Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Walk with me.... a tour

It's wet!  Very wet!

We've had rain, rain and more rain lately.  Yesterday, there was just a long enough break that included sunshine for me and Paul to put some TLC into the garden.  Although we had some showers overnight through this morning, I still spent a few hours out in the garden this morning too.  Temps were ideal!

While walking around in the upper garden, planning out my path to travel with our tiller for the first cultivating job (yesterday---it's WAY too wet today for tilling!)....
IMAGINE my delight when I see oooooooodles of randomly scattered tomato plants!
I couldn't resist......
I grabbed the hand-shovel and starting digging them out for transplant into some open space we still had available (see the holes from my selections?).  When Paul realized what I was doing, he gave me "a look," and proceeded to inform me that they are most likely from our hybrid plants last year, and not heirloom.  
Meaning:  "you don't know what kind of plant you're going to get, Amy."
Well-----so!??!??!  Isn't that part of the fun too?  It's not like we don't have enough space for eleven more unplanned tomato plants. :D  Let's just live on the wild side and see what happens with them!! :P

 
I mean....LOOK!  It's so cute!  How could I pass it up and say..."Sorry buddy!  I didn't plant you this year so you're not important."  :(

And see who else wanted to sprout up this year???  
In additional to oodles of scattered tomato plants, I also transplanted a couple dozen dill sproutlings that were popping up everywhere in the open area too!  Goodness!!!!  It was like a garden-holiday!!!  Those gnomes must have wanted us to have even a bigger garden yet :)

Eventually, I stopped looking!  And the big, bad machine came out.
It wasn't easy tilling over so many tomato plants, but.....

...with 44 plants in our lower garden, and 11 newly transplanted "treasures" .......
Ummm.  Fifty-five (55!) tomato plants MAY just have to suffice... or not?
**chuckle**
Originally, we had 20 plants, and that was going to be it! (pictured towards the 'back' of this picture)
Then our Ag teacher had her Mother's Day sale for FFA, so we purchased 4 more.  
So, THEN we were done!
....
... a few weeks later, while digging through our seed box.... the package of tomato seeds was (accidentally) dumped upside-down.  So.....I shrugged and thought....."might as well plant them in some starter containers.  What's it gonna hurt?  We have the room....let's see what happens."  (I sense a slight measure of deja-vu here).....   
Enter:  20 MORE seedlings (pictured towards the 'front' of the above picture).  They were planted last week and have more than doubled in size!  They are about 3-5 weeks behind the first planting.

And speaking of our first planting:  Our first tomato is starting to form!  Always exciting to see :D

Maybe all this water from last Thursday wasn't too bad afterall :D

During my treasure seeking endeavor, Starz and Tristen (not pictured) kept me in conversation, baaaaing back-n-forth with each other.  They both were crying out for some attention....and for some good-eats!  tsk-tsk....the grass isn't ALWAYS greener, Starz....!

But even Dotty was trying to get some grass through her pen fence.  

On my way down to the lower garden, Daddy Robin was chirping up a rukus, trying to distract me away from the nest.  We don't know how many babies are in the nest, but we know two perished early on.  One egg was booted out of the nest, and a baby had fallen from the nest shortly after hatching (we saw evidence of both of these events on our concrete walk-out).

Paul finished up the newly renovated Chicken house.

And the birds moved in officially yesterday.

It's CRAZY how fast these buggars grow!  It's hard to tell from the pictures, but two weeks ago, they were cute-n-cuddly and SMALL.  
Paul mentioned probably selecting a couple lucky chickens in two more weeks to take part in our rotisserie ferris-wheel ride.  Oh, WHO will the lucky one(s) be?!?!?


:D

A local store remarkably had some strawberry plants in stock when we were "out looking" yesterday. Since our strawberry patch is nearing the end of its production life, we picked up 36 plants; two different types.  I planted 18 this morning;  the other 18 Paul wants to plant.

WHEW!

I also have pictures from our Sunday visit with Paul's namesake, but those will need to wait for another post.  But, I'll leave you with a snapshot of one small area of their amazing home/land/garden.

I hope your day is filled with whatever you feel "counts."
:0)

Happy Tuesday!


5 comments:

scraphappy said...

So much going on down on the farm! I am just waiting for the stories to start coming in of you giving away tomatoes to every passer by in a few months. You will have run out of jars and eaten all you could stand, and still have bushels to carry in to school for anyone who wants them. I do hope it stops raining some day, but until then I'm sure it is nice not to have to water.

Andee said...

Loved the tour..also got a kick out of the chicken ride comment! I am sure they will be delicious! Looking forward to all that garden goodness!

Amanda said...

I'm not surprised you couldn't ignore the tomato plants, you've got to give them a chance after they've tried so hard haven't you. We've got a plant growing in the middle of our fruit garden that Christopher rescued and nurtured. We've no idea what it is but it's about three feet tall already. It's probably a triffid!

Pieces to Love said...

You can send some of your rain my way, We haven't had any significant rain since early May and are in a drought. Normally we don't here the word drought until August, never in June.

Ellen said...

Fantastic garden space. We have tons of dill that plants itself every year because we let a lot of it go to seed. I love the smell when brushing past it while working in the garden. We don't have tomatoes yet, but we do have lots of flowers on the plants.

Do you "prepare" the chickens yourself or do you send them out?