Our Summer Garden

 We planted a garden this year, a very large garden.  It was our first experience with gardening, so we anticipated that it would be a learning experience more than anything.  And yes, we were right.  We learned a lot!  First of all, we knew we’d have deer since we live right near the woods and see deer all the time.  So our first project was putting up a 4 foot fence of chicken wire.  I did this all by myself, thank you very much!  Nate took care of the tilling with his new power push tiller.  Then, the kids and I got to work planting seeds!  We planted sweet corn, lettuce, spinach, green onions, cantalopes, watermelon, pumpkins, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, and strawberries.   After we planted, we had a very long and hot heatwave with no rain.  The heat scorched some of our seedlings and unfortunately our spinach, and root plants like potatoes and carrots, never came up.  I think our dirt is still clay-like as well which may have played into the problem with the root plants.  So we started a compost and will work that into our dirt for next summer so our dirt is finer and more workable. 

 The corn came up thriving, which was so exciting for the kids to see.  Every day we’d go out and it would be taller…eventually taller than them and they just couldn’t believe it.  And our green beans too were thriving.  BUT, we had thieves.  We found hoof prints in our dirt, our corn had been broken and trampled on, and the tops of our green been plants had obviously been chomped off.  We couldn’t deny that deer had actually been walking around inside our fence!  So they could hop over 4 feet!?  Wow, we didn’t see that one coming!  Nate’s solution?  An alarm system.  He placed a motion detector on a tall pole in the middle of the garden facing the “tempting plants.” 

 It would catch 180 degrees of any movement for quite a distance.  It started to go off almost every morning around 4 or 5 am when the deer were out.  Sure enough, deer were in our garden.  The first couple times Nate ran out there with a shovel or tool and chased them away in the dark in his jammies.  It was quite a funny sight.  Pretty soon, they slowed down coming and the sound of the siren often scared them away too.  Problem solved!!!  The corn was demolished, but the green beans grew back, thankfully. 

Our tomato plants have been producing more than enough tomatoes.  I have been skinning them, seeding them, and dicing them and freezing them.  I use lots of diced tomatoes in recipes, and since I don’t have a canner, freezing them in the same amount as a can works well.  We also have been snapping green beans and freezing them.  We got one yummy salad out of our lettuce, but our lettuce didn’t thrive through the heat.  Our strawberries are more delicious and flavorful than any strawberries I have ever tasted.  They make the store bought kind taste like paper, flavorless.  

Our next problem came to the pumpkins.  We were introduced to squash bugs.  They are evil things!  They slowly start munching on the leaves of pumpkin vines and lay eggs on the green leaves.  After a while we started to notice that the pumpkin vine leaves were turning brown and wilting.  Turning them over we realize there are hundereds of these tiny squash bugs all over the leaves and vines, destroying them.  Every day more and more of the vine leaves were wilting.  One day we tried to catch as many squash bugs as we could with gloves, scooping them into a big bucket.  Cooper went around squishing and destroying all the little red eggs he could find.  And Jaxton caught a few squash bugs but was too grossed out to keep catching them.  It was an impossible feat to conquer them at this point.  Slowly, all of our pumpkin vines died off.  We saved 1 beautiful pumpkin that would have grown quite large if allowed to do so, but we cut it off the vine before it could die.  It is a good 10 inches tall and maybe 7 inches diameter.  Perfect to carve.  We picked it green and it slowly ripened on our counter and the boys have been asking to carve it!  That will be fun!  Next year we will spray our pumpkin vines with some kind of pest control since we won’t be eating the pumpkins, just carving them.  After the pumpkins were gone, the squash bugs moved on to their second favorite, the cantelopes.  And thirdly, the watermelons.  We may have a few cantelopes and watermelons survive, since there were tons of them out there, but unfortunately, those bugs are taking over our vine plants.  Now we know for next year.  

 We were going out to pull weeds in our garden every afternoon, however, with the heat it was nearly impossible to get the boys to work through their sweat and too tiresome for me.  So we decided to change things up a bit and work before breakfast, just like they did in the old fashioned days.  I told the boys that long ago, kids had to get up super early and go milk cows and take care of the animals.  Well, we would do the same, we’d get up and pull weeds before breakfast.  So that is what we did for the majority of the summertime and in fact, the boys loved it.  They would stay outside longer than needed, play in the dirt, destroy weeds, and examine bugs and plants of all kinds.  It definitely was refreshing to be outside and working hard early in the morning air.  It got the kids working and being involved in the garden and was a great learning experience for them to see things grow from seeds!