Although we've had starts going for over two months here at Sweet Gum Farm, I don't consider the garden officially underway until something is actually growing in the ground. I've learned not to count my chickens, so to speak. Earlier this year about $80.00 worth of sprouted seed just keeled over and died. All of the peppers, all of the herbs except some basil, and a couple of tomato varieties - just gone.
I cried. Then I beat myself up: "I'm just no good at this gardening sh-t!" and "I'm a baby (plant) murderer!".
Jeff came to the rescue, reassuring me that 1. peppers are finicky and therefore easy to kill, and 2. we got bad seed. I've struck that company off my seed supplier list. We actually had zero germination on one tomato variety and I contacted that seed company. They sent me double the amount of seed as replacement, but they still didn't germinate very well.
We wanted to sell starts this year and I've got a few tomatoes to sell so I guess it's OK. Plus I got a wild hair a couple of days ago and ordered more tomato seed (who can resist blue cherry tomatoes??) and 3 varieties of peppers. Kinda late but, dang it, I've got to figure out how to start peppers. We can't afford to buy starts when we're growing 150 to 225 row feet of plants!Anyway, yesterday was gorgeous. Sunny, breezy, high in the low 70s. So we went outside and once again checked the soil. It was STILL too wet to till! So...we were confounded...what should we do since we can't plant anything??
We had a discussion about the volunteer mustard plants that were already flowering. Chop them out with the machete? Yep. Hmm, me and a machete probably wasn't the safest combination, but I did OK. Still have all of my fingers and toes. I also found out that mustard plants have roots the size and density of turnips. Are we sure these are mustard plants and not turnips?? Jeff said yes. (Not that it mattered, they were coming out either way.) I left a few for the little bees that were swarming around them. They'll get turned under when we till.
Then we moved some dirt around, filling up low spots that had developed in the garden over the winter. (yawn) Fill in low spots - check. Now what?
Well, last year SOMEBODY who shall remain nameless (OK, it was Dad) ran over one of our leader hoses with the mower, ripping the faucet fitting right out of the ground and destroying one of our irrigation timers. To prevent such catastrophes this year, we're going to run both of the leaders through PVC pipe and bury them. Asking SOMEBODY not to "help" just doesn't work so we have to Dad-proof as much as we can. (No, he's not senile, just stubborn!)
BUT FIRST - here we go - we had to move Champ, our '69 Dodge pickup. It doesn't run (naturally), so we had to move it with the tractor. Before we could move the truck, though, we had to pick up a bunch of fence posts that had been left on the ground in front of it. I had to go get Barney (our '94 Ford Ranger daily driver) to throw the posts into for relocation. Remember, Lisa: sometimes you can't get there from here. Translation: you can never, ever just go do something on the farm. There will always be a bunch of things you have to do before you can do the thing you want to do. It's a corollary of Murphy's Law. For us anyway.
That list of things we had to do first was mercifully short.
So Jeff got one of the trenches dug with the backhoe and ready for the hand work of leveling, etc. The other one is going to have to be dug by hand altogether - can't get the tractor in there to do it. Fortunately it's only about 12 feet long...
Today is overcast but not raining (thank God). We're going to till a strip and plant lettuce whether the ground is dry enough or not! I know, it's very late for lettuce, but we've had cool wet weather. Maybe it will continue long enough for us to enjoy fresh, home-grown greens.
Cross your fingers!
PS: We have English peas and their companion oats coming up:
The oats are a special variety, recommended as living trellis for the bush-type peas. The oats will also provide green manure when we till them under later. I'm dithering about letting some go to seed. We can feed them to the chickens (that we don't have yet), but I don't know if I'll have time to hand-thresh them...?
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