped the potatoes into 1-inch sections, one eye per section. I let them dry out a little and plugged them in the ground. I’ve had great success planting potatoes this way with all varieties except the red potato one wet year. However this year I’ve had a little extra money from blogging–all those stray links you sometimes see in a post earn me money. I thank you for tolerating them, because they do help me to pay for projects like these! With my earnings, I purchased a sack of Adirondack Red seed potatoes. This is what they look like. They will make a fancy meal on the dinner table!

I also wanted to try corn again this year. Our first two years of vegetable gardening gave us very poor corn. We had problems with crows and also a blight. I’m trying again, but this time I’m planting it away from the beds, and out in the field behind the garden.

Our pumpkin patch will go back there, too. I’m very keen to seeing how the corn does. We covered the rows with thick leaves to try to keep the crows from stealing the seeds. We’ll see.