Today we were out in the garden on our usual watering visit and Kelly asked if I thought the radishes might be getting close to ready. I said I don't know but there was enough plant there to think maybe it could have a little radish under it. So I gently pulled on one and I wouldn't budge. I pulled a bit harder and out popped a real radish. Sure as I am typing here today is was an actual radish. I pulled one of the biggest plants and it was not a huge radish but it gave me a thrill to see real food coming from our humble garden. We split the radish and now if nothing else comes of our efforts at least we can no longer say we got nothing.
Another exiting discovery was that our Pumpkins have sprouted. We planted them 6/14/06 so it took them just 7 days to break thought. Actually only 4 or 5 have come up so we will look for the rest over the next few days.
I can't believe how satisfying it is to have things grow under your supervision. It is just so amazing to plant a seed and then have it pop up in a plant and then have it turn into fruit. Clearly I know this was how it worked but there is something about actually doing it that is really something.
Our garden is looking better and better all the time. Here are the latest pics. From now on I will only be posting garden stuff here.
As any of you who read here know. Kelly and I are growing a garden. It's starting to grow. There are definitely green things popping up. Disappointingly the tomatoes are not looking very good at all. I'm not sure why they are mad at me. The beans are the real performers. They are by far the biggest. A distant second are the radishes and then the carrots both of which we have now culled out a bit to let them grow. I'm worried though. I don't think our soil is very good and I'm afraid that as they get bigger they will not be able to get that they need to keep up the growth. I will be doing this kind of report from time to time at the request of one of my best readers. If anyone knows why we are doing wrong with the tomatoes let me know.
Kelly and I have been working on our garden lately and it is finally starting to look like it. We ended up buying tomato plants because it got so late in the year. Our soil is all clay. So we dug really deep holes for each of the plants and mixed the clay with soil builder and then used it to fill the holes back in. It's almost like our tomato's are in clay pots. I have three basic motivations for growing (or attempting to grow) a garden. First and foremost, I love homegrown tomatoes. As the saying goes, there are only two things that money cant buy… true love and homegrown tomatoes. The second thing is that it's something that Kelly and I can do together and that makes it fun. The third thing is that I want to learn something about what it takes to live off the land. I hope to collect seeds from this year and plant them next year. I expect to have most of my crop fail. That's not necessarily a bad thing though. You have to do it to learn. So I will judge the operation a success if I get to spend some good time with Kelly, eat a few tomatoes and maybe learn a thing or two about growing food.
We had another fun weekend. Kelly was off work on Saturday again. I could get used to this. Saturday we slept in till almost 10 and then we spent the day planning out our garden and chicken run that we are going to put in next spring. We figure that it's going to cost us about $120 for fencing to keep the deer out and the chickens in. The plan is to put a "moat" of chicken run around the garden. We have read that this arrangement will greatly reduce problems with insects beating you to your veggies. Another advantage is that during the non-gardening months you can let the chickens into the garden and they will keep in fertilized. We plan to get about 5 or 6 chickens and in addition to the run, build them a coup that we will lock them in at night to keep the mountain lions and whatnot from getting them. We don't really know what we are doing so if you have any suggestions we are open to them.