Can I come home for the summer? I could slow down for a little while…

I am going to start off my saying that through this process I really respect what my parents/grandparents did by working outside in the field all summer. This one has been a killer, but I absolutely love sitting outside in the sunshine…..getting dirty…. and feeling as though I have accomplished something. Being outside planting, weeding, pruning… whatever makes me feel a little bit of the simplicity of life that we often miss in our busy hustle/bustle lives. I can respect that ability to wake up early work outside all day and then go to bed when it gets dark just to get up and do it all again. Sometimes I think that life would be easier if we weren’t so accustomed to what we have. I often times wish that we could just pack up and move to some place like Montana where there isn’t anyone for at least 50 miles and be completely self sufficient. But enough with the daydreaming, huh?

So, I realize that it’s been about 6 weeks since I last posted anything about anything. I apologize because in gardening time a lot can happen in 6 weeks, and believe me it has. We have been working in the garden almost every day (especially since I only work three days a week now). Jeremy ultimately turned the garden over to me completely (not only blogging, but also the care of the garden…he’s been busy). I started working at UK Medical Center on June 6th, and have had a lot of computer classes to do since it all started, which ultimately means I don’t want to be on the computer unless I have to….. hence the lack of updates.

So anyways, enough about that….. The garden is CRAZY! Things are growing and ripening and we are almost to the point where we can reap the benefits of our hard work. I plan to post recipes once we start yielding enough veggies to do something with. I already use the herbs almost everyday.

The biggest nemesis to our garden has not been the heat, rain, or even the bugs(which we haven’t really had a problem with this year) but it has been the dogs. We built a new fence around the entire yard including the garden. Our old fence pretty much sucked, and now we can be lazy and just let them out the door plus they love to just be outside. What we didn’t realize was how much they want to dig and dig and dig…. who knew huskies like to dig, right? They managed to massacre my bell pepper plant and completely get a tomato plant out of the ground. I was able to cover them both up and save them, despite the dogs’ attempt to foil the productivity of the garden.  Ultimately we ended up using the old wire fencing to fence in the garden area, which has proven effective in keeping the dogs out.

So anyways, there are probably close to 200 tomatoes of all various sizes on our nine plants. It will be crazy because I imagine that they will all start turning red at the same time. We might have bitten off more than we can chew, literally, with the tomato plants…. I guess next year I will be awesome at making pasta sauce, pizza sauce and any other tomato products.

My strawberries aren’t doing as well as I had hoped for. The planter has been a very poor environment for them. The plastic bin has seemed to work pretty well, next year we plan to investigate a better method for the strawberries. We pulled up  a carrot and onion to check the size of them and the carrots are about 4-5 inches now, and the onions are small bulbs. We ended up having to thin the lettuce out, because it like everything else got a bit out of control.

I am unsure as to why it has taken a while for somethings to start growing well. My basil plants have just decided to grow in the past two weeks, and our black beans have kind of stalled out and quit growing. I am planning on researching better environments for strawberries, beans, chives and rosemary because ultimately I am not the best at growing these things and I would like to be able to add them to our repertoire of what we grow as staple foods.

Well I guess that is enough for now.