Lola's Victory Garden

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Garden Update

Our Rose Bush came back. We thought it had died. It kind of did. Last year we had Peach colored Roses and Yellow Roses from this same plant. Apparently the nursery had grafted 2 varieties together. In any case, only the Yellow Rose is blooming.

06/03/09 06/30/09
Look how tall our Sunflowers have grown!
This is what our garden looks like today. I need to pick up some additional garden fence stakes this weekend because we did not have enough. The bamboo stakes Anastasia substituted for the stakes we were short are not working out.
First tomato!
Our first grapes!
The weather was wonderful today! I got a chance to begin tying our growing tomatoes to the cages and stakes. (Ok, to be honest I did maybe 1/3 before I cried Uncle. If Anastasia didn't have a chance to finish I'll be back at it again Wednesday.)

The hay has been working out quite well at helping our garden retain moisture. When I went in to tie the tomatoes I was surprised to find the ground soft and wet even though we hadn't watered for more than a day. I was not happily surprised when I discovered that weeds were still popping through the hay. The hay has greatly slowed down the proliferation of weeds, however, it does not prevent them.

I hope to be motivating our kids over the next few days to turn over the other garden plot so that we can get our seedlings planted for pumpkins, butternut squash and acorn squash. We hope to get those planted by the weekend, depending on the weather. The weather service has been promising rain, but so far has not come through.

How is your garden doing?

Lola's Victory Garden
©2009

4 comments:

alovelymadness said...

Everything is looking so well Lola.
And you have GRAPES ! YAY!! Soon you'll be doing the happy happy grape stomping dance and brewing your own..lol.
If the weeds start to get to be too much, pull the straw back and lay wide strips of newpaper between the plants 2-3 pages thick then lay the straw back over. This should smother the weeds. When we build raised beds I always lay newspaper down before we fill with soil. Larry wanted to till the ground first but I told him no need. The newspaper will attract more worms and they will loosen the ground up under the bed. Of course we always have to nail that metal hardware cloth to the bottom of our beds as we just can't seem to get rid of these pesky moles and voles.
Living in the woods, we would have to spray the surrounding 10 acres with castor oil to do that.
So happy to hear to you will be having a fall garden. We are going too also, with a heavy emphasis on kale and swiss chard, beets, spinach, butternuts,broccoli, cabbage etc.
I'm reading "4 season harvest" by Elliot Coleman. He gardens in Maine with heat in his greenhouse so we're crossing our fingers.
See you soon,
Happy Gardening,
Diane

Lin said...

It all looks good! And I like your Budha. :)

Lola said...

@ Littlepurpleroom - Thanks for the tip about the newspapers.

@ Lin - Yeah, Budha's cool, but he's no Isabel Bloom.

Sock Monkey said...

Sending Sock Monkey hugs this holiday weekend!