We worked so hard to get the garden going, but first we have some adorable pictures of Sam from dinner last night.
I can't remember what he was laughing about in this one, but he looks so cute!
Showing us how he dips his finger in the ketchup and then growls while eating it :)
A quick look at the tomato starts I got at the farmer's market in IF. These babies were huge and 9 out of the 12 already had tomatoes on them! It was pouring when we went to go get them, though and poor little Sam was miserable because the sweatshirt he had on didn't have a hood (it wasn't raining at our house, just a little chilly) so by the time we got the plants and had them loaded, his hair was plastered to his head and we were both drenched. But it was definitely worth the trip! I didn't know what varieties of tomatoes to get, so we got a mix of Celebrity, Delicious, Fantastic and Better Boy.
These are my two watermelon plants in tires to keep them warmer and milk cartons used as hotcaps (we'll have to see how they work)
The row in front of our fruit trees is for five pumpkin plants. We are also working on making nice, large wells around each of the trees to help with watering this summer.
Our array of tomato plants. We are trying out walls of water this year, along with the cages and plastic we had last year from a friend and then the two hardiest plants we are trying without anything to see what works best. Behind the tomatoes are four rows of corn that have been planted and will hopefully give us enough corn to cook and freeze again.
A quick look at my square foot box. The left hand square is carrots. The other three are onions, but the middle square that looks sparse was planted much later after realizing that onions started from seed don't do well. But with all of this cool weather, my onions have been doing great!
This is the front flower garden space. A previous tenant had planted tulips along the bank of the ditch, so my plan is to enhance this with tons of bulbs to make this an area that doesn't need much attention year after year. We are planning to rototill one more time and put down mulch to keep the weeds at bay and leave it until fall.
And lastly, the front flower garden space. Still don't really know what is going to happen here, but we rototilled once and will probably do it again before planting flowers. I would like to keep this space to be creative with year after year. I would love to get the flowers tomorrow and do that, but want to wait a little longer until the prices go down a little since there IS so much space, it will take alot of foliage to cover. Last year I got pink and purple pansies, some orangey flowers and purple lobelias and alternated all four between two rows all the way along the outside and then put three bunches of daisies in the middle space. I thought it looked nice, but there was always weeding to do, so I may look for more ground covering flowers to put in this year to help it feel more full and hopefully cut down on the weeding, since our garden is so much bigger this year. Any suggestions you guys have would be most welcome. Happy Memorial Day!
