Update!
Lots of progress has been made since my last entry here for Farmfront. Starting with expanding our gardening space! It seems my ambitions have outgrown my original amount of space. So with that and the seedlings quickly maturing, we doubled our overall tilled ground.
Tilling is hard, man.
I always thought that tilling looked easy. Grandma always made it look like no big deal. You just push the heavy turning dirt blades around. Not true at all. As can be seen, I do not think the large amount of red rock present in my soil is doing me any favors either.
After a few failed attempts at trying to get more chicken litter tilled into the new addition to the garden space, I declared that what I had done was as good as it was going to be. Time to move on. Now that I had my extra square footage, I could plant some of my seedling babies!
Seed babies! Moment
One little issue arose though. Since I transplanted my small seedlings from peat pods to a smaller plug tray, I had an assortment of squash and zucchini all mixed together.
While this will not be such a problem for myself, it makes it difficult for me to now get rid of the rest of my seedlings. I cannot distinguish between the two to give away. Just a beginner’s mistake!
The squash and zucchini proved to be the easiest as they proved to be easy to grow from seeds. Brussels sprouts were also not too bad, other than they were frail. I had accidentally lost a few along the way. My cucumbers seemed to be stuck at a point where I was hoping that getting them into real soil might do them good. For the life of me I can not get okra to grow in the plug trays, but planted a few anyway. With everything now in the ground, I am seeing slow, but consistent progress. I am even beginning to see some small heads of broccoli, and tomato blooms.
I continue to go through and hoe up the soil weekly around my older plants. I always want to get rid of any sprouting weeds and aerate any packed soil that is on the surface. We have had quite a bit of rain in Western Kentucky this spring, with even more cloudy days. I am hoping that with some more sunshine, my plants will really begin to take off. Maybe I will finally have some produce to share with friends.
Lessons I’m learning
My one largest failure so far is forgetting the fact that my strawberries exist. I have three hanging baskets of them off my deck railing. I can never remember to look at them daily. Unfortunately many of my berries have rotten spots on them when I do find them. Oh well! I guess the many birds I have hanging around will like the treats I leave them in the yard!
