REALITY?: Eating the Outdoors

So that’s how it starts: 10 bags of manure, 6 of peat moss, a couple of lime and some seeds.

I planted the garden over the Memorial Day weekend–that’s a tradition that comes from living exactly in this area for long enough to know that we’ll still get a frost in May and even if we don’t, stuff knows better than I about growing conditions. Planted too early, it’ll just sit there and wait for the right time.

I love watching a garden grow. From lotsa brown dirt and a spreckling of green to green that almost takes over. The squash certainly have. I knew better than to crowd them in like this but I started out right to left with peppers, then tomatoes, then beans and lettuce and herbs, then almost ran out of space.

What’s neat about this new garden area is that it’s small, limited by the size of the pool that had stood there when we bought the house and taken down when we put in air conditioning.There’s still some deck that has to be cut down but I won’t let the guys near the garden now that it’s growing.

There’s still some problems: only a couple of inches of decent soil before we hit solid sand, which means constant watering; the early tomato blight that I thought I conquered is slowly creeping in again as late tomato blight; the late-planted Swiss chard and Chinese cabbage just sort of sprouted and bolted; and the millions of blossoms on the yellow squash are somehow mainly just male. They will be eaten as fried squash blossoms as soon as I go through and pick out the boy blossoms.

I think that aside from strengthening and rewiring the fencing that I threw up in a hurry in May, the removal of the deck, and a ton of topsoil, I think that once the production is done, this will be a good spot for a few years.

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