Oh, What to You Do in Your Garden?

While Dan and I are busy planting, my boys dig themselves a grave.

Yep, they were supposed to be digging up rocks, and got a little distracted with the digging portion of the assignments. 

Garrick got distracted by the goats:

Have I mentioned all the “farm” land around us?  Around our garden there are goats, pigs, and horses.  Not to mention the chickens running around.    There are also tree houses in some of the fruit trees.  My boys are in heaven when we have to work in the garden.  We get them to work for about 20 minutes, and then they get distracted by something else.  That’s normal I guess.

They boys still love the planting part, and we had tons to do this year.  With all the area we have this year we really branched out.  We planted 2 10x10 plots of a 3 sisters garden (corn, beans, & squash).  Plus 2 more 10x10 areas of just corn.  Then in the remaining area we have 16 tomato plants, 12 pepper plants, and a couple of watermelon mounds.  (I’m not holding out any hope for the watermelon).

Dan has been a great help in getting the garden going.  It was a lot of hard work.  REALLY hard work.  The soil is clay.  Literally. We can mold the dirt.  It is awful to shovel and weed, but Dan did it without any complaint.  I, on the other hand, complain every time I go out to weed!

My home garden has been a little more of a struggle.  The weather has not cooperated.  And where the weather didn’t ruin something, my dogs or my boys have.  We planted peas and onions back in March.  I have caught my dogs pacing up and down my peas and eating the tops off.  I keep hoping they will recover, but it is looking more and more bleak every day.

At home, we also planted 5 more tomato plants, 4 more peppers, 2 cucumbers, 2 pumpkins, yellow squash, and zucchini.  Unfortunately I have had to replace all of my squash, pumpkin, and zucchini.  Stupid weather.  The new stuff seems to be working out, and some of the original seeds are starting to sprout.  I’m hoping one day to get more comfortable with this whole gardening thing.

It is great to see some growth in all of the gardens.  Some of it not as well as I hoped, but there is still growth.  I’m really looking forward to the end of the season.  I can’t wait to start filling my food storage up.  It is starting to look a little bleak.

Our last jar of pears.  In 10 years we had never done anything with our pear trees and last year we tried canning them. The boys loved eating them through the winter.  I’m definitely taking advantage of our 3 pear trees this fall.  Oh, and the 3 peach trees.  I’m hoping to get enough for at least 1 jar of each for the whole year. 

Wish me luck with the weeding!