Garden's In!

I always dread planting my vegetable garden, thinking it will take many hours to get everything in the ground. After the job's done, I always remark that the planting didn't take that long after all. I wish I would remember the second part from year to year so I could skip the first part.

Yesterday I planted 18 tomato plants, 6 green pepper plants, two hills of cucumbers, one hill of zucchini, and one hill of acorn squash. I also put in a row of radishes. I was mortified to realize I'd forgotten to buy beet seeds. We love beet greens, so I need to buy a package of seeds the next time I'm near a garden store. I think I'll get some Swiss chard seeds, too.

I'm not sure why I bother with green peppers. I haven't had any luck growing them since we moved to this house ten years ago. At the other house the green peppers flourished and I was giving  them away by the pailful. Here, if I get two peppers per plant, I'm pleased.

Ken drove the tomato stakes into the ground for me. I always get a kick out of his engineer side emerging for this job: He takes a measuring tape to the garden and measures the distance between every two stakes, to make sure they're evenly spaced. I mentioned yesterday that I was merely planting a garden, not entering it in a show, but he insisted the stakes need to look carefully placed. So they are.

Why so many tomato plants, you ask? Because I love to can tomatoes, and we enjoy them all winter long in chili sauce, Hunter stew, etc.

There's nothing tastier straight from the garden than a cucumber. My idea of a late-summer snack is a plate of freshly sliced cukes and tomatoes, sprinkled with salt and pepper.

Ken cracked open the base of the compost bin so I could shovel out some fresh compost for each tomato plant, green pepper plant, etc. It's always fun to see that the year's accumulation of kitchen peelings and egg shells really does convert to a nice, fine, rich compost for the garden.

After the planting was done, I mixed up a spray bottle of deer repellent: water, powdered milk, dish detergent, and a couple of raw eggs. The first time I made this, I ignorantly added the dish detergent to the mixture BEFORE putting it into the blender. What a mess. It took only once, though, and I learned my lesson. Now I blend the water, milk powder, and eggs, then add the dish detergent at the end. Hopefully this repellent will keep the deer out of my garden. So far, so good. We have plenty of deer in our area, and we watched two of them feeding in the woods just behind our house last week, so we know they're lurking.

Here's a photo of my first iris. I think I'll have a banner "crop" of them this year.