Well. It’s only been two months.
Imagine being someone that is slightly obsessed with growing things. Then imagine that you have not been able to grow or plant or do anything in the garden in the peak growing season of the year. This has been my existence for the past two months as my workloads have skyrocketed and I have spent my weekends in front of a computer screen. My job is entirely deadline focused, so there has not been a way of getting out of it. My poor garden.
Actually, the garden has been fine. My husband has maintained the watering, and everything I planted at the start of Spring just tootled along at its own pace. The tomatoes were in dire need of tying up when I went outside yesterday, and there was hella weeding to be done, but nothing else seemed amiss. Nature finds a way.
I dug up all the garlic, and now it is drying in the sunshine. We are expecting four days of extremely hot Australian weather, so that should be sufficient to dry it out before I bring it inside. We use a lot of garlic so this should last a couple of months. I guess I will have to plant more next year if I want to grow enough for a whole year.
I tested out a new shovel by digging up the compost from the two compost bins. One was half full, while the other was full. Both were ready to use. One had truly incredible compost in it because I had used pigeon poo from the next door neighbour’s aviary. It breaks the compost down very quickly. The corn and tomatoes got a great feed yesterday. The other contained rabbit poo and straw, which also broke down very well. Considering I have not had the time to give my heavy feeding plants a good feed this season, this should make up for it.
I am growing two types of corn this year; an heirloom painted mountain corn and an F1 hybrid called Jubilee that I grew last year. The mountain corn is already producing cobs. I expect it will be another month before the Jubilee follows. My experiment of growing beans up the corn stalks has been somewhat successful. The beans are growing up the corn as planned, but the beans are growing much faster than the corn. I started building some additional supports yesterday to help the corn so it would not be strangled by the beans. I also made the error of planting Scarlet Runner beans next to the corn, not realising that this bean grows enormous! It is the largest growing runner bean and requires a much sturdier frame than a poor corn stalk.
Now all the weeds are cleared and plants fed, I am going to figure out if I have time to grow a quick crop of eggplant and zucchini before the end of the season. I can’t believe I have not had time to grow a single zucchini this year.
It was so lovely to be outside in the dirt again, even if it was mostly digging up weeds and shovelling pigeon poo.
