Gardening Notes

We pull our rows up in ridges so the plantings are raised. Not a raised bed, but raised rows. Here's a picture of this year's garden so far, with a picturesque backdrop of trees.

We have an assortment of tomatoes, peppers, a row each of Georgia sweet and Texas 1015 (sweet) onions, some cukes, a watermelon, a cantaloupe, some okra, green beans, beets and carrots in the raised rows in addition to the corn circles.

We also have some garlic (not shown in this photo). I'll relate The Legend of The Garlic (with picture!) in a separate post in the near future.

By the way, in case you're interested, the trees shown include Black Walnut, Pecan, Hackberry, Elm, Honey Locust, and an olive relative I call "Sweetbush" because of the way it smells when it blooms in the spring. Downright intoxicating, the Sweetbush.

Elsewhere on the acreage live Juniper, Cottonwood, Mulberry, Willow, Cypress, Sweetgum, Oak and Pine trees. Possibly also a Redbud, the Oklahoma State tree, which I planted over ten years ago, but have not yet found.

Gateway to Oz

I had posted my introductory entry to the Yahoo group on Organic Gardening and another member of that group, Jeff FaithWalker, replied saying, "So God is delivering you out of the Hands of us Yankees and sending you to the gateway to Oz is He.......... .hmmmm verrrrrrrrrrry interesting!"

Gateway to Oz - what a great turn of phrase! The idea made me remember the carrots we planted the day of the May 3 Tornadoes:

Some of the best carrots I ever ate were planted on May 3, 1999, a day of a seemingly neverending series of tornadoes.

We had worked a little ash from the woodstove into the row and planted as the darkening sky boiled up from the west. You can keep a garden alive with the water hose, but to really grow, rain is best, so I knew that these carrots having their first watering by rain, I knew that would be good, as long as they didn't wash out. I kept my eye on the sky as the thunder began to rumble and as soon as we got the seeds in the ground I left my dear husband outside to finish putting up the tools and get things closed up and I went inside to look at the weather radar on the TV, see just what was coming, and how soon. Yikes, what a wild ride we had for the rest of the afternoon and most of the night! A whole 'nother story about all that, for sure. But the carrots did great, yes they did. Best carrots I ever ate.