Some of you will probably be starting on this years gardens! ---We had 5 inches of wet nasty snow here yesterday! I want to start a few plants in the hotbed by the south side of the house. I have grown a lot of plants in it over the years from seed.
Our garden this year won't be the 5 acre thingy! --Seriously looking over this little one by the house as being about my limit for this year. -- Have 2 small patches here south of the house in the yard that I always have green beans, squash, popcorn in them, ( no popcorn this year) wanted some real short season sweet corn for one small patch, then the rr stuff on west side of the big garden.
The rr stuff gets planted, wait til everything gets 8 to 10 inches tall, then hit it one time half dose of spray, then wait for harvest, no hoe or cultivation on this kind. Neighbor gets the seed and I plant it, he gets his fill of good sweetcorn,---everybody is fat and happy with it! LOL!
What are your garden plans for this year???

Turned mine over beginning of the week... it was a real nice day. Want to make it bigger this year.. Hope to get some squash this year. Last year was a bust on that.

None of our vine crops did any good last year. --- Don't know what happened! Going to try the summer squash again this year.
Virginia wants to freeze dry a lot of them----we did a test 2 years ago and they come out good, so wanted to do a bunch last year,--which didn't happen!

We have all of the seeds in hand for or garden and now waiting on the mud to go away so we can start planting early stuff. Missed the 17'th for onion planting so probably won't have good ones because of late planting. Potatoes here are usually around the hundredth day or so. later than that the bugs take them before they clear the ground, so we will see.
I am told that now people are hording garden seeds from stores!-- WTF!! ---- I hope they are smart enough to not eat the seeds! Todays people make me sick ! ---- Wish they would learn some redneck skills that would really help them survive IF it comes down to that!

Finally got the onion plants in yesterday. Ground was still kinda wet but I planted them anyway. Onion plants here should have been planted Mar. 15 to get good bulbs, ---we shall see what they do!
Later I will start seeds in the hotbed ---still a bit early for that right now.

20200331_144553 by sonny reese, on Flickr

Sposed to be a pic of onion row.

did you use the garden creeper to plant with Sonny? Last I remember you were working on a laydown planter machine

I now have 2 creepers that I can lay down, but the surgery kinda has me not laying right now. Did manage to get the onions planted by bending over but not gonna work for weeding so still gotta keep trying to lay on a creeper! ----time will tell as to if I can lay or not!

Yesterday we got the potatoes planted, bout a week early but close enough! --it did rain last night so no planting today.

TOO wet here.. Thinking about trying potatoes in a cut in half 55 Gal drum. saw it on the net...

Container gardens work in most areas. I used the things called "earth-box" for a couple years, still have 10 of them and they do work fairly well. ---the worst thing about them is keeping water to them in the really hot dry summer. ---we grew cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli , melons, cucumbers and green beans in ours just to see if they would work and they did!

from the looks of it, 'social distancing' is no problem for you Sonny..thats gonna be a whole lot of onions

20200331_144553 by sonny reese, on Flickr

Working on making the garden a little bigger. Added 6' to it. going to replace the 3' 6x6 pieces with two 12' lengths. We'll use these 3' sections to make a couple boxes for something.


Bent up one of the forks for my fork lift pulling up the border. that rebar held on pretty good.



I got the fork lift stuck and had to get it out with the backhoe.. Wife posted that one up on FB.

Once put in the ground, some of the iron is hard to get out. ----good thing for backup equipment!
Gardens are good no matter what size they are! ---- Any extra space you can expand to will be great!
I have only 1 row 225 feet long of onions this year, normally have 7 rows. More spuds this year than last, trying to keep acres down, BUT not sure how successful that gonna be! lol! Planting is easy, weeding an cultivating is the hard part.
Later on the sweet corn, green beans, and other stuff will go in. Our last frost date is between Apr. 23 to early May, so gotta wait a bit yet on some of the stuff. Soil temps are still cold. ground getting dry and hard here already, so might have to start right off hauling water to the garden this year. Neighbor is filling his 10,000 gallon tanker and will let me get water again this year.

Virginia wants to can several quarts of green beans this year so will plant them here close to the house in the window garden. Going to try summer squash again this year too. Want to freeze-dry a bunch of them, also some eggplant. Will plant a package of cucumbers just for the heck of it, usually can give them away if we have too many.

