May garden update

And suddenly it's the end of May. My leeks grew up and I've put them in the garden. I also put in a ton of pepper, eggplant, tomato, flower, and other seeds. Most have been popped into the garden at their own peril.

On Thursday I was rushing. It was after work and I got there around 6. I really wanted to put the melons in before the hot summer days coming up over the weekend. And I was so sad for my new little seedlings. It would be unseasonably warm all weekend, with little water, and me, well I was off to Acadia for some camping, fishing, and hiking. (During the drive up, I watched the temperature fall from 86 to 52.) As always, I tried to cram too much into my day...sweet potatoes and tomatoes to transplant, watermelon seeds to plant, everything to water, and my my aren't the weeds getting tall these days?

The mosquitoes had their revenge. They wrote "3" on my left arm...a message that my boyfriend and I have yet to decipher. Though I did get a few bites up in Acadia, it was nothing like my late evening gardening trip.

But it sure paid off. I came back and my corn is now ready for stage 2. I'm trying out the 3 sisters planting...corn, beans, and squash. You plant five hills of corn, with four seeds in each. Then you plant 4 hills of squash, and we picked 4 different kinds. After the corn is 4 inches tall, you plant pole beans that grow up on the corn. And you have this lovely mess of companion planting, tall and short. So far it's quite nice looking, and I'm hoping for productivity.

I'll admit to a bit of jealousy when I look at some of the neat, tidy gardens with careful veggie choices. My garden is focused on getting out as much food as possible in a small space. In my 15x30 plot, I'm hoping for about 50 varieties of veggies. It's pretty easy to do when you only plant one or two square feet of of several veggies. My problem is that it also leads me to buying too many seeds. Johnny's Seeds has been great, and I particularly like their sweet potato sets. But next year I might go for the High Mowing Seeds, since there are less choices and they are all organic. I'm finding that it's a lot easier for me to control my shopping when there are less choices, especially when they're all high quality. Clothes, menu choices, seed catalogs, less is more darling.

The tragedy of the week was that I burnt out some of my peppers and eggplant. I'm thinking that I'll try to replace them with other seedlings from the garden shop. Last year I similarly had problems with both, so I'll need a different strategy in the spring for starting. I figured that my grow light would solve my transplanting needs, but I think I'll need to get everything bigger pots too. I read all the seed packets and try to follow the rules, but so very often it doesn't work out in the soil as it does in black and white. Will keep on truckin'.