Sovereignty Farms

Organizing the workload

First of all, no one has been getting updates lately and I think I found and fixed the problem. Hope they start coming to you again. You can look in the history and see the ones you missed, if any.

OK, so I need to get more organized with my gardening. Let me review the beds I have now:

1. Vegetable Bed

2. Herb Bed

3. Yellow and Pink Bed

4. Woodland Garden

5. Forsythia Bed (this is the new one, best to call it this now since it is by the large Forsythia)

6. Fern and Iris Bed (near the driveway)

7. Misc Beds (like by the barn and around the tree)

8. House Beds (on each side of the walkway and on the side)

Some of these are high maintenance and others are low. Point is, I tend to ignore some of them until they just can't be ignored any longer and the chore lasts forever and feels like a chore and not like fun. So, I want to work on doing something in each one every day.I can combine the Fern and Iris bed with the Misc Beds. So that is 1 per day.

Today I picked lots of veggies for Pa. We also got some more pumpkins and a few watermelons. 1 large enough to bring in. I pulled up a lot of the cucumber (as much as I could). It was really invading the tomatoes and watermelon. And we already have so much. I have thrown away oodles and oodles of stuff. Tonight I need to blanch and freeze some beans since I think this was about the last big harvest we will see from those plants.

I need to move the impatients we bought - the New Guinea. There is not enough enough sun for them - no wonder that the iris weren't blooming either. I am moving them into the new Forsythia Bed. I finished putting the mulch on the bed. But I had to move around some of the plants. Turns out one half (the left) of the bed gets considerably more sun than the other. So I moved out of that part the hosta and hydrangea and put the daylilies there - again, that is just a holding place for the red daylilies until I build the beds in the front of the house. Maybe I can do those this fall. Anyway, I may also move the irises over in that sunny location of the bed.

The Gaura in the front bed really needs to be moved to that sunny part too. But I am thinking of waiting until it is cooler - when I plant pansies. They will be dormant and move better - but I may get impatient.

HOLY COW!!!

Last night I got the letter in the mail that I have been waiting for.......................

I made it into the Master Gardener's Program. Woo hooo.

Click here if you are interested in learning about this program.

Changing Attitudes

Last night I was anxious. We have a lot of vegetables in the kitchen that have not been 'processed' in any way and may even have gone bad. And in the garden there is tons more peppers, tomatoes, okra, squash and cucmber. And I feel anxious letting them potentially go bad on the vine, but otherwise they would go bad in the kitchen.

So Dan pointed out something to me. He said it is ok if we don't harvest everything, and some things go bad. This is our first year experimental garden. The world will keep turning if we don't harvest or preserve everything. And next year, we execute on lessons learned (like planting fewer plants and making them further apart). Whew! I know all that may seem obvious to you, the reader. But what an epiphany for me. What a load off my shoulders.

Now, this doesn't mean I am going to let the whole thing got to hell in a hand basket. BUT, I can if I want to. hehe. Sometimes, I feel like I have so much to do that it literally paralyzes me and I do none of it. This is why the pinestraw is not on the whole bed yet (the new one).

New Flower Bed

So this weekend I tilled a new flowerbed and planted about 10 hydrangeas in it. Not new ones, but I moved ones from the back to this bed since the sun is better here. I moved all the sickly ones, plus others - large ones. In there place I planted 3 plants - an acuba, a fatsia and a shade tolerant holly.

I also planted 13 hostas and 7 daylilies. This area is too shady for the daylilies to flurish, but they will hold here until I till the beds in the front of the house. I also planted about 8 other daylilies in another bed for holdover as well. I got newspaper and pinestraw on about 1/4 of the new bed before we had to leave for a musical. Some of the new plantings look very sad and need watering but I drank too much tonight to do it. I will do it in the morning.

In teh pink and yellow bed....the roses are blooming. The elephant ears are huge. The canna lilies are growing tall. In the herb bed, the dianthus that I cut back are reblooming which is nice.

I pulled a few of the other tomato plants again. They just need more air circulation. I was going to pull some others that look really bad but the tomatoes are huge and beautiful. So I left them. I pulled the rest of the carrots. And lots more beans which I need to freeze. I didn't finish harvesting.

We opened the watermelon this afternoon. As far as watermelons go, it was pretty ok.

We made homemade spagetti sauce based on Alton Brown's recipe. It is pretty good, but is better for things like pizza and lasagna - which we will make with it this week.

Also, we went to Cagle's Dairy this weekend - to the tour and the farmer's market. We got some blueberries and I made blueberry pie with them - yum!

I have to finish harvesting and putting down pinestraw.

Sizzlin' Summer

It didn't take as long as I thought it would to get the garden back into shape. I pulled lots of weeds that grew while we were on vacation. I harvested a few more carrots. The hot peppers are so large and there are so many of them - a few are now beginning to turn red on the vine.
Most all of the ripe tomatoes were - well - molded. It was disgusting. I imagine it is all the rain we have had. So I threw those all out and I pulled up 3 poor looking plants. They were planted so close together they were not getting good air circulation. I can already see an improvement there.
I got more beans. There were not as many as I expected so I was beginning to really think they were done producing, but today I noticed tons and tons of flowers on them, so I guess I'll have another crop. Today I cleaned them and put them in freezer bags enough for a 2 person serving. I hope they freeze well. I read in some places you should blanch them first, but in other places I read that it was not necessary and it affected the taste negatively. Because of that, I did not blanch the okra or the squash that I froze today, either. I did cut up the okra and put cornmeal on it for a few bags.
There is a lot more squash to come. And the cucumbers - they are huge. I try to get them when they are smaller but I just can't make it in time. We had 3 more ripe pumpkins, too. No evidence of cantalope yet. Maybe we will not get any. And only 1 watermelon, although there are a lot of watermelon flowers still.
I made 2 pumpkin pies with the pumkin - put it in a food processor. They are in the oven now so I will have to give an update about that later. I do not have high hopes though. I also made 12 jars of canned sweet pickles. They will be ready in about 7 weeks.
We tried the corn this week. It was horrible. Most of the ears were too old and icky and they are so small. There are a few others to get still but they don't look so super either.
We also used a can of homemade rotel for cheese dip today. It didn't taste like real rotel but it was really good.
I also cleaned up the herb bed and cut the irises into a fan shape. It looks nice I think. And I planted new daylilies. They were huge! And they came from ebay.

Here are some new pictures.