Gardening is tricky stuff no matter where you live if you depend on mother nature for your moisture and heat. Gardening also takes constant work. You cannot plant and just leave it. I had one of those the summer that I got married in 1973. Between traveling up and down the up coast to get married, weeding got pushed down the list. By the time my bride and I got home in August which is peak harvest month in Nova Scotia, I had to run a lawn mower between the rows of the garden at our Saint Croix Cove home before I worked them with the tiller. It was still a great garden (see these pictures) but it was a lesson that I never forgot. It is better to do a little gardening each day instead of depending on getting to it someday.
As you can see from the post picture at the top taken on May 22, 2016, our little round bed has changed a lot in the nearly two months since I first wrote about it. My intentions were good and I hoped to write a post in April but trying to finish up my year as treasurer of our HOA nearly swamped me. This picture of the Romaine lettuce in the bed was taken on April 9. The lettuce started small but grew quickly. We enjoyed a bounty of lettuce totaling thirty-one heads when you include our buttercrunch bed. We did give away nearly one half to friends. We have been amply rewarded for our generosity. We got red leaf and lettuce and cabbage collards back in return.
The picture at the top of the post shows our Umberto tomato bed after this weekend's welcome rain. After they were planted, they were pruned twice, weeded and given liquid fertilizer three times. As the lettuce matured, it was cut and the lettuce roots were chopped a little and put in our compost bins. Other than being watered a couple of times and having cages added for support, that is all that we needed to do to our tomatoes to get them ready for this week's rain and next week's heat. Our tomatoes are stretched out over four additional beds so it does take some work.
We now have a pepper in the ground, a cantaloupe already blooming, tiny beans filling out quickly, and more snow peas than we can eat. So far this has been a good gardening season. We just harvested the last of our spinach this week and will be eating off what my wife cut for another week. We have lots of small and medium sized green tomatoes so we are anxiously awaiting the first ripe tomatoes.
There still are challenges. We could get too much rain or it could get too hot too fast. Right now if we could get a couple of weeks of serious sunshine and warmth, then we will likely have some ripe tomatoes at a time close to when we used to put our tomato plants in the ground on our farm in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. In the next week, I will plant some additional tomato seeds. I fell behind on that also, but a handful of new plants to put in the ground around the first of August will insure that we have some late season tomatoes. Last year we had tomatoes well into the new year.
