I love my garden!

I have been spending a lot of time in the garden. I got to thinking, really, who needs INSANITY when you’ve got one of these:

Seriously? Yesterday I think I spent about 5 hours using something like this (mine isn’t this exact one, but close!). This kind of tool is AMAZING for getting out big clumps of weeds. It’s much faster than sitting down, hand-digging. I will use mine on an entire row, and then go back and sit down & pull out the (super easy to pull out) weed clumps that it made for me. I LOVE this tool!

Remember a few weeks ago when I said that God was taking care of my garden, because I wasn’t? Well, it turns out that laziness (or busyness? :)) is bad religion (and bad for the garden), and the Bible says that “he who works his land will have abundant food” (Proverbs 12:11). And, “Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth” (Proverbs 10:4).

God did a great job watering my garden, and providing sunshine for it, but he didn’t do anything about those darn weeds. 🙂 I think He was leaving that up to me. 🙂 A few of my plants didn’t make it. My pumpkin and spaghetti squash seeds were sporadic–some made it, some didn’t. I have weeds everywhere. Tons of them. My garden is 63′ x 28′. It’s huge.

I asked a local farmer (who owns a CSA we used to participate in) what he puts between his rows to keep the weeds down. He said that he doesn’t put anything in between rows, because he uses a dripline system, so only his plants get watered–not the paths. Brilliant! We’re not there yet. We haven’t set that up. We have soaker hoses, and a good old fashioned garden hose with a spray nozzle. Our paths get watered. Our weeds are thriving because we water them. 🙂

I tried pine bedding in my rows. It just didn’t work for me. The color was wrong, it didn’t look “natural.” It didn’t keep down the weeds very well, unless I put a thick cover of it on the path. It was something I had to buy and spend money on. My kids would pick up the little pieces and throw them all over like snow–and there were pine chips on my tomato plants and everywhere else they could possibly be. I came up with a better idea! We recently hired a tractor guy to come out and mow a few of our acres. We have 30 acres, and it’s all tall grass right now. We don’t own a tractor, or any cows or goats–so the grass is growing crazy! We just wanted a few acres around the house to be shorter. So he mowed–and left the tall grass just laying there. It’s dry now, like straw–perfect! I’ve been having my boys go around the fields, gathering “hay” (they call it) to put on the garden paths. They use their radio flyer wagon to make the job quicker (sometimes I doubt the wagon actually makes it *faster,* but hey, they’re enjoying their work.;)). And my garden paths are about 1/3 complete! YAY! Now hopefully we can finish them before it rains too hard and that “hay” starts composting into the grass…then what will I do? Buy straw? 😉

I am excited about everything I have growing out there–tons of different kinds of squash, cukes, lettuce (we’ve been eating every night), peppers, tons of tomatoes, etc. We are considering the idea of hosting a booth at a local farmers’ market a few times this summer to sell some veggies & get a list of customers for our meat….We will see if we produce enough to make that happen! 🙂

How are you all doing in your garden?