My Little Garden

After Mother's Day is safe planting time here in Ohio....so we made use of that weekend to get the garden in. I am trying out the Ruth Stout heavy mulch method this season. In a nut shell you use 6-8 inches of hay on your garden spot to stop weeds, keep the soil moist, and act as a natural composter and soil amender as it rots down. Through out the season you add your grass clippings and later leaves to the garden. You compost right in your plot by lifting the hay with a pitch fork and placing your peelings and what not right under the hay to decompose. So far so good. We prepped the beds a few weeks ago here and have seen nary a weed since!!! To plant we just pulled back the compacted hay to reveal the dirt. If you plant a full plant you can then push the hay right back up to it like a nice little blanket.....but if you plant seeds like we did for lettuce and herbs you cannot cover it until the seeds sprout or else you will just smother and kill the poor little things! It was very easy to plant. The earth was soft, moist and perfect- not hard as a rock!! Secretly I was surprised. Now we'll just have to see how everything grows!

Here's the area where we planted herbs. The other half of this bed got one row of lettuce and will get two more rows a few weeks apart. We planted a small row of radishes too.

















Here's the lettuce half....it will hold 2 more rows in a few weeks.





















Here's the whole area. We ended up with 6 tomato plants, 6 pepper plants, various herbs, lettuce, radishes, and a few sugar snap pea plants. There are cucumbers in the background near the rabbit hutch too. There are a few marigolds planted here and there, I'm told they help with bugs...we'll see...I just happen to think they are a cheery little flower that I can collect seeds from this fall too!! If you click the picture you can see better. Some things have already sprouted this week and started to grow! In a few weeks I'll do an updated post with progress!! We decided that this year we really only wanted a garden to eat fresh from and don't plan on canning this season. Although I know that if the six tomato plants do well, I will have to freeze the extra...but that will be just fine and it's easy to freeze tomatoes! I just pick them whole and place in freezer bags straight off the vine and freeze. To use them you just pull out the bag, rinse the frozen tomato under hot water and the skin splits and pulls right off. Then into a pot it goes to cook down for chili or spaghetti sauce or fresh tomato soup. I mash mine a bit with a potato masher or whirl with a stick blender if I want it really smooth.
















As a dear blogger friend, Kim ,reminded me....lets all ask God to bless our gardens this year....however BIG or small they may be and that through Him they will help to provide our tables with many wonderful blessings!!!

Happy Gardening!