2013 Garden, Part 4- A New Use For Pantyhose

Garden- June 21

Our garden is really doing well!  We are still only harvesting yellow squash and zucchini, but other things are getting really close.
Our latest change is fertilizer.  We've had problems in the past with getting the right amount of fertilizer on the plants.  This year we are trying a new approach.  See, to water our garden, we are turning on the well pump and letting it fill the rain barrels.  Then the water slowly seeps out into the garden throughout the day.  We decided to fill pantyhose with fertilizer granules and put them in the rain barrels.  The fertilizer dissolves in the water and gets to all the plants through the hoses.  So much easier than worrying about getting too much or too little on each individual plant!  It only takes a couple of minutes every other day to fertilize the entire garden.

Here is a picture of our garden from this morning.  Compare it to the picture below from 2 weeks ago.  You can tell the potatoes (on the left) are done growing, but everything else has taken off!

Garden- June 21

Garden- June 5

We've had 2 really good rains in the last week.  The wind from these storms whipped our squash plants around quite a bit, but they seem ok.  We actually have some water in our pond too, so the frogs and toads have been pretty active.  I nearly stepped on this Woodhouse toad this morning.  We have to get used to watching our steps more closely!

Woodhouse Toad- do you see him?  He's about the size of my palm.

Our only problem right now is the grasshoppers.  They are getting pretty bad and snacking on a lot of our garden.  Luckily, most of our plants are big enough that they aren't struggling too much, but we'll have to wait and see if productivity is affected.  For now we're enjoying how well things are growing.