Wednesday July 4
Well, Here it is July. Things are moving along in the garden for this month. Rains have come at intervals along with winds and hail. It seems like this year the hail and extreme storms are more frequent than usual. I'm hopeful to have a good harvest but others not so much. That's a normal year of gardening.
This is my pride and garden joy. Sweet corn has always been the main reason I wanted a bigger garden. I knew that the wild life would be a problem when I first started Terra Nova Gardens. I knew that fences would be the only deterrent for for saving the corn. Even though I planted corn since the first year, last year was the first year that I harvested any corn. Last year I even had electric fences and was able to harvest all the carn. This year the chicken wire was replaced with steel welded five foot high fencing that's been pinned down to the carpet overlay. So far that alone without the electric fence has kept the varmints out of the corn.
The squash and cucumbers are looking good and doing just what I wanted them to do. The squash is crawling over into the sweet corn. Being away for 10 days caused some issues with the vines not being trained to crawl in the right direction and the cucumbers to crawl up the leaning fence trellis. I'm seeing squash being formed by the vines. There still are no cucumbers yet.
Thursday day July 6
It doesn't take long for a garden to get out of control. This is what happens when a little neglect in the garden is encouraged. This is that nasty weed with a Velcro weed head that sticks to clothes, gloves, and especially shoe laces. I had to take action before it became really nasty.
When I put the hardwood mulch down, I didn't know that it would grow weeds in the mulch and compost down so fast. However the weeds are easy to pull and this path took less than an hour to clean up. The path look like the left side of the bed with tall grass and weeds in the mulch. I'm thinking that after each rain if a good raking about three days later would probably kill all the sprouting seeds and be a better way to control the weeds. In another year I'm thinking just rake this mulch up and put it in the raised beds and put down another layer of fresh mulch.
The Rugosa Rose bushes are really starting to make a good looking hedge. Every year they get thicker and bigger. Before long they will have filled in the gaps and have a strong hedge. This is really only the fourth year for them. I'm really happy with the selection of tough rose bush for the front of the garden area.
The road frontage was a bit raggy and needed attention badly. This section took about five hours and 9 wheel barrow loads of weeds to get in decent shape. The section behind the bushes is still in bad shape and needs a good day to clean up.
I'm still amazed at how much different Terra Nova Gardens has changed since I took over the land almost six years ago. The garden looked like the top portion of the picture over the entire garden. Trash, cement chunks, and all sorts of car parts were cleared off the land. It's always good to look back at the progress that's been done to get encouraged to keep going.
Ok the plants look great but there aren't many tomatoes on the vines. I'm not sure what's up with that but I'm hearing that folks are having the same problem all across the land here.
Wednesday May 10
May has been a continuation of April with many rain days. It's never an extreme amount of rain and it's not been with any damaging things like high wind or hail .... so far. I do like a well behaved thunderstorm. This morning the rain fell; the thunder rolled; and the air smelled so fresh after the rain was finished. Upon talking with my friends through out the day, all noticed the birds chirping their hearts out after the rain finished. It wasn't just one or two song birds but a whole choir of birds singing away. I think they were just happy and thankful for the rain.
It's been a challenge to get into the garden to work on the preparation but I do have the beds ready for planting. I wish I could say the same for the pathways. They have been so neglected. I haven't really planted any thing at the Urban Ranch yet except for four tomato plants in the buckets.
Terra Nova Gardens has been the focus this year.
Some times it's good to have taken pictures to see the progress that has been made. I had hoped to expand the garden beds by two but ended up with a total of four more beds to plant this year. This is what the expansion area looked like in February.
This is that same area at the beginning of May. Many hours of building the beds and digging the soil have produced some very nice beds to plant.
The first time through digging up the beds requires rock removal and vine removal. It takes several years to clear a bed from rocks. I have some beds that are entering into their 6th season and still rocks and vines will pop up to be removed. Each year there's less and less but I don't think they will ever be all removed. I some times think about when I can't continue to garden any more just how long will it take before the garden reverts back to the wild. I suspect it won't take long. Nature has all the time in the world and really can't be tamed forever. Nature will submit for a time but in the end always wins.
An idea conceived over the Winter months was to have a slanted wire trellis for cucumbers to climb with squash planted under the cucumbers. The open side faces to the East which gets full sun from sunup to about four in the afternoon. Since the sunshine hours are mostly from the East the vine plants tend to sprawl toward the East and not West.
The next bed over in the foreground will be sweet corn. The plan is to let the vine plants (squash or pumpkins) grow across the path and into the sweet corn. The other vine plant bed which is not in the picture will not have a cucumber structure but will be allowed to spread across another path in a bed of sweet corn. I have a total of four sweet corn beds this year planted two weeks apart for a harvest over four weeks or maybe six. Last year was the first year to finally get a sweet corn harvest due to raccoons.
I'm hoping to get the cucumbers, squash, zucchini, and chard started in the seed cells. It's a good way to get 100% germination planting. A lot of plants need to be planted. All the green peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, onions, and eggplants need to be planted. There's lots of work to be accomplish over the next couple weeks.
