Garden

By popular demand I am going to post about my garden. (Translation: the one person who reads this has requested to know about my garden). My garden is progressing quite well... as are the weeds.

I have some theories about weeds. I want to state from the beginning that I am fairly certain that these theories are wrong, but I use my theories to justify my laziness in not weeding the garden. Please don't destroy my theories because then I'd feel obligated to weed instead of doing whatever else it is that I do.

I don't want to start by writing about my weeds, I'll start with what is going well in the garden. When I grow up and own a farm I am going to grow sunflowers, beets and zucchini. I can grow those foods without problem. They grow great here and if that was all I planted I could have sunflower seeds, beets and zucchini for dinner every day for the entire year. I do not intend to do so.

This year we also have corn that we've been able to eat this year. Actually we have a bunch more that we should go eat. There, I figured out dinner for tonight. We grew a little bit of lettuce, but it was planted too close together and ended up bug infested before it went to seed really quickly and then tasted bad. We didn't get a lot of lettuce out of it. Our spinach didn't grow at all, even though I planted it three times. It may have been bad seeds, I'm not sure. We grew a bunch of basil. What do you do with basil? I know it's a spice and all, but evidently our cooking style isn't fancy enough to use spices regularly. We also had some carrots, except the ground was sort of hard and they didn't pull out real nicely. It took a shovel and chisel and we ended up with matchstick carrots mixed with dirt by the time we were done. We've got a bunch more carrots and I'm looking for dynamite in order to harvest them.

I still have hope for many things. The Brussel sprouts look pretty good, but I don't know how to harvest them. The cabbage looks good, well actually one of the five cabbages look good. We should have about four tons of tomatoes, but we've only had one that was ripe so far; it was stolen by a ranging child. Our potatoes look good, but the tough thing with potatoes is that they're underground so you never see them. Last year the plants looked good, but we didn't get many potatoes. This year the plants look good and we piled dirt up around the greens which is supposed to make more potatoes. We'll see. We've got peppers that look really good, but I'm not positive how to know when they are done. I also don't know what kind of peppers they are. Oh, and we have squash. We don't know what kind, they are mostly volunteers, but they are growing well.

Now for the grand finale. The part that I am the most excited about is watermelon. I have at least 6 big watermelon that are looking great. I'm not positive how to tell if they are ripe, but they look good. We've also got cantaloupe that looks pretty good. I'm excited for all of the melon growing in the garden, but I'm a little concerned. What do you do when you suddenly have 6 ripe watermelon and 8 ripe cantaloupe? How long do they last without refrigeration (I'll look on the internet, I don't expect answers to these questions).

Now for the weeds. we have weeds everywhere. The weeds have totally taken over the strawberries that we had. They are found throughout the corn, melon, Brussel sprouts, carrots, tomatoes, squash and peppers. I'm overwhelmed by them, so I wait for them to look like they are going to 'win' and then I devastate them and give the other plants a chance. My theory is that a little competition is good for the plants. It should make them grow faster and be stronger; adversity makes things stronger. Then when I pull the weeds, I leave them in place (but pull the roots... or break the stem really close to the ground). I feel that the weeds must contain a lot of really healthy stuff for my other plants. I'm sure it's helping everything grow. So as long as I cut down the weeds 'frequently enough', everything should go well. We'll see.

On a completely different note, I found this on youtube the other day and thought it was cool. If I had a couple hundred thousand dollars to spare I would love to do something like this. Actually I wouldn't. I don't think I would give people an SUV under any circumstance. Anyway, I thought it looked like fun and I liked the principle of giving things to unsuspecting people. Maybe I could do the same thing, but instead of giving them a car from my sponsor I could give them a used bike, or a weight loss program to help them lose weight. Somehow I don't think that would go over as well.