Garden news!

Here's the newest gardener at OAH! I highly recommend enlisting the help of a bunny rabbit for your gardening efforts...they make fast work of composting your veggie scraps and offering up some wonderful garden fertilizer in return. This little gem has been named "Snowball," she is a Dwarf Newfoundland (sp?), so she should remain small and will hopefully show well in the County Fair for my girls.

Here are the potatoes, cut and curing the night before planting!

These beds contain spinach, onions, lettuce, and peas! They're still a little rough...this is a garden in progress, people! On the right, you'll see the potato plot...cock full of seed potatoes planted, in part, by this little person:


Take a look at the newly tilled space...this will soon be built into beds like the ones above.

Here's another pick of the bunny...nestled in a bed of lamb's wool. She is just adorable!

Pot-A-to, Pot-ah-to...

We dug up our potatoes this morning because the tops were absolutely eaten ALIVE with potato bugs. Here's what the tops looked like:


Compare that with the photo I posted earlier this month:


If anyone has some organic solutions for potato bugs, I'm listening!

Anywho...here's the harvest this morning plus the remaining onions:


Anyone out there freezing potatoes? I'd love to hear your tips!

Gardening, Building Moats, and Atwoods...

The gardens are really coming along! This weekend, I cleaned out two of the raised beds and planted several varieties of peas (Sugar Snap and Wando) along with spinach. We tilled the newest garden bed in the backyard and were really surprised by the soil. Don't get me wrong, it is still Oklahoma clay, but it is not as bad as the West garden. We didn't pick up any compost because we decided to use partially composted mulch from our mulch pile to mix into the soil and break it up a bit. I also added two wheelbarrows full of compost from our compost pile.

Today, I formed two wide rows in the new garden and planted 138 seed potatoes, 60 Super Sweet Onions, 80 Red Onions, and a handful of Beet seeds. I formed a moat around the whole bed and in between the rows. This will keep any rain that falls on the garden in the garden...a must here in Oklahoma! I covered the center moat/walking space with loose hay. The hay will keep the trail from being muddy and will clearly show my girlies where to walk in the garden.

A note on the frugal nature of gardening...I purchased my seed potatoes, onions, and some other seeds at Atwoods. Seed packages were 8 cents each and I paid around 2 dollars for 140 onion sets. The potatoes were around 8 dollars. An 11 dollar expense will turn into a year's worth of potatoes and onions...and we're not even covering the additional seeds I picked up for 8 cents per packet!

As I was planting, though, I was thinking of what a blessing it is to work with the soil. I'll have to share the story of my paternal grandparents someday...I'm convinced that gardening and homesteading are in my blood.