Home-Grown Watermelon!

Well, the garden is a sorry sight this year, thanks to my being extra-busy this summer, our leaving for Colorado for over a week, and now the ragweed season keeping me inside. (I knew I shouldn't have said anything last week when it was going well...think I jinxed myself!)

But....this is the first year we have had a decent sized watermelon come out of our garden! Perhaps they love neglect?  I just popped these into the corner of the garden before our trip to CO, watered them, and haven't done much since! 

The pic above(thanks to my 8yo for taking the pic) was of our first one that we cut into last night. Could have probably gone a couple more days, but oh well!  Totally edible, though.

Not in Love with Ruth Stout's No-Till Garden Method

Maybe we didn't follow her instructions exactly. Maybe we had higher hopes than we should have. Maybe it's just a weird year (it is).  In any case, I don't think I am a fan of Ruth Stout's No-Till Garden Method, unless we make some changes.

I think our greatest error was not to have had the garden completely covered over the winter...It was mulched with grass clippings in part of it(which had disintegrated over the winter) and straw in others (which wasn't completely gone by spring), and that wasn't enough.

With the changes in my availability/ability to work a lot in the garden this summer, I sort of planted the garden on a wing and a prayer. Many things would not germinate well (but we have had a cool spring and summer) and we had more weeds break through the mulch and outgrow our veggies when we were away for 10 days. The okra never came up all three times I planted it (never had a problem before this year, and I tried three times).  And then in July we went on vacation(always a negative as far as the garden is concerned).      So it had a lot going against it.

We have had far more success with fully tilling the garden(even just once), pulling out any unwanted plant matter, making rows or hills, planting seeds, and then mulching heavily once seeds emerged.

I think we will be going back to our old way of doing things next year.

For this year, though, we do have a couple of healthy sized melons, cukes, green beans, a couple pepper plants, onions, chard(what the chickens don't eat), corn, and hopefully potatoes(if I can find them past the thistles).  The summer squash have succumbed to the squash bugs..not sure I will even try next year...maybe I will just plant later...

That will have to do for now.  Not much to "survive" on, if we had to, that's for sure.  Thankful we are not relying solely on the garden!

Until next time...

Adventures in Gardening, or Trying the Ruth Stout No-Digging Garden

With me working part time this year, I have much less time to spend in the garden. So, Randy and I decided to try the no-till, no-digging, lots of mulch method used by Ruth Stout, author of Gardening Without Work.

We have long been mulching our garden, for as long as we've lived on the farm.  We have plenty of grass/plants that we mow and this makes great material to lay in the garden alongside the plants, both to keep the weeds down and to help retain moisture.  This part of the system has worked fairly well for us, with the exception of around our squash---I pull the mulch away from the squash plants, because squash bugs like to hide in the mulch.

So, this year, we mowed and mowed and mulched the entire garden. We pulled the biggest weeds(thistles have been our bane), and a week or two later pulled the mulch away in the rows where we were going to plant, and planted our seeds.

That was about 4 weeks ago.  I had planted a variety of greens, peas, okra, cucumbers, squash, beans...oh, and potatoes on the back end...I'd also gotten some watermelons and peppers from the nursery and they aren't doing great either...though they ARE growing... Maybe I'm just too impatient.

So far, I am not impressed.  In fact, after I have seen others' gardens this year, I am downright ashamed of our garden!  The seeds are just not coming up well at all.  The soil is still uncovered by the mulch, so it's not that they are covered up too much.  I am thinking it's because the soil is too hard and with the cool weather, it has held onto too much moisture and the seeds haven't done well.  We do have a ton of rabbits, but surely they couldn't make it this bad....maybe, maybe not.

At any rate, at this point I am trying to determine whether to have Randy just till everything under and start over, or to simply replant where things haven't come up and hope they come up (finally) and they do well.

Has anyone else tried the no-till method for gardening and had better luck than we have?

Just for kicks, here is a pic of my last year's onions going to seed, and a volunteer sunflower: the most interesting part of my garden so far this year.

8 Little Chicks...

Sorry to not post yesterday--was away from the computer all day and  not able to blog!

As of this morning, we have 8 chicks. There is one more in the incubator whose shell is partially cracked, so we'll see...

Here's a pic of the little critters. Of course, one of them put their head down, so you can only see 7 of their faces! Oh well!

4 Little Chickie Birds.... so far!

Just like kids, they almost all looked away when I opened the lid a bit to take a picture...

 And I got a pic of this little one and closed the lid (don't want them to get cold!).