Garden Update 6/3/2019

Do you feel like you are behind with your garden this year?  If so, you are certainly not alone, this is a feeling I have been struggling with lately.

I can’t help but feel like I am already behind and our plants are just getting started.

I feel like this is pretty common feeling this time of year, regardless of whether you started your garden from seed or from transplant, there is also a lot of energy needed in the very beginning of the season.

Cleaning your garden up from the winter, preparing your soil and beds, and planting your plants or seeds, many of these tasks are required to be done early in the season.

Once they is done, it is sort of a waiting game with much less effort until the plants start producing.

Watering and monitoring progress only take so much energy each week. The extra free time tends to give me the feeling that I am slacking in my garden responsibilities.

If you are experiencing this period of down time, relax! We should enjoy the quiet time right now, because the work will pick up again soon. ​

Here are a few of our failures and successes this week:

Success #1: Beans

Our beans and peas are starting to sprout, hopefully I can keep them alive, fingers crossed.

Failure #1: Tomatoes

Since the cats ate our tomatoes seedlings back in April, I had to direct sow our tomatoes plants in our raised beds.  Unfortunately, they all died.

Luckily, we had one last option to ensure that we can have a harvest of some sort.  That option is to purchase and plant transplants.  I bought the following transplants from a local store:

2 Roma Tomato plants

2 Bonnie Original

1 Heatmaster

1 Sweet Million Cherry Tomato

1 Strawberry (I couldn’t resist, I always end up with one plant that I did not plan on purchasing.

While it is not my first choice to use transplants, I figure I will try my hand at starting from seed but in the worst case scenario, I can always purchase and plant transplants.  At least our raised beds look really pretty now:

Success #2: Mystery plant identified!

Every year we have this mystery plant that pops up and everyyear, I pull it out.  This was always done with extreme care because I was sure that it was poison.

This year, I took a picture of it and posted it on the Mother Earth News Gardening group asking for help identifying it. It caused quite the debate over whether it was a fig tree, or a sassafras tree.

Either of those, would be really cool to have! After many comments and suggestions to tasteand smell it, I am 95% sure it is a fig tree!  How awesome is that?!

Unfortunately it is in the worst spot possible, so I am going to try to figure out how to move it.  I really hope I do not kill it.

Failure #2: Some seeds from last year are not growing

I tried to reuse some of my seeds from last year for our summer squash and broccoli. Neither of them are growing, so I grabbed some transplants and planted those, I figure, I might as well fill those pots with something growing.

Next Steps

Build a fence, these plants will start growing and I need to keep out the rabbits and deer.