Garden 2015... and the Story of the Sunflower Murderer

Get your party hats on folks!  It's time for another rip roaring round of "What's in Your Garden?!"

*Wild cheers and applause*

If you don't care to look at picture after picture of soil and plants or are sensitive to stories concerning unnecessary murdering of an innocent sunflower, it's best to advert your page now. You've been warned.

So here's my garden:

And here's my garden on drugs.
Wait. Wrong PSA.

Our garden is quite large.  Look towards the top of the sober picture, a little off center to the left.  Hopefully you can make out a little white spot.  That would be Sarah Rose standing at the other end of the garden.  I am blessed with space.  Lots and lots of space.  So rather than try to scrunch everything into a little space, I take advantage of the area we have.  It's so much easier to weed during the growing season and reap during the harvest season!  Also, we (and by "we", I mean "I") grow a lot of viney things that need plenty of room to grow and produce right!  So.... I have the room so I give them the room.
And I like how it looks.  After all, looks are everything, right?

The first year we plotted this area out for the garden, we would have torrents of water coming from up the hill after every rain that would leave gullies through the garden in several places. I lost many plants and a lot of time and effort after each rainstorm. So Josh, the wonderful husband that he is, built a little terrace at the top of the garden to redirect the runoff.  We also divided the one long section of tilled ground into three separate plots by planting two grass strips.  This also helped stopped any additional run off that started on this side of the terrace.  The area that we now call the garden was once part of the field.  We spent many a frustrating hours (hours and hours and hours and hours) just trying to fight the soil that thought it was still part of the field.  Finally, a few years later, I think we have the soil conditioned to knowing it's a garden.  I think this is the most beautiful it's ever worked up and produced!  I owe much thanks to Josh for being patient with it and working with it year after year when I just wanted to give up!  He had a vision on my behalf and I'm so thankful he did!

From top to bottom, we have:

Grapevines, year three.  We didn't get any grapes the first year since the vines were establishing themselves.  Last year, we had two bunches of grapes.  The birds decided those two bunches would make a fine feast for themselves before I got a chance to gather them for us.  This year, there are LOTS of grapes!  Now I just have to create a bird deterrent. It's in the works.

The top section has potatoes, Jack-be-little Pumpkins and sweet corn.

The taters, mulched with straw.  I'm a complete newby to taters.  If I even make a few, I'll be happy.  I'm learning as I go.

The Baby Jacks.  This is a just for fun thing.

And the sweet corn.  I have hoed and hoed and hoed to keep the sweet corn clean.  And we have plans for an electric fence around it later in the season.  Those coons had better not touch it!  Or else!

The middle section is really the heart of the garden.  It has cucumbers, tomatoes, green beans, cabbage, green peppers, zucchini,  turnips, radish, onions and beets.  Most of the stuff I'll can or freeze comes from this section.

The cucumbers.
I can't wait to see these babies make some delicious cucumbers!

The green beans.  This is probably the prettiest crop of green beans we've ever grown!
A little fact about me: I hate picking green beans!  With a vengeance.  But it is worth it to not have to ever buy them from the store.  Hopefully, what we get from these beans will last us until the 2016 garden produces!  

And the little stuff in this section.  Some of the zucchini, peppers, turnip greens, and (hopefully) onions will be frozen.  All eight cabbage will probably be eaten fresh  My family LOVES any kind of cabbage, fresh or cooked.  The radishes are eaten fresh.  And we have just a handful of beets, which are new to us.  We'll see how they go over.  There was also supposed to be carrots in this section, but they never came up.  The seed was given to us and I think it was too old.  Bummer.

The bottom sections homes more tomatoes, giant pumpkins and giant sunflowers.

More tomatoes, to be canned into various tomato products.  I can't remember the last time I bought a canned tomato product!

Here are Josh's giant pumpkins.  Every year, Josh says "Let's plant giant pumpkins."  I say, "Why?"  He answers, "Because they're cool!"

