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| My little piece of happiness among the weeds... |
I enjoy a little bit of everything good in life. I have so many passions I can not just give all my love to one, but something I do love so much is to grow things. I am a gardener and I find a little piece of happiness in a labor of love in the hot sun and the cool breeze of the late afternoon. I am not a trophy winning flower breeder or show stopping tomato grower, but what simple pleasure I have found in my garden.
This year I am trying to grow a variety of vegetables in a spot I haven't used to grow anything on before and it hasn't been very easy. It turns out that this piece of ground has more rocks on it than I would have imagined. However I am making it work. Weeds have also been quite a problem and have come up everywhere and very thick. I don't like weeding and the fact that most of them are covered in thorns makes me dislike it even more.
I got started this year in early may. My brother-in-law borrowed our neighbors little tractor and tilled it up as best he could, but since it has so many rocks, some spots were still very hard. I have worked around the spots to hard and rocky to soften up. I now have a garden that is growing very nicely despite the nosy horse who tries to lay the fence over and reach the corn and tomato plants. Even though I love gardening it doesn't mean I am great at it, but I guess I am learning as I go and bound to get better at it.
Fertilizer is not something I know a whole lot about, but my plants were a little sluggish at taking off at first so I bought some and tried to do it right. At first I used a general fertilize combo of 10-6-10, but later I used a little 23% nitrogen on stuff I wasn't worried about not getting ripe soon and 19-19-19 on the rest of everything like tomatoes. I read somewhere that okra likes fertilizer rich in phosphate so I just the other day got some 45% phosphate and put it around things that flower like okra and things that are roots crops also. There was some old manure worked into the soil when first plowing the ground also. I do believe I got a little excited and over fertilized some things with the nitrogen . Most of my plants have brown and yellow leaves that makes me think the plants may have been burned by having too much, but they are growing out of it and growing fast enough to surprise and delight me. Some of my tomato plants are at least 4' tall.
We have all had plenty of rain here this year and maybe too much in fact, but it seems to have made all the plants happy and green. All my 50 some tomato plants are now being covered in lots of tiny green tomatoes. My zucchinis are producing well as well as my butternut squash and yellow straight neck. I am also growing Connecticut field pumpkins that are now starting to bloom. My cucumbers where planted too thick and do not have very big vines, but they are covered in cucumbers the biggest about three inches so far (except the one I already ate that was about 5 inches long). My bell peppers and banana peppers are producing well also, but the plants seem stunted and are still short. I counted 19 blooms and 4 bell peppers on one little plant anyway so they may do just fine. I hope it all does.
My eggplants were cruelly devoured by some bug and out of 6 I now have 2 surviving plants. My poor watermelon plants are just now starting to take off and grow. Out of about 50 plants I have about 10 left and 4 that are doing very well. I believe they will do okay though- who needs 50 plants anyway? I am growing 2 kinds of beans, state half-runners which are in a row in front of my pumpkins and Kentucky wonder beans that are happily climbing my corn. I am training the large vining things to not run over everything else and so far so good.
I started this blog other night and was too tired to finish, but since then things have grown even more. It is such a joy to watch a garden grow. Much of what I am growing I planted as seeds. It just thrills me to see it go from a tiny seed to a huge plant. I think that is why I like to grow the pumpkins and squash so much. From seed I planted cucumbers, lettuce, carrots, okra, watermelon, corn, beans, sunflowers, a variety of greens, radishes, and of course pumpkin and squash.
My garden is needing tended now. I am going to weed the beans today. Several large weeds have now grown too big to hide among the beans anymore. I hate the messiness of weeds everywhere, but thankfully my garden is for the most part well under control now. I am grateful for such a pleasant distraction from the demands of life. Next year I am sure to make changes on how I have done things thus far. I will improve upon good ideas and discard not so good ones. For the mean time however I am gonna continue to love my little piece of happiness among the weeds. I thank Jesus for giving me this little joy in life, and for all the other blessing he gives.
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