Watering the Garden

We water the garden using an irrigation system. Irrigating was another one of those things that I knew existed while I was growing up, but I didn't know much about it. Those same neighbors whose garden I envied growing up also irrigated. It looked like a ton of work! The way they irrigated was with a large hose that they moved from one area to another. As I attempt to recall it, I think I remember the hose having holes and the canal water would come out of the holes allowing it to be a little like a sprinkler. But I mostly remember thinking that it looked so heavy and difficult to move that hose over and over again.

When Garrett and I first got married, little by little he showed me how the irrigation worked. Luckily, they already had a sprinkler system that just utilized the secondary water, so there was no need to haul a big heavy hose around. Garrett also explained to me that the garden, orchard, and pasture were irrigated by flood. This meant that instead of using the sprinkler system, we use large pipes with spouts that pour out into the garden, which is on a very slight hill. The water seeps through the furrows and into the ditch at the bottom of the garden and it all soaks there. This flooding is a process that takes several hours, since the garden is basically soaking up its weeks worth of moisture.

I also wanted to give you a quick update on what's coming up, because that is the part I really enjoy!

This is a new Pepper! We now have four growing.

This one is getting really big!

This is another new pepper - even though it's tiny, it still counts!

Some corn.

This is squash - I believe it's butternut squash.

And this is acorn squash.

It will be fun when I have some more of the actual produce growing that I can show pictures of, but for now this is still exciting to me!

Weeding

Now, I know that I said that planting day was difficult to anticipate, but that was a large understatement in comparison to how much I dreaded the thought of weeding our massive garden. When Garrett mentioned that it was time to go out and weed the garden, I was prepping myself both mentally and physically for the draining process that it would be. The thought of crawling around on my hands and knees picking out the weeds definitely did not sound appealing. But I'm here to tell you - it wasn't that bad.

Call me crazy, tell me it was because I had low expectations, or even that the weeds weren't bad enough yet, but my overall response to the experience was that it could have been a lot worse. Come to find out, I didn't have to crawl around on my hands and knees to get all of the weeds. I honestly had no idea that a gardening hoe was a sufficient tool for weeding. Which probably goes to show just how oblivious I am about this whole gardening thing, but oh well.

We went out to the garden and weeded for about an hour, and even though I got two blisters in that small amount of time, we got a lot done. Granted, we didn't finish because I had to go to work, but I felt a lot better knowing that the next time I went out there I wouldn't be so scared.

Just a quick picture of some corn growing with weeds around it. Can you tell which is which?

In other news, we have some peppers growing already! I know, that would be fast had we planted them from seeds, but we were advised to plant the peppers and tomatoes as "starter plants" because they can be difficult to tend and grow from seeds. Regardless of this slightly cheater step, I'm proud of our small peppers that are starting!

And yes, those peppers are on two separate plants, so I'm allowed to refer to them as plural - peppers!

Planting

The dreaded long awaited time came to plant the garden. I'll be honest and say that I was really nervous! I was relying on the little bits of knowledge that I had gained from word of mouth, and Garrett and my upstairs neighbors previous experience.

We started by planning out the garden. This required knowing how many rows were in there. I'm here to tell you that there are 37 rows in our garden. Yep, you read that right. 37 of them! We told ourselves we wouldn't plant on every single row, so I felt a little better. We decided to put in carrots, peas, beans, bell peppers, tomatoes, corn, acorn squash, butternut squash, zucchini, two kinds of pumpkins, cantaloupe, watermelon, and potatoes.

After skipping a row for the plants that are eventually more widespread and viney, doing multiple rows of a few things, and allowing some neighbors to have a few rows as well, the entire garden was full. It's a little overwhelming! Mostly because it will be difficult to stay on top of all of the inevitable weeds. But we are determined to do our best!