Weekly Spring Gardening Chores

Water Pump Setup

Nearly every weekend we head out to Die Gruene Weide to tend to Herbie, Inge's Donkey, and to tend to the orchard and garden. Because we don't have water available out there yet (oh, for some well drilling hands!) we bring water for the garden with plastic drums. Today we brought three drums totaling 180 gallons. In previous years we siphoned the water into two garden cans, each about 2.5 gallons, and hand watered everything. Talk about a lot of work! This year I decided to buy a battery operated pump and with this purchase, our watering chores became much more bearable! 

Orchard after mowing (blue tarp covers well drilling tool)

After watering the orchard, I mowed it and then snapped this photo to show the orchard at its groomed finest. We planted all six peach trees and one Mexican plum tree three years ago as sprig shoots so we still have a year or two to wait for production. Further back we bought two larger plum trees, and two larger apple trees. We planted the apples this year and both trees already fruited. I snipped most off to let the tree concentrate on root, not fruit production, but I left about three to five apples on each tree. Inge and I are curious to see how they come out!

Onions and Carrots

I've written about how good the onions look so I decided to take photos of each of the garden inhabitants, starting with the onions and carrots. The photo captions describe the rest.

Black-eyed Peas (4 rows)

Foreground Tomatoes and Jalapeno Peppers, Watermelon background

Front row - salad cucumbers, next pickling cucumbers, rest, Greenbeans

 Finally, below stands the potato straw bale experiment. I planted half the potatoes (two varietals) on newspaper like the video I saw and half the potatoes on the ground. (Mostly because I ran out of newspaper...) The potatoes placed on bare ground sprouted, but only a handful of one varietal sprouted from the newspaper plantings. Next time I try this I plan to use the broadfork to bust the sod, plant the potatoes on top of the busted sod, then cover with the straw. The bare-ground potatoes look pretty healthy.

Potatoes in Straw - not coming up well. Back by fence, Muscatel grape vines.