This is my first full summer on our farm so I of course have big plans for our gardens. While living in the worst neighborhood in Buffalo I still had a nice flower garden and beautiful flowering Rose of Sharon bushes. I even won an award for my garden and had the news video my house. This was no small feat when our house was sandwiched in between two condemned abandon houses with drug dealers across the street. Now that I have almost ten acres to play with you can be sure I am increasing the size of my gardens.
I started off slowly this year. Living in a valley means our last frost date was June 1 and amazingly enough we did have a frost in the wee hours of June 1st. But in the middle of April I did plant some cold hardy Azalea and Rhododendron bushes.
Next was tilling a large area of our field in order to prepare the area for a vegetable garden. This of course was very exciting to my chickens who thought the whole purpose was to expose the plethora of worms and bugs for their culinary delight. Our neighbor, the wise farmer, offered us some free composted manure and was nice enough to drop a truckload off at our house.
All during this time I was busily planting seeds in the house to get a jump start on the season. We started off with some pumpkin seeds (procured from last years Jack O'Lanterns), zinnia, cucumbers, nasturium, green peppers, snap peas, zucchini, morning glory's, holly hock, and sweet pea. Why start seeds you ask when I could just go to the nearest greenhouse and buy started plants? Well the economy silly. See when your mortgage gets raised and the hours at jobs get lowered you have to cut the fat somewhere. It is much easier on our budget for me to make newspaper seed pots from my mothers recycling and buy packets of seeds for 5/$1.00 then to spend $1.89 per plant. The only exception were a six pack of tiny tomato plants and one large strawberry plant.
Once we had a nice warm evening my husband and I along with our two daughters and niece started getting the vegetables into the newly composted soil. He also brought home(as a suprise) some started summer squash, brussel sprouts, and egg plant. We also got some onions in the ground.
I just started some carrots, turnips, beets, spinach, jalepeno's, watermelon, and a few other peppers this week. We have decided all the root vegetables will be grown in bins this year because our soil hasn't been turned in a very long time and we are just unable to make sure our garden is rock free 12 inches down.
As of right now we haven't started any of the flowering plants outside, but that is more because my seedlings aren't very large or vigorous yet and Ms. Chevelle is not about giving me the time to do so. Oh well hopefully this weekend.
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