In for the evening and no more gardening today. Weeded a flowerbed that I look at all the time from my back door and needed weeding badly. Then I moved upstairs and started working on my veggie area again. I made a border divider out of some leftover edger pavers to show where the iris garden ends and the veggies begin. So now I have a 4 by 8 foot (approx) rectangle edged with paver blocks. I wanted the soil loose even thought it looks like good soil. So I got out my shovel and double dug it. That really got deeper by doing it twice and loosened up the clods. Then I raked it and thumped out and leveled any remaining clods.

Now tomorrow I am going to rake it again even though it really looked pretty good tonight. Once that is done I will measure and set up my rows for seed planting. I need to get my root crops in by/before the end of June because otherwise I think it would be too late for them.

And this bed will be great and stay loose I hope. It is 4 feet wide but accessable from each side. So you only need to reach in 2 feet. It had better work because that is the way I am doing it.

This bed is for my root crops. I have four different types of turnips, then I have rutabaga, kolrabi, parsnips, golden beets, baby carrots, onion seeds. If I have room I can put some of my greens up there in the future but we will see.

Sounds like a good plan! 4 ft. should work just fine. Sounds like you made a lot of progress today.

I got the weave done on my peppers but some need a second row and I just didn't get it done. I had to weed them as well. Then i weeded my echinacea row. Wow! Really a lot of grass but it pulled out easily.

The guys worked on my Cool-Bot again. Almost finished. Hopefully I will be able to use it this week and cut my flowers on Thursday instead of Friday. It's just too long of a day to pick all the flowers and then make 36 bouquets. This Saturday I was so tired I only made 18 and figured I'd make the rest after we got set up at market. People started right away making their own bouquets! It was great for me. We osold over 35 bouquets this week!

We had beans again and four HUGE buckets of basil, cukes and zucchini/yellow squash, a little bit of lettuce and a few potatoes and we almost sold out of everything.

I have found a nursing home to contact this week that is very close to market so possibly I will be able to take them all the leftover bouquets/flowers. This wee I had over four huge buckets of just daisies.

My son pulled honey again and this time he got over 50#. That is always a big hit too.

Took a few pictures today. You can see some of the grass I'm dealing with at the bottom left of first photo.

Pepper rows. Don't know if you remember picture right after I planted them, but you could barely see some of them.



This is Gypsy, a sweet red pepper, one of our most popular at market.


Zucchini

Arlene, I like the weave method of support and I think it works especially well for peppers as they never do get really large like tomatoes do.

I hate weeding but it has to be done. Your garden is so large that I don't know how you keep up with it all.

Sounds like a very good weekend at market what with the flowers and veggies.

Lol! I don't keep up with it. I figured with 40 rows, even if I could do one a day it would take me over a month to go through the entire garden and in one month's time, that is the kind of weeds I am dealing with. I was using a heavy mulch of chopped straw but I ran out so all the most recent rows have no mulch. If I can mulch it helps tremendously, not only with the weeds but also the watering.

And of course I don't get to be in the garden evey day so you just have to prioritize and look the other way sometimes! i have seedlings I cannot find for the tall grass! right now I'm just trying to keep the money maker crops weeded...

abhege said:Sounds like a good plan! 4 ft. should work just fine. Sounds like you made a lot of progress today.
.

I think it all worked out so that I have the space for the new root veggie area. I thought of moving those iris last year because I wanted to put veggies there but I had no place at all I could move them to. So I didn't do it. But this spring what with so many of those iris having rotted there were only about half as many as there used to be. So prefect opportunity to get that veggie bed in. I just moved iris from one end into empty spots in the other end.

abhege said:Lol! I don't keep up with it. I figured with 40 rows, even if I could do one a day it would take me over a month to go through the entire garden and in one month's time, that is the kind of weeds I am dealing with. I was using a heavy mulch of chopped straw but I ran out so all the most recent rows have no mulch. If I can mulch it helps tremendously, not only with the weeds but also the watering.