We plant the beans and peas in the cinderblocks around the edge.. works great. we froze a bunch of beans last year, just killed the last bag Sunday.
It's getting pretty now..

Lookin good! ---- amazing what you can do in smaller spaces!

What do you recommend I add to this stuff to help break up the Dang clay? I can't plant in this mess.

I use all of the horse manure I can get here, BUT that might not work for you! ---Compost is great, but takes a lot of it. Big-R stores here sell bags of composted cow manure, ( de- scented) and it works good for mixing into the soil.
If you can get some good topsoil, that would help too. When it dries out , till it several times as deep as you can go and let it sit a few days if you can then till again.---some of that stuff will rot down, but for the clay problem---really need to add good soil to the top few inches of it.

Kathy always dumps the grass clippings from the bagger in. Push mower is down so I've been using the rider which just has a mulching plug. She turned it over by hand and snagged up a coupe bags of clippings from curbside down the road. Been getting rain every other day for a while and no more puddles, so she's going to go get some plants this weekend.

WATER GARDEN IS STARTING TO BLOOM

Mr. Bull Frog sings to us in the morning.. Already knew it was COLD this morning because he was quiet. This pic is from yesterday.

Grass clippings are great,--it does take tons of them, but they do the job, leaves are good too if you can get them.

I put all that stuff in the garden. just had that NEW section we turned over this spring to make the garden bigger that need some immediate love.

New areas take a while to mellow out and if you keep adding stuff it will be fine!
Our potatoes froze off this year,--not sure if they will come back or not. Been colder than normal here this year so nothing is growing real good yet. Might be lean garden year here!
Have some cabbage plants just coming up in the hotbed and no tomato plants yet --- trying to start a few plants of my own. Cant buy the big varieties anymore and I hate than micro kind! ---I like 2 pound tomatoes and 25 pound cabbage heads! lol! --- I can get seeds but not plants so I have to grow my own!

trying to get basil in but its too cold here too at times, lost a lot of maters already damn frosted em

Got the gardens planted last weekend. it was nice N hot here. been cold & rainy ever since. Actually a good start on putting plants in the ground. Beans & Peas are starting to pop up all ready.

Gardens in the CITY setting..


Tomatoes & peppers in the main garden. Peas and beans are planted in the cinder block boarder and along the fence at the end of the garden.


Summer squash & Zucchini are in this one..


cucumbers are in this one down the side of my shop. They grow up the pallets. need to replace these pallets, they're shot.

WOW!!---That's makin the best use of small spaces!! ---looks great!
Still rained out here and major freeze damage this year. Grape bunches froze off, strawberry flowers turned black in the center and never matured into fruit.-- a few later flowers are starting to turn green, so maybe a 1/4 crop this year. Potatoes never came back but the ones underground still came up so maybe 1/2 of a stand so might get a few spuds from them. onions never even turned a bit black as they can take a LOT of freezing and come up swinging. Fruit trees are kinda bare---flowers fell off most of them so no fruit this year. That makes 2 years in a row of no peaches.
Do have a few plants coming up in the hotbed, so maybe we will have a few tomatoes, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli plants to set out. In the other bed we have a few sweet potatoes laid out to sprout new plants and there are a few showing right now.
Long wait for plants to get big enough to transplant but plant prices in town this year are nuts! ---- $3.00 for 1 tomato plant???---not this kid! lol! --- Lookin like a lean garden year this time, but we still have stuff in the basement to help carry over for another year and we should have a bit of fresh stuff to add to the stock. Time will tell.

I planted onion sets last year, and the ones I pulled had hardly grown at all. We had a mild winter and they came through it just fine, were green most of the winter. Actually look happy now, so we might actually get some decent onions out of them yet...if the weeds don't choke them out.

lost a couple of tomato plants to rot all ready. New section of the garden needs more love to break up the clay better. Need to put each plant in some good potting soil.

Pulled out the surviving plants, tilled the mess up again worked in some peat moss and compost to help bust up the dang clay


used the mixer to stir up our own blend of potting soil and replanted the plants. Still need to get replacements for the ones that diodn't survive.
these were the survivors.

rest of the stuff looks good.
Squash BLOCK BEANS haha (green beans in blocks)
BLOCK PEAS. CUCUMBERS.

I use a lot of compost, mostly made from horse manure and it works good at getting the ground loose for a long time plus the fertilizer in it.
A few pix of some of the tatoes, the first strawberry, the onion row, and a couple of the big gardens tilled.

