Gardening Today: The Kitchen Garden is IN!

This morning I awoke early.  It was gently misting outside but there was enough daylight to go out and get my hands dirty with the garden.  Son #3 had given us some very sturdy metal posts and two rolls of heavy wire that he had used in his garden last year for tomato trellises.  They seemed just the thing for our garden so that was my main project for today.

Left end of Kitchen garden

The posts were taller than I am so it was a bit difficult to pound them into the ground with our splitting maul, but I did get all four in the ground...two for the ends of the tomato row and two for the ends of the pea row. I did manage to pound my left forearm once in the process, which raised a sore black and blue mark...good for a few comments on gardening with the ladies, I guess...

The next job was to get the wire unrolled, pushed flat, and ends of the wires clipped  so they could come back on themselves and grab the posts at the ends of the rows.  That was more of a project than I had imagined.  I am used to cutting chicken wire with tin snips.  This wire was in NO WAY as simple a job!  I was finally about two-thirds of the way through cutting the wires when Ethan came by for Seminary and asked if he could help.  It had taken me ten minutes to cut those wires.  He did cut the rest of them in less than thirty SECONDS!!!  That is the difference between old wimpy lady  hands and young strong boy hands!  I am so grateful for his help because I was wearing down...a pretty frequent problem here.

Right end of Kitchen garden

Installing the wire on the posts was no picnic, either, but was finally accomplished so it was on to the planting.

Closer up of the right end of Kitchen garden

This year we did not start any plants ourselves.  Our first purchase was a flat of basil.  Within the first couple of nights something ate half the leaves INSIDE THE HOUSE...so it was not slugs, as one gardener suggested.  Later on we purchased some dead bug material which seems to have slowed up the bug damage...

With the garden now "ready" with composted goat doo, spaghnum peat moss, spading, straw in a walking path, and fencing and posts installed, the planting could be finished.  The plants we used were Sunsweet tomatoes-6,  lettuces-12 leaf lettuces, basil-10, sage-1, Parris Island Cos Lettuce--a few feet of row, Sugar Snap peas, Maestro peas, zucchini--3 plants from which I should have selected one strong but couldn't bear to pinch out two, and rhubarb-1.  This to go along with the 7 German hardneck garlic I planted last fall.

View of things yet to do for the final setting-up process...taking away the cement blocks!

With the plants (and Parris Island Cos seeds) in the ground, now I feel like I can just lie back and wait for the harvest.  Well, there will be a small matter of weeding, and potentially watering...

The annotations are a result of finding a new app called Skitch which is part of the Evernote app.  So far I love them both. I think I will probably love them even more when I really learn how to use them!