Painfully obvious lessons

More lessons, con’t from this post…

Tomato cages. Just suck it up and buy them. Stakes do no good when they have 6 “main” stalks coming up from the ground! It’s like trying to stop a monkey from flinging poo. Or trying to contain a 2 year old. Not gonna happen.

Zucchini and squash need a lot more room then the 2′ circle this boneheaded blog author gave them. 4′ all around. Or more.

Weed control. Don’t think because you start out good that you can slack off. Or your garden will look like this after a futile 2 hour weeding session:

That really is almost ALL WEEDS – the taters and corn are all harvested, so all the green you see, except the far right tomatoes and the far left squash, is weeds. :dizzy And that really is after I spent 2 hours taming some of the worst!

Don’t eat the apple in the Garden of Eatin’

Bad stuff’ll happen….weeds will take over so badly you can’t catch up and all you can hope for it to clear little areas around the still producing plants so they aren’t choked out. Tomatoes will grow so insanely big they’ll all fall over and you were dumb and planted them so close together you can’t untangle them (I’ll be canning tomatoes here soon though!). Cucumbers will be so thick and thorny that is a risk of death to pick anything. One squash plant will completely take over the onions.

Yeah, I’m keeping Earth Juice around :thumb But laying down better weed control next time! It’s really bad, I’m not kidding. Maybe I’ll take a picture if I think I can deal with the embarrassment :lol

General growy-ness

Just a general update on how things are going in the Garden of Eatin’ today.

The weeds are taking over. I need to get out there and attack with the weed whacker, it’s that bad. It’s not stopping things from growing, so that much is good! But it won’t happen in the next few days…yesterday we had 100F+ temps, today we’re due for 105F and tomorrow is supposed to be 100F, and Sunday 90F…temps should be back in the mid 70s on Monday, so I’ll plan on going lots of work in the garden then, with before after after pics.

The tomato stake experiement has literally been a giant FLOP. As soon as the tomatoes started getting big, the plants got so heavy and thick they’ve tipped over, breaking the stakes and I have lots of tomatoes on the ground at risk from bugs…trying to keep them UP but they just keep growing and falling more :help

The corn is nearly 7′ high with lots of ears. I think we might have some grilled steak and corn for dinner tonight.

The lemon cucumbers are finally growing, well….like taking over their corner of the garden. I definitely planted too many. And the little vines have built in protection to keep me from picking too early, their thorns leave me bleeding when I try.

The strawberries stopped producing fruit all together after giving us hardly anything and are producing runners like crazy. I tried stopped that to see if it would encourage fruit, but it didn’t.

I’ve gotten 6 gigantic zucchini now and there’s lots more growing. I’ll be shredding and freezing it this weekend. Those suckers grow fast!

The crookneck is finally starting to grow fruit, but only after the plant grew to “Little Shop of Horrors” porportions.

Out one pumpkin is about basketball sized and just starting to turn orange.

Potatoes will finish being harvested tonight, there’s 3 plants left and I want to make potato salad. I forgot to write down the ingredients I used last time, I’ll do that this weekend and post the recipe :D

Weeding made…….. fun?

I still have my 2 prong hoe for deep weeding and use it often. I also get down on my hands and knees and use a hand weeder or just my hands when I need to get close to the plants that should be in the garden. These items have made the dread and loathing I used to have for weeding completely disappear. Nice!