And of course I don't get to be in the garden evey day so you just have to prioritize and look the other way sometimes! i have seedlings I cannot find for the tall grass! right now I'm just trying to keep the money maker crops weeded...

I use straw for mulch also. I couldn't manage without mulch and not surprised that you can't either. And yes, those money crops should get the most attention.

OK, now going back and looking at your pictures that you posted.

Yes, I can see the grass that you weeded. The peppers look wonderful! I can remember tiny tiny plants, these look big. And it looks so nice all weaved and weeded. The entire garden looks pretty good to me.

The veggie area is pretty well weeded except the potatoes but we have already started digging them so I may just wait and rototill it. The flower rows are another story but the weeds don't prevent me from picking them so they get put on the back burner. I would LOVE to have it all weeded and mulched, I know it would look fabulous but I don't think that is happening this year.

I had really planned on it but the other grandma usually comes up from Panama for the summer and watches Miranda but her DH dislocated his shoulder three times so he had to have surgery (just yesterday) and she felt she needed to go back down to be with him. He had stayed behind for a bit when he got injured. I don't think they will make it back up until LATE summer, if at all, and when the weather starts to cool off, they don't like the cold.

We are going to try and schedule getting a load (truck and trailer) of straw this week if they have cut it and while we have the cap off the truck, a load of horse manure as well. Each will take a full day to do so ther goes this week! but I would rather get it done so I can start getting some more straw down.

I am liking the weave!!!!

Yes, best to get the straw down of at all possible. Makes weeding more worthwhile when you can mulch right away. I guess the horse manure makes you garden grow so well.

Sorry about grandma not making it here this year.

Yes, the horse manure is needed because we are still building the soil here and we get it from someone who doesn't use pine shavings so it compost faster and is more concentrated.

Secretly I am hoping She will come in a few weeks

abhege said:Yes, the horse manure is needed because we are still building the soil here and we get it from someone who doesn't use pine shavings so it compost faster and is more concentrated.

Secretly I am hoping She will come in a few weeks

I hope she does.

City girl here doesn't know much about using manure in the garden and I don't want to learn.

By the time we get it, it is already pretty far on its way to being composted so rarely is there any odor!

You can buy composted cow manure at big box stores and it looks just like black dirt.

I have bought the bags of composted cow manure. The veggies love that stuff. I meant not knowing about getting the non bagged direct from the horses stuff!

Straw must be different here. I have tried it a couple times. It was so full of weed seeds, I had more weeds than ever. I bought from a farmer down the road once, and the local farm store once. Now, I use pine bark chip mulch, combined with landscape fabric or newspaper.

Juli, are you sure you had straw and not hay? Hay is aweful as mulch because it is nothing but weed seeds. Straw is pretty much clean of weed seeds. All my veggies are mulched with straw, I could never do without it.

Anyone that said they have no room for tomatoes or other veggies. Think outside the box. I have tomatoes planted in back of my front daylily rows along the driveway side garden.



And here are more pictures of Florida weaved tomato plants.

I have gotten straw that was full of weed seeds as well. Unless you know the farmer you are getting it from, it is a chance. Someone told me to put paper under the straw because if the weed seeds germinate they will die. They suggested getting butt rolls of newsprint from the local newspapers. I will probably try that. Or, if you subscribe to a paper you could just use old newspapers or cardboard. We do use cardboard for the ends of the rows where the Bermuda grass is more prevalent.

On my new root veggie bed, I haven't done anything more up there today yet. Here it is this morning looking exactly as I left it last night. It was just too hot to stay out there in the sun. I was thinking wait till later and hope it cooled off some. But now it is cloudy and rain sprinkles so we will see.


Orange Butterfly for the butterflies is in bloom. I love the orange blooms. I have it here in the middle square of my now tomato bed and I have a clematis in the middle and yard long bean around the milkweed. No reason veggie beds can't be pretty!

Tomatoes are really looking great!