A Very Busy Summer

The weather has been very agreeable here in Wisconsin. We are entering the real summer with temperatures in the 80's and 90's during the day, 60's at night. My husband and I have taken on a huge project. We created a 35' x 15' garden on my father's land. He hasn't had a garden in many years and we thought it would be a nice addition to our smaller home garden and we could come by and visit every day.

So far it has been, how do I put it, challenging. We spent a few days planting and organizing our layout. In previous years, we only had our small home garden and it was easy to maintain. On the other hand, I need to drive about 10 minutes away and devote more energy to the larger garden. Cleaning up the land, adding both soil and manure, and picking all the weeds has led to sore and tired muscles. I try my best to put on my "Girl Power" face and remind myself that this work will be all worth it in the end. This is a lot easier said than done.

The long and the short of it.

                                              

                                                          

My husband, being the techie he is, installed a water system that measured the moisture of the ground and would send a signal to the timer that hooked up to the house spigot. This sounded pretty cool, but in application it fell short. We couldn't find the "sweet spot" we needed for adequate water distribution. 

After a week of fiddling around we saw our tomatoes shrivel and almost die. I was mostly concerned with the blight that attacked us in the Midwest last year. It took out huge amounts of crops and left gardens impotent and dead. The yellowing and eventual browning of leaves were present on these plants. Talking with some of the master gardeners of the UW-Extention they advised an application of a copper supplement. This is easy to find at many garden shops and hardware stores. To find out more about blight, check out UW-Extention's page here 

I proceeded to apply the copper solution to all of the tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, and peppers. Additionally we created a ground irrigation watering system (fancy speak for getting a bunch of hoses and lining them up so the holes in the hoses sat at the base of the plants). I was actually worried that my father's land was cursed.

Grumpy man=Grumpy land

                                                    

Now after a week's worth of work, including hours of weed pulling, I think we have made some progress. The tomatoes are perking back up. The peppers are starting to produce better. The zucchini and cucumbers are crawling out and seem to be well. Whew! So, needless to say, it has been a busy month.

My son finished up his classes in June and brought home one of his projects from his Plant and Soil Science class. A cute pumpkin plant in which he needs to take care of in the summer and report back in the fall. When the pumpkin plant arrived at the house it only had 3 leaves and fit into a large hanging pot. Now it is approximately 15 feet and has 4 separate runner sections. It was migrated from our little backyard garden to the neighbors land, and now has double-backed and it is climbing the protective fencing I had in place to deter the deer. I believe we might have our first pumpkin this fall. If not, we will have a mess of vegetation to clean out later.

Ooooh, it's having a baby!

Since this post has gotten a bit long I will try to wrap it up in a condensed TL;DR version.

1. Expanding a garden can be quite exhausting

2. Creating a new garden is like warfare against pests, infection, and hamstrings.

3. If your kid comes home with a pumpkin plant, you might want to find a whole field just for one plant.

4. I should blog things more often so the posts don't become little novellas. 

Talk to ya soon!

~Selina