I looked in on the vegetable garden after work today.
It is mostly pitiful.
If a butterbean dared sprout, something got it immediately. Empty row. (I take that back: not "empty," for it's full of weeds and grass, just no butterbeans. 'Ne'er a one,' as folks used to say.
The purple hull peas need to be replanted, too. The seeds in the south end of the garden sprouted skippy. North end didn't sprout at all. Except weeds and grass, of course.
The green beans did a little better than the peas, but those rows are skippy, too. And grassy.
Tomatoes and peppers are doing okay. Picked two Cuban peppers (tacos tomorrow night!) and saw a little green tomato. Eggplant has a bloom on it. The pine straw mulch job we did on the pepper rows seems to be working well for weed control Or maybe it's just hiding weeds. We also piled pine straw around the tomatoes, on top of landscape fabric, to help battle blight. So far, so good.
The squash, zucchini and cucumber hills and middles are grassy. The ground was dry enough to work, so I came home, got my gloves and some seeds (never found the butterbeans), and went back to the garden. Ran the tiny tiller (it cranked on the first pull!). Sharpened my hoe, and chopped around the squash and cucumbers. I raked up a few more pine needles and spread them around the little plants, aiming to keep down the grass. Not so sure that's a good idea though, as it might harbor the kind of bugs that like to eat squash and cucumbers.
When I got to the green beans, I decided not to re-plant both rows all the way from south to north, as I did the first go-'round. We planted the first seeds with the little bicycle-on-a-stick planter. I don't trust that thing, so I planted by hand. I stopped planting the skips half-way down each row. The other half (which has NO plants in it, except grass) probably could've been worked but, being a lazy and out-of-shape person, I rationalized that it might be better to hold off on planting the remainder of those 70-foot rows. Do I really want to deal with that many green beans at once? I'm going to see how this planting does before I plant the rest of the rows. I may even decide to use that space for something different.
As I started planting the seeds, a crow landed in a nearby tree and started to broadcast the news to his family and friends. I looked up the row, and those white seeds were just shining, so I hurried and covered them up, and I covered up the rest as I went, hoping to hide them from the crow. It made sense at the time. I stopped and texted all my kids and grandkids: "One or more of you wildly creative people should make a scarecrow for my garden." In just a few minutes, I got a nibble.
I went back to chopping weeds.
Then, it hit me: white seeds.
I was pretty sure the original green bean seeds were brown, for I remembered having a hard time seeing them drop out of the planter. I reached around in my apron pockets and came up with a part of a bag of brown seeds. I'd found the white seeds in the freezer. What the heck had I just planted?
When I pooped out and came home, I put on my glasses and read the label on the white seed bag. It said "pole beans." Whew.
Still need to put up the fence for the tomatoes.
Need to replant the peas.
More butterbean seeds on the way.
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