Count Your Blessing Monday

Down on the Farm, Marci has started Count Your Blessings Monday. Please join the fun!

Visit her site for more information and to visit more bloggers sharing their blessings!



My blessing? A potato. A potato? Yes - a potato. Actually, it represents the food we have been gathering from our garden. I am so grateful the LORD has allowed us the space for a garden, the knowledge to garden, the weather to garden, and the desire to be self-sufficient. This potato was one of the first we harvested and now we have two baskets full in storage under the house. That night we had baked potatoes for dinner. It was the best baked potato I'd ever eaten!

Marci, thanks for starting this weekly tradition!

Fish and tomatoes???

"We remember the fish which we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic." Numbers 11:5
But what about tomatoes and fish?

After such an incredibly relaxing weekend, we come home to fish in our garden!! Fish? Yes, fish. Strung all through our tomatoes!

This trout line has become a gag gift in our neighborhood. If you read Petunia's Garden, you'll notice that she's posted about these little critters for several days in a row!! The joke started last Christmas when they were away for the evening. How do we welcome them home? We can "decorate" the tree outside their front door (see here)!! The lights were taken off their tree and fish went into hiding. Until now, that is!

Petunia's Gardener thinks the fish need to travel the neighborhood, but I'm not sure others would appreciate them as much as we have. Who knows? They may love them!!
(PS - There has been no scientific data which suggests illumination by fish is beneficial for growing tomatoes!)

Sown on the good soil

"And the one on whom seed was sown on the good soil, this is the man who hears the word and understands it; who indeed bears fruit, and brings forth, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty." Matthew 13:23

Please excuse my absence of late; however, we've not made much progress on the patio this week. But our garden is coming along quite nicely. Click here for a before shot.

The rhubarb adjusted to its new home right away. Once new buds were formed in the center, they took off like crazy! New shoots in every direction!! Rhubarb pie is right up there with gooseberry pie - love that tart, make-you-pucker sensation on my tongue!
Runners are good thing for straw- berries. You can see onions popping up all around. If you double click on the photo, you'll see little, tiny berries near the base of the plant. This year the crop may not amount to much, but next year we hope to have lots of sweet fruit!

Mustard.










Italian parsley.









Arugula.








Lettuce.

Potatoes, garlic, and elephant garlic. Those potatoes took off about as quickly as the rhubarb. From the looks of it, we're going to have a bumper crop!!(PS - The background is our no-grass, weed-infested yard. Since moving here one year ago, we've mowed three times!)

Here's the whole shoot 'n shebang! I'm standing over the rhubarb looking past the tomatoes & peppers toward the mustard at the far end. In between the tomatoes and peppers, we planted marigolds & nasturtium. They are finally starting to show themselves.



All in all, I think we have a pretty good garden going. Especially since gardening is not our number one priority right now.

Planting Our Garden

"Then God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you.'" Genesis 1:29
After we installed the drip irrigation, we added more dirt and leveled it to within 4" from the top, removing any large rocks we found. We ignored small rocks - too many to remove!

Next on the agenda was amending the soil. We started with one large bag of Miracle Grow every 8'. As you can see, Hubby just dumped it in one big pile. A rake works good for leveling.
Fertilizer and lime came next. Hubby measured out what he needed and just spread it by hand. Nothing too difficult about this process.

Now we can go shopping for plants, seeds, etc!! We found the best nursery and were very excited about our finds. Here's a list of the seeds we purchased: mustard, parsley, basil, coriander, chives, arugula, lettuce, peppers, onion, sweet corn, and fava beans.

We also decided to plant marigolds and nasturtium.

You may recognize the plants: shallots, two varieties of onions, strawberries, seed potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, and rhubarb. Yum, yum!

Now that this project is completed, what's next? Wait, didn't we build the raised bed to hold dirt from the patio area? Of course! Oh my. We still have more dirt to remove. Does that mean another raised bed? Hmmmmm, I wonder.