Next in Garden

Tomatoes like 'settled' weather. They, in the same manner as the peppers and egg plant, don't like cold weather, or a frost. I have read that tomato plants need to be protected from 40 degrees and under or your fruit (tomatoes) will be misshapen as in 'cat faced' or other deformities. Now, I do not remember if the plants have to be blossoming at the time, or if it is the plant itself with out the blossoms.

We have planted cabbage (several thousand plants when we were 'truck farming') only to wake in the morning to have a couple of inches of snow on them. They will take some cold weather, and the snow did not last long when the sun came up.

Not all plants of course are tender to cold weather, and not all plants need to be started inside. I've read an old timey booklet by Otha B. Warrin in which he stated an old adage: Any one can be a farmer.

As odd as it may seem, my mother used to have an adage: Any one can be a teacher. I have spent a good many years as a teacher, as a 'farmer', and as a 'gardener'. One thing I can attest to is that, yes, anyone can diddle at these things, but only a few are called to be able to put the adjective 'excellent' along with those terms.

Today my husband and I began planting our outside garden. We put in a few rows of onions, carrots/radishes, beets, turnips, and some spinach. There is still much to put in. I would like to put in our peas and set out our first planting of cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli. We could also set out our tomatoes and peppers, but only with protection of some sort.

The weather this year is far warmer than normal. The local farmers are planting even though a frost would kill the corn, and the potential is definitely there. How ever on the other side of the coin as our neighbor said Sunday, 'I am wondering if we won't have an early fall'.

Gardens, well, the soil needs to be dry enough to till. No mud balls. It is worked up either with (in our case) a tiller, or dug with a spade until it is loose. Somewhere along the line, and I'm thinking it was Benjamin and his Uncle Jeff, made a 'row marker' for me of two electric fence posts with hooks welded on each one to run my twine through. There is approximately fifty foot of twine that connects our two posts. The length of the twine is an individual choice. Not all of our rows are that long either, sometimes we tie the excess twine up for shorter rows. It is important that the twine be pulled tight...Push the one row marker well into the prepared soil, pull the twine tight, push the other row marker into the ground firmly. Run your hoe along the twine digging a trench in a straight line. We dig a trench for onions, drop a plant every couple of inches, then cover them so that only the green top is showing, which means the root end goes down...smile.

Carrots are slow at germinating, and are teeny tiny little green feathers when they do come up. In a garden setting the weeds will definitely over take them and they will be lost. So, what does a gardener do? We plant our carrots and radishes in the same row at the same time using the radishes as a 'row marker'. Radishes are fast growers. They are generally up...and out with in three to four weeks. It takes carrots about 21 days to germinate...just right.

An interesting thing about beets? One seed may produce more than one beet. Turnips are good raw, or cooked (in an earlier post I shared a recipe for creamed turnips). Kohlrabi is an unusual vegetable that not everyone is familiar with. It is along the lines of a turnip, very crisp and sweet when harvested early. Home grown spinach is very tasty either cooked, or throw it into a salad along with the lettuce.

We also planted some cheap sweet corn. Sweet corn seed is very expensive. Just a few years ago farmers were often treated to 'free sweet corn seed' when they ordered their field corn, but not in these days. Sweet corn seed varies from around 16 dollars a pound to as much as almost 30 dollars per pound. No more free sweet corn seed...I don't know exactly where we got the two small packets of sweet corn, but it was probably given to us and may not grow. It is too early for sweet corn by the calendar. About ten days too early, but like all the farmers around us the temptation is there, and...

Well, as I said we planted just two rows of cheap sweet corn..."Where," I ask my husband as we are planting the corn, "is Jeremy when we need him?" He isn't sure what I'm talking about, so I continue.

"Remember the year Jenny sold baked goods at the farmer's market? That was the year we had all of that sweet corn..."

The memory began approximately fifteen years ago on an evening. My boys, Nathan and Jeremy are helping with the garden planting. I am making the rows, Jeremy is dropping the seed corn into the rows, and Nathan comes along covering them up and tamping them in. I have made more rows than I care to remember, and I'm thinking we surely must be getting close to done...finally I say, "Jeremy, are we about done yet?" (My back of course is killing me by now.)

Any one who knows Jeremy knows exactly how precise that boy is...and he has been dropping a kernel of corn just about 6-9 inches apart for the last 20 rows, and we still have about half of the bag left...

"Give me that bag... You make the rows, I'll plant the seed!" It's funny now, and we had the best harvest of sweet corn! We sold sweet corn, we gave it away, not to mention our own 100 quarts we froze...and it is funny now. Did I mention it is funny now?

Job 8:21 He will yet fill thy mouth with laughter, And thy lips with shouting.

Proverbs 17:22 A cheerful heart is a good medicine; But a broken spirit drieth up the bones.

Smile, like someone used to say, "Thanks for the memories..."