Heavy rain & thunder storms over night. looks like my efforts paid off... NO puddles and the plants look good.

Strawberries are just about done now here.

looking good... Spread the grass clippings around the plants. Holds the moisture in keeps the weeds from growing and is compost at the same time. every thing is growing good. Have blossoms on about 20% of the stuff. Radishes are breaking through. no sign of the carrots yet.

Did get total of 9 quarts of strawberries from the patch after the flowers froze.

wasn't a good year for strawberries

Picked a bowl of green beans, Got one summer squash (small one) peas look sick need rain, tomatoes are starting to grow good Peppers are creeping along. should have some radishes here soon and it looks like the cukes are going to be plenty this year .

Might have got an inch of rain total during the week. ---dry now again and will have to carry water again. Wind knocked the potatoes, tomatoes, and sweetcorn down, spent yesterday trying to lean it back up and hoe dirt up around it to hold it. The first planting is tasseling and over waist high.
Tomatoes have green ones set and the wind did a lot of damage to the plants for the second time this week.
summer squash plants are kinda beat but setting some , so hopefully we will have a few.

checkin for potatoes under some of the plants and looks like there might be a few.

Been trying to freeze-dry summer squash and onions for the last couple weeks.
first pic is the freeze-dryer.
The squash and onions turn out nice and dry and light.
The squash plants are 4 to 5 feet tall and producing good so far. last year we had crop failure on squash--this year ----well --FLOODED with them! lol! ---I'm not complaining since every year has different production. We try to put up 3 to 5 year supply of produce when we have it to tide us over during the lean years.

NICE.
were getting squash almost daily beans are done peas never did produce tomatoes are just starting to ripen and just started getting cucumbers. still no peppers either. been a wacked season again

About half of the potatoes have been dug,--waiting on the rest to finish maturing. white squash just starting, cucumbers have been doing good ---- sis has been taking them. Kinda wanted to freeze-dry a few white squash. Looks like the sphagetti squash are setting a bunch. -- a friend takes them--I dont really care for them.
Been finding some weird shaped veggies this year---also a lot of smut in the sweetcorn--unusual for us here.
First couple cabbage heads broke before I got them--dont hurt a thing since they are cut up anyway and bagged and frozen in the freezer for later use. We love fried cabbage.

Too much heat and too much water then too much heat again our garden suffered. plants look great but didn't produce . I think we've gotten two cucumbers plants look great lots of blossoms but nothing's pollinating.

pulled the squash plants today... root rot toooooooo much rain

Been a ruff year this time----weather was biggest factor but we still are getting a little production from our stuff. Still carrying water to some of the plants. --- Not sure I can help the sweet potatoes so they are kinda on their own. Trying to coax some eggplants to give us a batch for the freeze-dryer.
Sweet corn second planting outdid itself with a lot of good quality ears and a lot of them so we started freeze-drying some of it.

a couple pix of the batch we just took out. 9 quart containers this round. ----- lotta corn. This will keep for a long time.
We did can some in pint jars also. We will use the jars first.

Been trying to freeze-dry a lot of corn and did can some in jars as well as put some in the freezer.
We did a few jars of kraut with these new tops, and gotta say they do work! We like kraut mild, so at 2 weeks we checked and it was just right.
The red shell beans are done, had 42 quarts in jars and a half dozen or so bags in the freezer. Did want to can a few quarts of tomatoes, ---raining today----AGAIN so dont know how the tomatoes are gonna do in the garden---might have to call it a year! ---- also going to be ruff getting sweet potatoes dug this year from the looks of the weather.

started digging sweet potatoes by hand---gonna be ruff job! ground is so wet it sticks to everything making it slow going. There are some decent spuds out there,----just hard to dig.

where's that garden creeper you were building Sonny?

creeper dont work for diggin potatoes! lol! ---- I did finally have to give in after the first row and use the skid loader, ---kinda messy with it but gotta do something before the frost hits.

Our garden was a bust this year.... got a little bit of every thing but not much.

Made 6 half pint jars of horseradish from one big plant. good stuff too!
gardens are subsoiled 3' deep and plowed 16" deep--- got the old compost turned under real good ---- onion plants have been ordered --week of March 23 delivery date for us here. Hurry up spring!!!!! LOL!!!