I’ve felt frustrated about the garden this year. Perhaps we’ve put less energy into it compared to other years, and perhaps not. For some reason, though, I’ve felt like the garden has resisted getting planted this year. Today was a good day in the garden planting department, however. In retrospect, a lot of the prep work we’ve done has led up to what we were able to get done today. I guess it works that way in every project; you do a lot of things that don’t show results, and then the planets align and things fall into place.
Today I got the 5 rows of potatoes planted in the outside garden. I also got our “watering dock” installed in the front pond (click HERE for a story about the watering dock.) The dock did not go in easily this year. As one thing after another went goofy as I attempted to install the dock, I finally started laughing at the whole absurd thing. When it goes in right, I hardly have to think about it. This year, one thing went wrong which caused a cascade of things to go wrong. I finally had to shed my pants and get chest deep in the pond to get things working. It still did not give up without a struggle, but it is installed and functional.
I used the watering dock to haul buckets with my home made yoke (click HERE for the yoke story.) I managed to water all the sweet onions, tomatoes, garlic, and potatoes. Meanwhile, Alice laid out the positions of all the rest of the plants in the greenhouse garden, and did quite a bit of planting. I don’t have an accurate list of everything she got in the ground today, but I can tell you that well over half the greenhouse garden is planted now. I have several pea trellises to make, and hope to use a similar plan to make some trellises for the cucumbers as well. We’ve noticed they will climb if they get a chance, so we thought we’d give them a good chance this year and see how things go.
This is a great time of the year. The white-tail deer fauns are being born right now. My neighbor said he saw an adult bear following another adult closely, suggesting some mating behavior. The red winged blackbirds are vigorously defending their patches of the cattails. Pairs of moths are doing their dances in the sky. The promise of a new season is upon us once again, and it is a pleasure to be part of it.
I’m hoping that my garden boxes do alright this year. I have already lost a couple of my tomatoes due to a lovely fall of hail we had the day after I moved them outside. Most of them seem to have either dodged the ice or done a decent job of recovering – I may just have to plant more squash in the holes. 🙂
Comment by Mel — June 5, 2012 @ 8:01 am