Gardening in stages

I like the various stages of vegetable gardening.

First you start out all excited in the planning stage.  You get busy prepping the plot.  It's fun because there are no weeds.  It's all brand new and then there's the anticipation of what you're going to plant and you imagine this huge bumper crop of vegetables.  You promise yourself you're really going to get after those weeds this year and it's gonna be grand.  In your mind, you can just taste the freshness of the things you'll plant and there's just nothing like noshing on a fresh vine ripened tomato.

The planting is all done and you commence to watering.  You hope it won't get too hot, or too cold.  you hope for rain, but not too much.  You promise you're really going to fertilize this year, too.  And you do.  Twice.

June comes and the peas you planted are doing OK.  You know though, that if this heat lasts your peas wont.  You pick, and pick.  You pick a five gallon bucket of pea pods.  After four hours of shucking, blanching, and packaging, you notice you have enough peas for about three meals for a family of four or five.  Oh, well, you grew them!

Some things do well in the garden.  Some things die.  Early planted cucumbers died and the seeds didn't decide to sprout until mid-July.  Whether or not you will pull a cucumber off a vine this year is anybody's guess.  What is doing remarkably well, though is your weeds.  No matter how much you try, they grow back faster than you can pull them.  It's mid-July and you're ready to let them have the thing. But you press on.  Pull a few each day is your mantra.  And hope you don't pull up too many of the plants you planted.

You planted two zucchini plants just in case one died.  It didn't.  And now you have more than you can eat.  There's that one that looks like a wiffle ball bat, too.  So, you tell yourself it's time to make zucchini bread.  You'll do this a few times, too, and you'll eat a few of the small ones.  Then you'll start the annual search for the guy who didn't lock his car at work or at church.  Hey, sharing is good, right?

Someone will eat them.  Or beat you with them if they catch you putting them in their car again.



I'm someplace inbetween the various gardening stages.  I pulled some weeds today and will again tomorrow.  I have seeds sprouting that should have two months ago.  They're mostly root crops so the cold won't bother them.  If you park near me at work or church, you'd better start locking your doors.  I'm all excited now about harvesting beans and June is going to bottle a batch tonight.  I will probably bottle a batch on Saturday or Sunday unless she beats me to it.  I'm excited about tomatoes getting ripe but we planted about eighty-four plants.  I'm going to be so sick of bottling tomatoes it ain't even gonna be funny in about a month.  Tomatoes are easy to give away though.

Our fall squash plants are doing well.  Our green peppers are growing like I've never grown a pepper before.  I hope they keep it up.  I'm really looking forward to some homemade stuffed green peppers made with my peppers and my tomatoes.  Yum.

I'm sure about September I'll be sick of the garden, though.  The weeds haven't won, but boy they're sure trying.  We'll keep fighting the fight.  Morning glory and purslane seem to be the biggest problems.  I pulled out some grass today too, and had to fish out a carrot that was growing.  It just sprouted, so I was able to get it, root and all, planted back in the ground.  I expect if carrots are sprouting now, that beets that didn't probably will, too.  They didn't do real well, either.

I have cucumbers.  Whether or not they'll actually produce remains to be seen.  But they did grow.  So did the oddest thing:  Tomatillo plants.  I have three volunteers.  They're producing tomatillos.  Cool.

So are turnips that were planted a couple of years ago.  They just popped up and June eats the greens.  They're growing.   That's all her though.  We just weed around them.  Potatoes are doing well.  My yellow onions didn't do so hot, though.  They're done.  They set really small bulbs and they're just done.  They're good, though, but I wanted them about twice the size they are. I found a recipe for bottled red onions that I want to try, so i hope the veggie stands in Brigham City have some good onions in a couple of weeks.  We'll have to see.

The really neat thing is that I learned today that the stuff we bottled a couple of years ago and didn't eat is more than likely still good.  I'm going to open a jar of corn from 2010 and try it out.  I know you have to boil the dog snot out of home canned vegetables but that corn was pretty good so I'm curious to see if this stuff is like twinkies....  you know, bomb shelter food.  The websites say home canned stuff should be good for two to five years.  They say it's best up to a year.  Fruits and tomatoes they say start to go south after a year.  I don't think we have much fruit left, but I do, sadly, have a lot of stuff from 2005 that I'm not gonna be a eatin.

It gets dumped because I need the jars and I'm not willing to take the chance.

Well, that's all.  I took some time off tonight to help the immigrant process beans but she's nowhere to be found.  I need to fix her car, too.

And I have some potato salad and zucchini bread to make.  A loaf of raisin bread sounds pretty yummy, too.



Oh well.

Hope your garden is growing as well as mine.  It really is worth the effort.