The Garden

I fear that the 2010 garden season is going to be remembered as the worst ever. It has been one problem after another and at this point I am letting it go to the weeds in places. Of course this year had to be the year I decided to actually sell our produce. Everyone is understanding but man I feel awful.

It started with the wettest spring ever. I vaguely remember a scattering of sunny days. Most of the early crops got root rot from too much water. I did four different plantings of things hoping the weather would start to cooperate. July came and actually brought some sun but by that time most of my crops were severely stunted. I replanted some and those are actually doing wonderful. The corn is coming along nicely as is the later planted squashes. The tomatoes are sad, sad, sad however. They were looking wonderful after being started inside. They grew and grew while I waited for the rain and cold night temps to stop and finally I had to plant them outside. They were too big even after repeated transplantings. So out they went, all 80 of them. Sadly the rain didn't stop. They are flowering but I fear they will not bear much, if any, fruit at all this year.

Creatures have been a huge issue this year as well. The wet created a huge slug problem, which an organic slug killer took care of for now. Not before they ate a 80plant row of peas though. There must have been hundreds of them out there. The moles seem to know when I plant a row of seeds. I have one garden row that never fails, I plant something and the next morning a mole has gone from one marker to the other with his little mole path of destruction. Its kind of funny that it is regularly this one row though. Last but not least is my mistake of leaving the gate open when I left for Church last Sunday. I came home to a deer eaten path of beans and cucumbers. An entire acre to choose from and he walked the entire row up and down both sides of the trellis. lol The beans are not lost though, they were just starting to bear beans and the deer only ate about 1/2 to 3/4 of the plants. The cucumbers only had minimal damage so that is good. I have high hopes that we will still get some later harvest crops and I am starting to plant the fall/winter crops.

I have been really busy and not blogging as much but I do miss it a lot. We have Skamania County Fair coming up and my daughter is excited to be showing her chickens again. My husband and I have taken on the roles of running the children's program and youth group at our church which is wonderful. Its something we both enjoy very much and keeps us pretty busy. We feel very blessed to have found such a great church family when we moved here. Still trying to figure out how to get photos on here without as much hassle as it was last time. One of these days I will devote some time to that as there are tons of photos I have to share with you all. Until next time enjoy whatever season your area of the world is in!