Monday, May 07, 2007

6-4-07

whoo-hooo! i found my packets of prescott fond blanc AND the french charentais melon seeds! i'm not sure what the difference between these two are, as i was under the impression that the prescott was a charentais melon, but i've started seeds of both and hopefully i will get to find the answer to that question sometime late this summer :)

over the weekend i did get a lot done. saturday morning was spent at the doctor's office waiting room, waiting to get my son worked in for a poison ivy shot. poor thing had a severe case of poison ivy rash and it was getting worse not better and by saturday morning he was ready for a shot. that's when you know a kid has reached his tolerance of misery - when a shot is considered a GOOD thing, lol. he has learned how to work the tiller and last weekend he tilled a few rows up to plant his corn and beans. lots of roots kept getting stuck in the tines and he kept pulling them out. apparently, the roots were poison ivy :( but he got a good garden in before the rash set in, and he thinks it was worth it. he is 10 years old and the doctor was pleased to hear about his interest in gardening. my oldest son likes to garden, too, but he only plants for the deer these days. i hope one day he'll get back to growing food for people.

so i didn't get much garden work done on saturday. on sunday morning as soon as i got out of bed and had coffee, i went up the mountain to look for some goldenseal roots for a friend. now, this is not the right time of year for harvesting roots, but if a person needs a certain herb for a certain need and you have to have it then, then any time of year will do. sometimes it's better than not getting it at all. it's a really hard hike to the goldenseal, about 300' straight up behind the house, and then it's all level to the west side using the logging road. once i make it to the water tank, it's real nice up there, but i sure wish i could hike it without getting winded and sore. i guess i need to do it more often, don't I? it was cool and breezy, and i always love being up there. i did get full of ticks, though.

after the hike i came back down and got to work on my garden. lots of seeds to start (yeah! melons!) and another trellis to make. this time i recruited my oldest son to cut the saplings for me, so building this trellis went a lot quicker than the bean trellis. my daughter doesn't like to hang out in the garden much, but she does like to ride her horse. i might have to put those two to work in the garden...she can get her horse to run errands or something - i'm always having to send one of the kids to the house for water or a hat.
it's really May 29, 2007 - blogger is STILL not dating right! This is looking west over the garden by the house. Eventually I want to have the whole hillside there terraced. It's pretty rough right now, but I can see there's promise of a beautiful "ozark tuscany", lol. You can't see the plants in the picture good, but there's tomatoes on the top row, and bell peppers, and on the second row is more peppers and some squash, and my favorite is the Prescott Fond Blanc melon. I had a whole pack of pretty old seeds and only managed to get one to sprout - so hopefully I can save some seeds from this melon and have some more next year. I hope it lives up to its reputation of being so fragrant and sweet that it stops motorists in france who smell it in the fields as they pass on the highway!
Here's our upper garden. The picture makes the trellis look much smaller than it really is, but it's high enough that i can walk under. Obviously, I didn't get my fence made, or even started, but I DID get the bean trellis done! there are strawberries in the foreground and yellow onions in the two rows before the beans. the beans are there, you just can't see them, lol. they're barely breaking out of the ground right now. in the foreground that you can't see is another row with a paste tomatoe, yellow squash, and more strawberries.
Today I found two overgrown Cherokee Purple tomato plants at the nursery near where I work and got them for half price. One even has tomatoes on it already.



5-23-07 (blogger still not dating right)
This weekend I am going to try and begin a fence around my front garden plot. Lets' hope this project turns out better than previous fencing projects! I'm off work Monday, so maybe I'll have a little time to actually get it started. The idea is to make a rustic stick fence. NOT rustic like my other one, which actually elicits laughter from some folks, but rustic in an attractive sense. We'll see. I fought the other one trying to make it look like my imagination wanted it to look, but it just wouldn't work. I have a new idea to try this time.
5-22-07 (Blogger isn't updating the dates properly)

Last weekend was very good gardening weather. I have almost everything planted that I had started, except for a few things i started as seeds over the weekend. It's really almost too late to start seeds, but I figured I'd try anyway. If they don't produce in time, well too bad. But if they do, then so much the better! Here's what all I have in the garden this year:

Tomatoes (beefstake, mortgage lifter, roma, mr. stripey, cherry, and some unknown variety of seeds that i had saved from last year)
Celery (leaf and stalk types)
Bell Peppers (yellow, red, orange, purple and green)
yellow squash
zucchini
snap beans (bush and pole)
sunflowers
okra (texas longhorn)
melons (one lonely little prescott fond blanc seedling, and seeds started for iroquois cantelope)
strawberries (everbearing, kent, and sparkle varieties)
yellow onions
asparagus (first year, no harvest)
sweet basil

If most of these do well, I should have lots of fresh food to eat and sell this year at market.
ha, well, i've almost let another 1/2 month go by without a post. but i just don't have a whole lot to talk about these days i guess!

Oh my goodness, how could a whole month have passed without even one entry?!! Well, I've been busy. My garden is finally growing and my little horse is growing, too. Here's a picture from the weekend from my son, Zack's, game camera. This was one of 3 bears caught on camera this weekend, raiding his deer corn feeder. I hope they stay up there on the mountain and don't start coming down to the house!