I guess it's been a week since my last post, a bit longer than usual. I've been busy with a lot of garden stuff and canning and I just haven't had the mental energy to write a post. Today, I had a dentist appointment in the afternoon, and after I got back from that, I decided to go up to the community garden and check on my plots. I also had 8 five gallon buckets of dirt in the back of my Explorer that needed to be dumped up there.
I've been doing some digging by the greenhouse at home to put in some gravel and pavers, and since the dirt is decent topsoil, I've been hauling it up to the community garden to dump onto a plot that I'm working on improving. The soil at the community garden is sandy and doesn't hold water very well, so I think the topsoil will help with that. I can't fit the wheelbarrow and the buckets of dirt all into the back of the Explorer, so I use my little trailer to haul the wheelbarrow.
I put the wheelbarrow against the back bumper and dump 2 buckets of dirt into it to haul into the garden.
8 buckets of dirt gives me 4 trips with the wheelbarrow. I could dump 3 buckets in at a time, but it's easier for me to handle the wheelbarrow with 2 buckets of dirt.
After I unloaded all the dirt in a pile, I spread it out a bit, and then covered it up with the black plastic sheet that I've been using to try to kill the grass in the plot where I planted the pumpkins.
Speaking of pumpkins, I decided to see if I could find any pumpkins on the plants while I was there. They're all hiding under the canopy of leaves. The following pictures are all separate pumpkins. I have a couple of pretty large ones, and more softball sized ones.
I think there's more small ones also. I started cutting back the vines where there's no pumpkins to try to get bigger pumpkin growth. It will be interesting to see how these turn out this fall. I forgot to take a picture of the overall patch.
My red potato plants are just about done growing now. There's 4 rows of red potatoes and 3 rows of Yukon Gold potatoes in this plot. The Yukons actually look worse than the reds.
The other potato plot is still growing pretty well. These are longer season white potatoes, and the Adirondack Blue potato plants.
The potato plants in the straw bales seem to be doing well also. I wasn't sure what to expect from them, this is my firs time growing in straw bales.
The borage plant that I planted next to the end of the straw bales has been growing well, and attracting the bumblebees.
The corn that my friend planted in the end plot is doing ok, but I think it's showing a lack of nitrogen in the soil of that plot. The corn plants on the end by the straw bales are about 6 feet tall, but the ones in the middle of the plot haven't done as well. There's ear on all the plants so they're fairly successful anyway. I'm going to have to see if I can get some old manure to put on that plot this fall after the harvest is done.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
