Several years ago I began compiling information about gardening in our area and putting it into a notebook. I listed each item we grew on its own page and when I would learn something new about that item I wrote it in my notebook. In the back of the book I had planning sketches of our gardens for each year with a list of the varieties we planted and how well (or not) they did. It was a great book.
was?
Yes, was!
You see, it somehow got mixed in with the newpaper and in a frenzied moment of cleaning up before our small group arrived, a child, who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, emptied the newpaper bucket into the burn barrell. The crazy thing is that we don’t even burn our newspapers, I save them for using in the garden. But it was a frenzied moment, and so my garden notebook and my brand new Eat Your Yard book that I was taking notes from were burned.
So, although I’m in the process of starting over with a new notebook, I thought I’d also post my garden information here each week or so. Just in case…
Gardening takes up quite a bit of our time, but we love it. Well, maybe we don’t love all it, but we love eating from the garden. In our area, it is possible, with a little work, to keep a garden going all year. That is our ultimate goal.
From the fall, we still have lettuce, spinach, cabbage that got a late start and brussel sprouts that I thought was broccoli. (Apparently, I need to start reading more than just the first 2 letters of words!) We also have a bed of green onions that are going to seed to replant themselves and storage onions and garlic that have been growing all winter.
For the spring, we have already planted one bed of corn (around Feb. 15th), started tomatoes, basil, cilantro, squash, zucchini, luffa squash, cucumbers and green beans in trays that will get planted in the next few weeks.
We are trying out some new ways (at least new to us) of keeping our garden watered, I’ll let you know how they pan out. Last year we really struggled with powdery mildew on our squashes and cucumber leaves, we’re hoping to not have that this year.
