Gardening Stops and Starts

I can’t decide if I take one step forward and two steps back, two steps forward and one step back, or if I’m just running in place. For everything that goes right in the garden, there is at least one thing that goes wrong.

Yet, I love it. I absolutely love being in the garden, tending to the plants, figuring out how to fix problems, and especially picking all the veggies!

Yesterday I picked our first cucumber. It was perfect.

Grace and I split it and ate it like we hadn’t eaten in weeks. There is nothing like the taste of freshly picked, home-grown vegetables.

Last year I harvested about 200 cucumbers from the A-frame which was far less than the 300+ I’d gotten the year before. I moved the A-frame to a new location this year in hopes of returning to the 300+ again, but at the moment it doesn’t appear I have too many female flowers on the vines.

I’ll keep checking and pollinate when the bees aren’t so we can get as many as possible. Last year, practically every cucumber went into jars of pickles. This year I’d like to have a few more to enjoy fresh.

Other than the cucumber, I haven’t harvested anything else recently. Rather I’ve been dealing with slugs in my fruit trees and splitting tomato plants. Check out these posts at Simply Grateful Gardener for more information: Tomato Plant Woes – Splitting Down the Middle and The Cherry Slug.

It’s raining cats and dogs outside right now, filling the rain barrels and watering the garden. Tomorrow I’ll harvest the rest of the first crop of peas, possibly the remaining first crop of beets, and maybe I’ll even find another cucumber. Oh, and yeah I do have some blight to deal with in the tomato garden…the bad with the good, and still I am — Simply Grateful.

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Finding Solutions to Gardening Problems

I read the books. I watch the shows on television. I listen to the professionals when they talk. I even follow the directions (or so I thought), and yet, the gardening problems continue. Thank goodness for the Internet and the myriad of information floating around the web.

Although my harvest yesterday was bountiful, there were issues with both the radishes and the carrots. The radishes were inedible and the carrots, well for two plantings of three 6-foot rows, I’d think you should get more than a handful of finger length carrots.

After much research and reading some humbling information (humbling for someone who thought they were doing everything right), I have once again been shown the way and will hopefully not make these same mistakes again.

Check out my posts at Simply Grateful Gardener for my solutions for The Incredible Inedible Radish and Why Aren’t My Carrots Growing?

I don’t know why it always surprises me when I screw up in the garden, it’s not like I don’t screw things up in every other aspect of the household, so why should the garden be any different. That’s okay, every time I screw up and then figure out where I went wrong, I grow, and for this I am — Simply Grateful.