The Garden

Please permit me to share my garden with you. In several months, I hope to post a picture that you will find unrecognizable from this one.

In the far background, you can see my brother's trailer. Then there are box elders lining the drainage ditch; their leaves clipped as high as goats eat when they get out, and a large black willow behind the chicken house.

Between the garden and the chicken house is an area that I seeded with grass several years ago for my folks, when they felt they had become too old and too busy to garden its entirity. We covered a portion of it with sheep and goat manure from the barn last fall. Our 8 goslings of unknown breed, and the two ducks enjoy that area immensely. The goslings are mostly white with some gray tones. The Rouen drake and the brown Indian Runner hen hang with the goslings often, as if to parent them a little. Off to the left in that grassy area is what I had intended to be a trellis for some cutleaf blackberries that are still growing after 3 years of being transplanted there, but have never thrived.

The garden has green onions, mustard greens and red leaf lettuce to the right in a small area I turned over by shovel in early April. The larger tilled area that is growing in nicely with small weeds also has a barely visible row of kolarabi, then carrots, then 2 rows of beets, then brussel sprouts. A lot of the green you see is actually volunteer tomatoes from last year. I have since weeded most of them out, and it looks much prettier today.

Bruce tilled off to the left, a size about this big. Today I planted a row that is half Job's tears, and half turnips. He also weeded and turned the manure, and in it now is 5 rows of blue corn, surrounded on the 3 grassy sides with hubbard squash, watermelon and pumpkins that will hopefully grow out over the hay and assist in keeping the deer and goats out of the corn.

In the foreground is a rusty old chime that hangs on the porch. Some carpenter bees make a nest in one of the bells each year. Down below the chimes from the porch are some blackberries I have been propagating for several years, and lots of Japanese knotweed. The blackeberries were part of my Japanese knotweed eradication program; but alas, it was not as successful as I'd hoped. I am doomed to pull knotweed from around my porch, as I and my mother before have done for the past 30 years. Whats more, about half of the blackberries have a very thick rust on them this year. So I am going to cut them all out after harvesting them, pile manure on, and make it all back into a flower garden.