Garden Progress Photos

Garden, Planted and Mulched with Straw

Over the last few weeks we've worked to build a hopefully productive garden. It's larger than any we've grown before on Die Gruene Weide we put in a lot of work to fight against the persistent droughts we've suffered the last few years. The photo above shows the bulk of the garden which consists of (from the far end moving towards the camera, onions (looking luscious), carrots, black-eyed peas, tomatoes and watermelons (planted today), bush green beans, bush pickling cucumbers, and vine salad cucumbers, and the potato straw bale experiment. Shown in the below photo is the asparagus patch with 15 of the 16 roots planted successfully sprouted.

Asparagus Planted and Mulched with Straw

Three things we've done to fight the drought were to mulch the entire garden with wheat straw. All the yellow shown above and below shows the wheat straw surrounding all the plants.  This helps prevent soil evaporation. The second thing we've done this year is to plant all the row crops such that we can use flood irrigation between the rows. And finally we bought a battery powered Wayne PC1 12-Volt Water Pump which makes watering the garden and orchard far easier than toting water cans which we have done for the last three years. I also purchased two 55 gallon food grade plastic barrels to bring our water capacity up to 205 gallons until we get the water well finished. We only brought 180 gallons today as it had rained recently and we knew we didn't need the full capacity to water the garden.

Last we succeeded the most with the harvest of the black-eyed peas. We ate two very good meals and could have obtained one more but we didn't get it out soon enough. The squash also gave good results but Inge isn't a fan of squash and we had never grown it before with the result that we often harvested it after it had become too hard. So we didn't plant squash. This year I can already see the most beautiful onion plants I've seen in my life and we'll have to wait and see if the rest of the garden produces too.