It’s been a couple of months since our last garden update, and so we thought we’d show the latest from the garden!

Here is some of the first produce the Lord granted!

And here, we’ll show you around the gardens from early in July. In our 2014 wheat blog post, I mentioned that we had planted turnip seeds back last year, and that nothing had grown. Well, a couple of months ago or more, God granted somewhere around 7 1/2 inches of rain in a few day period; and lo and behold, a bunch of turnips sprouted! Here you can see them (again, early July) in Garden 2, along with the green beans on the right:

And more turnips in the raised beds. The ants started getting to those, so I have since pulled them and fed them to our pig (they were really small):

Again from early July, the zucchini:

The corn:

Tomatoes:

And in the hugelkultur bed:

The following from just yesterday. We’ve been eating the greens from our turnips in salads and sandwiches, and we hope to start to preserve them by lacto-fermentation, which would be our first attempt at that with turnips:

Also, I mentioned in the previous garden blog post that I thought I might try planting okra. I believe I planted them the next day, and none germinated. And so, I tried again, and here are a few that have started!

And here are the tomatoes:

And again, in the hugelkultur bed:

The corn:

And zucchini. We’re getting to the time with them where the inner leaves start to die and any further growth starts occurring farther from the root. We’ve had a lot of flowers, but not a lot of actual fruits, which to me is interesting (apparently other folks here have had some similar issues), but of course, we are thankful for what the Lord has granted:

And here’s another okra:

And here is a lot of the produce being lacto-preserved:

As always, we are so very grateful for the food the Lord is granting us through the gardens; the rains he has brought, with His direct watering, and allowing us to have water stored to water the gardens; and the mulch garden beds, which has allowed for a lot less watering and allowed me to water areas of the gardens without having to monitor the watering minute by minute.

— David

At least for me, it’s always nice to start coming out of Winter into Spring time, with the warmth and the anticipation of planting the gardens! Since the last time we planted a garden, given we took last year off for our land sabbath, we had done some expansions, mostly based on the idea of mulch-bed/forest gardening, in our original garden area, and then adding a new garden area, and my first attempt at an hugelkultur bed.

Also, last July, I added a layer of manure we got from the local cattle sale barn:

Given the very often dry and hot conditions, I have concluded that our mulch beds are going to need to work for gardening out here to work — watering in raised beds without a really good layer of mulch is just going to take too much water. And so, prayerfully, we started to plant in the mulch-bed gardens.

As for what to plant, I decided to stick with what has worked around here in the past: zucchini/squash, beans and tomatoes, and hopefully okra later when it gets warmer. I also learned you need to plant deeper, making sure to get to where there is soil, or the seeds won’t really germinate (no…really?? 🙂 ). Our garden 1 is also in the shade, so I thought that might help with some of the more sensitive plants, especially the tomatoes. I also decided to move some of the goat-area compost I had put in garden 2 for the Winter turnips over to garden 1 to try to make sure there was some decent soil available.

I wasn’t sure how this was going to work, but we were very thankful when little sprouts started to show up! I did plant some broccoli, but nothing germinated with them at all. These are about a month ago:

The zucchini (I thought I had bought squash seeds, but didn’t realize I hadn’t until I went to plant — so it’s all zucchini this year). The PVC pipes are just markers as to where I planted:

Just to see what would happen, given the hopes of much more moisture in the mulch-beds, I thought I’d throw a little corn in the ground to see what happened; and it started to come up:

And here are the tomatoes in the hugelkultur bed:

And the green beans in garden 2:

And then just a few days ago…

The zucchini. I had planted just a few in some dried chicken manure to see what would happen, but none of that came up:

From this morning…beautiful, in a couple of different ways:

Corn:

Tomatoes — these aren’t doing too well, as I don’t think what I planted in was good enough soil — I think it’s still composting, and that I’ve found in the past doesn’t work either:

The Bunkers graciously gave us some tomato plants, and I thought I’d put a couple in the manured area; and these actually seem to be starting to do well:

And the beans:

One nice thing about the mulch/forest-bed gardens is that I haven’t had to water nearly as often so far as I would have in our normal beds, which has helped, given the low rainfall from this Spring time.

We are very thankful to the Lord for granting us the forest/mulch-bed gardening idea, and for Him allowing it to apparently work! We’re thankful for the water He has granted, and we pray for His continued provisions, both spiritual and temporal, in accordance with His will.

— David