And they are.  They usually get so big that we have to have the bucket of the tractor help move them!  These are mostly for fun, but I've done some research and discovered that (most of the time) giant pumpkin flesh is good processed for pies and breads.  SO, I foresee some freezing of the pumpkin this fall, too.

And here are my little projects.  Giant sunflowers!

Now a little story:  When I was in third grade, we planted sunflower seeds as a class project.  I loved my sunflower.  When the plant unit was over, we got to take the sunflowers home.  I planted mine by the back door.  I could take you this very day and show you where I put it in the ground.  Well, I might need a little help.  It was 1000 miles away and I was nine.  But once someone led me back to the old house, I absolutely could show you exactly where it was rooted! And it started growing marvelously at the care of my young green thumb.  And then one fateful day, my little brother... yes, my very own brother!..  not mentioning any names *coughAdamcough*...peed on it.  And killed it.  I was heartbroken.  I've always remembered my little sunflower that never was.

I grew sunflowers a couple times growing up since then, but they never grew to be the most beautiful, most extraordinary, world famous flower that my first sunflower, I knew, was destined to be but was torn apart from me by the urgent need to "go" and no time  (or, more accurately, lack of effort it took) to get to the bathroom. It's okay.  I've forgiven the unnamed *coughAdamcough* Sunflower Murderer, even though the crime was excused without so much as a trial.

Well, when I was first married and starting growing things at my new home, the only thing Josh said I couldn't grow was sunflowers.  The story goes that his mother planted sunflowers one year and they spread like mad into the fields.  Her pretty flowers became a nuisance weed in the fields surrounding them, still to this day.  (I don't hold by that theory because we have sunflowers popping up in places not even close to the original sunflower patch.  But anyhoo... you don't argue with a man and his beautiful flower, uh... I mean WEED control!)  Because of his disdain for sunflowers' ability to spread, I was banned forever (hear that, FOREVER) from planing the sunflowers I loved so much.

For the second time in my life, my heart was broken over a crushed sunflower dream.  I cried and cried.

No I didn't.

But I was disappointed.

And then, much to my pleasure, I ran across these beauties that I planted this year.  After some research and questioning of the Sunflower Murderer (oh the irony!) who has become quite knowledgeable in seeds germination, I discovered that these shouldn't re-germinate next year!  So even if the birds did scatter the seeds, the seeds won't grow!  Could it be?!  Could I have found the answer to all my sunflower dreams?!?

Per the information I found out about these babies, I was "granted permission" to go ahead and plant them!  WaHoo!!!  And the nice thing is, if I'm wrong and they DO produce next year, the field right next to the garden is a hay field.  So they rouge plants will be mowed with the hay before they get mature to any extent.  So I feel that I'm safe!  Now, if  I've got my crop rotation years wrong AND my sunflower information wrong, we could have 12-15 foot sunflowers growing in the bean field next year.  But we won't think about that...yet!

The sunflowers are claimed to grow 12 feet or taller.  Being the mastermind that I am, I planed them next to our septic area.  See where I'm going with this?  Mwa. ha.ha. 

My favorite view of garden is from the upstairs windows, which happens to be Sarah's room's windows.  Looking out, you can see the whole garden and, after it's tilled, is just beautiful.  Unfortunately, the only way I would ever be able to take a picture of the whole garden from that view would be to take the screen out, lean out the window and snap a shot.  Well, I'm not doing that.  So here's the partial view looking through the screen....

And the rest of the partial view, still looking through the screen.

Next to the top part of the garden, in a raised plot of its own, is our strawberry bed.  Three years ago, we started with 25 straggly plants that we planted at the beginning of  what turned out to be a drought year.  We weren't even sure they were going to survive.   Now they are thick enough they need to be thinned out.  Desperately!  Talk about bunny reproduction.  If you want some strawberry plants next spring to start your own bed, let me know!

Another little fact about me: I hate picking strawberries more than I hate picking green beans.  But it is SO worth it!

Well, there ya have it.  My garden for 2015!