Saturday, July 16, 2011

Garden Woes

Garden-wise this year, not much has been happening, let alone on the scale on which we'd imagined it. It's a huge bummer, because a) we're used to having an abundance of organic, homegrown produce at this time of year for eating and canning, which isn't going to happen, and b) because we don't get to try again for another 9 months.

We were foiled on a couple of fronts, mainly, that this Spring and Summer were both slow to arrive and then failed to dazzle weather-wise. This is the second ho-hum summer in a row here, and it's bumming me out.

Our other failing was our soil. We saw it's richness and deep black color, and foolishly assumed that it would be adequately fertile, as it had not been gardened for nearly a decade. Wrong-o! We amended with goat poop, bunny poop and a worm casting/bat guano liquid fertilizer, but everything except the weeds seems to be growing in slow-mo.

This sorry state of affairs leaves me to wonder if there will be any way at all for Bill and I to carry on with our Farmer, Feed Thyself challenge. There's just nothing there to eat yet! The pumpkins look promising, and the lettuce is kicking, but most everything else is still in it's infancy. So our planned FFT start date of August 1st is looking quite unlikely. :(