Farmer Me

It rained!  it not only rained, it is raining! My plants are in shock! They're all sweating and nauseous and confused. I'm going to go out there tomorrow and find the place littered with PTSD pamphlets - which is fine, I can use them as  mulch, its important to think ahead.

I would like to use more than pamphlets to pump my garden. I see reference to using rye grass as a green fertilizer on gardens, you plant it, it magically beefs up the soil and then you just plow it under when you start the garden in the spring. This sounds good, but I'm not entirely sure I want grass feeling all at home in my garden. Grass is bad, I don't know how I feel about inviting it in and telling it to make it self at home. I need to re-read my Burpee catalog to read the small print.

Speaking of the garden, everyone is still in their place. I was going to remove at least one of the tomatoes but they all pulled themselves out of the fire by producing at least something, one is however producing a lot of blossom end rot and that does not make me want to let them live long and prosper - however, it makes me sad to pull out plants and I don't really want to. I feel like I owe them more than just pulling them out.

The peppers are still doing very well and they are in no danger of their season ending early. Just today I put up four peppers for the winter - little peppers but still better than no peppers. I was going to chop them but I decided on julienning instead. It probably isn't going to amount to more than a single meal but it will make me feel like I did something with my summer.

In addition to the peppers I have sauce tomatoes and two meals of stuffed peppers waiting for me. I want to make sauce with my tomatoes , I'm going to have to supplement them with store bought but I can still feel like I made the sauce with my garden. I didn't really out any of my vegetables up last year, I tried with some late broccoli but my brocs never really came out like they were supposed to and they are small and a little peaky looking and I only did it to be able to say I did. They haunt me now.

I would love to have a bigger garden and be able to really plant enough plants to get a real harvest and really have enough to freeze and use over the winter but unless my yard grows or the damn tree magically disappeared, which is not going to happen, most likely. What would be really be neat would be to take over the lot behind my house and use it, its larger, sunnier than my yard and still close enough to feasible provide irrigation to it. Anyone can plant some veggies in a lot but its really hard to keep them watered. There is a church group that every year plants a large plot in a lot down the street from me. They plow and plant and they get a lot of output for a while and  seem to work on it -  But it dies every year, because it isn't irrigated.

In my mind that;s a waste of energy and its unfair to the plants. If you aren't going to take care of the garden you shouldn't start it in the first place. If those people are so dedicated to gardening, they could plow up their neighbors yards for free, provide seeds and help out folks who really are going to tend their gardens.