Jun. 4, 2009 - ~This is the great adventure -part 1
Hubby prompted me to take photos of the garden so I ran out this morning and captured a few. The squash is growing so good! Last year about this time we attempted to grow squash in the pool with drainage holes up the side of the pool every 18 inches. Well, this time of year is extremely wet and our beautiful squash began to rot! Lesson learned..... now just look at these beauties! I think we appreciate it just a little more because of the failure last year
One thing that I'm sure the pools are great for is growing lettuce! I have never had a problem with the lettuce in the pool. No matter the season..... the lettuce LOVES the pool! Here is a photo of our lettuce going to seed. This is what it looks like if you do nothing with it for a couple weeks.
Here's an close-up of what the tops of the lettuce look like. Little flowers will begin to form and when they die off they'll leave little tiny lettuce seeds. About a month or so ago we harvested a million little romaine seeds that I had planted about a year ago. I don't expect it to take very long for these to go to seed though. We're certainly learning......
Here are some of our tomato plants. With the flood I really thought they were goners. But thankfully they like it wet and were at the stage where it didn't cause very much damage. In this pool, with the tomato, I have about 10 pepper plants.
I tried growing some peppers last year and my blooms or tiny little peppers would always fall off. That was aggravating to say the least! I talked with a local farmer who said I should probably add some lime(?) to the soil a couple weeks before planting. So far so good.......
Pepper get wet feet easy, so after the flood I took 5 pepper plants out and transplanted them. I then went to the tomato/pepper pool and gently began making little ditches around the plants to help the root stay aerated. All of the peppers look good - the ones I transplanted and the10 or so I left in the pool, but the peppers in the pool look three times as good! The true test will come in a few weeks though.
Here's the backyard garden. We actually have little garden plots all over the yard as experiments. These little experiments help us evaluate soil, lighting, drainage, and we use that information to expand with each new season.
This plot is very exciting! The photo is a little deceiving, but there's quite a bit in here. Right here at the front we have watermelon. These watermelon are suppose to reach 200 pounds.
We were walking the garden last night and found this! Isn't that the cutest little thing?! If you zoom in you can even see it's stripes! Reminds me of a little baby in the womb..... it's all there it's just tiny
After the melon there are three rows. I'm glad we allowed room for the melon to roam because they are already right next to the corn!
The corn is another exciting adventure! I didn't want to plant corn, but hubby did. We had planted corn before and it didn't go too well. I think we have it figured out now. So far everything in the garden is growing by leaps and bounds and we attribute that to preparing the soil well beforehand AND 2-3 weeks after our initial planting we gave the seedlings a healthy dose of miracle grow.
They say that if your soil is healthy it helps in fighting off insects and disease. So far I totally agree.
Here's another view from the other side. Right here on this far side we've planted cucumbers. They are the cutest! The next row are the squash, and the following row had several corn and 4 pepper plants. We've already started harvesting our squash (as you can tell) and they are ginormous! We used our first harvested squash for the soup we made the other day, along with several picked beans. One thing I've noticed when growing your own food is that you DO NOT want any wasted! It's an entirely different mentality when you grow your own. There is a very real sense of appreciation!
My daughter told me this morning that she wished we had begun all of this when she was younger. For the children to see the entire process is such a blessing. The younger ones do not understand all of it, but they are blessed by it in many ways. I can't imagine them in a school all day long! Learning should be hands on for the little ones! I myself, have learned so very much just being a home school mother. I never had opportunities to learn like I do now.
The children pick up the eagerness to learn as well. Sometimes a learning opportunity comes from a simple question one of the children will ask. From that question books begin to fly and field trips are scheduled. Get ready...... we're going on an adventure!
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*I've had two requests for a peek at Grandma and Grandpas cabin. For those of you who don't know they've been re-doing 150 year old cabin for a while now. Grandpa is quite talented and always does a little something extra, so you'll also see photos of his outhouse (fully equipped with plumbing and hot water). In the final photo below Jo is standing to the side/back of the outhouse holding the shower stall door open (which also has hot water). You can't imagine how much fun it is for the children to use the facilities at Grandma and Grandpas!
There's an inside photo of the outhouse from last weeks entry. Just scroll down a few entries to see that.
