A Weekend at Home, A Day at the Farm

What do I know of man's destiny?
I could tell you more about radishes.
--Samuel Beckett

A wonderful, long weekend with family, friends, and, of course, gardening. It was great to start things off Friday with an appetizer of asparagus and Cherry Belle radishes from the garden (below). Unfortunately, the accompanying caprese was made from bland grocery store tomatoes, which motivated me more than ever to get the real tomatoes in the ground.


I planted about 10 heirloom tomato plants in one of my gardens and got a number of peppers and some eggplants in as well. The real work took place at the family garden on Monday though. There, we've had the seed in for sometime, but we've had very little rain. Time for irrigation. Here's a shot of my brother-in-law running the sprinkler lines. We're pumping the water from a nearby pond rather than a well, so the plants benefit from the warmer temperature and added nutrients. The stakes in the foreground are for the beets, beans, carrots and onions. The beets and beans are up, the onion sets are doing well. (By clicking to enlarge the photo, you can get a better view of the plants.)


While the others worked on the sprinkler system, I put down the soaker hoses and transplanted 20 tomatoes and 25 peppers. We have a heavy, semi-permeable landscape fabric below the tomatoes which will be covered with a straw mulch, but still have to get in the support for the plants. We spent quite a bit of time hauling the rocks we had removed from the garden back in to hold down the fabric until the stakes are in place.


Below is a view of the length of the garden with the sweet corn coming up in the foreground. We've broken the plot up into approximately 60-by-60 foot sections. Beyond the sweet corn are the tomatoes, peppers, carrots, onions, beans and beets, then another plot of sweet corn followed by squash, cucumbers and zucchini. Beyond that is one more sweet corn plot and a pumpkin patch. Not quite an acre, but definitely enough to keep us busy and, one can hope, well fed.