What We’re Doing in the Garden

Today was a gorgeous day and Eugene, Oregon finally got a break from the rain. The soil was a bit more wet than I would have liked but we went ahead and turned over the compost that is creating our newest garden bed and the soil under it. It still needs a little more working and settling so we covered it with tarps since more rain is on the way. In retrospect, we would have been smart to have covered the area much earlier in the season and we would have seen the organic matter compost much more quickly with controlled moisture.

While we were working on this garden bed project, a great friend and helper stopped by the house and took all three of our children to the park! How amazing is that?? Sammy and I worked head-to-head moving down the 4×20 foot bed as we relished over the awesome earthworms and black dirt that we were going to be gardening in. The turning of this bed went much faster than we had anticipated. Renting a rototiller would not have been money well spent plus we would have killed so many great worms. (Some people actually try to grow worms, you know…)

Amazingly enough the sun continued to shine on us and we moved on to the blackberry eradication project. I had bought Sammy some leather gloves with the hopes that the project might be a little less painful. They did prove to help because he was able to grip the vines but finally he realized the usefulness of a metal garden rake and started using it to his advantage. We still have some digging of roots to do and then we will be moving as much leaf compost into the area as possible. I am so excited because this is all happening much sooner than I expected.

At the advice of a good friend and fellow gardener, I reluctantly plucked the blossoms from my newly planted 1 gallon size blueberry plants. Doing this is suppose help the plant get larger during the growing season rather than working on producing a handful of berries. I tossed the blueberry blossoms at the chicks to eat because I thought they must be packed with all kinds of energy and nutrients….probably should have ate them myself. The raspberries that were planted last year have some blossoms on them also but I left those on since they are such vigorous growers but I did have some weeds to pull from their growing area.

In the vegetable garden I planted some more radish and lettuce seeds since it has been about 2 weeks since I planted the last set. We now have 4 different varieties of lettuce growing, so long as the buttercrunch and romaine sprout. Speaking of sprouting seeds, we have some sunflowers that are peeking up out of the ground. We even had a couple of frosts over the last 4 or 5 days so I was a bit surprised to see them. I meant to put a little bit of leaf cover over them today but forgot to. If these puppies make it we are going to have some great looking sunflowers!  Looking forward to sharing some photos as things keep moving along.