I've been thinking about cataloging my assorted garden posts here on my website for awhile, since I've wanted a place to keep all my garden thoughts. I figured I might as well start! So this is the first post, hopefully of many to come.
Gardening thoughts count as writing, right?
Anyway, the garden has reached that stage in the late summer where everything is huge and a bit of a mess. It's a constant battle with the weeds. But there's a lot of successes like the sunflowers this year:
Note the pervasive dog hair wrapping around the sunflower stalks. The dogs have been shedding pretty bad.
I'm loving them this year, but they are large. Taller than me. I need to get some mesh bags to put over the flowers this year, because the squirrels got to them last year and ate everything. We decided to try to counteract this by planting them away from the fence, but TBD how that does.
The collard greens this year are incredible. They've basically been nonstop since they took off in the spring and we've already made many meals from them.
They look untouched. I promise you we have eaten much from them and given away more.
This year we also planted native passionfruits (maypops). I'm looking forward to seeing these take off. Passionfruit is one of my favorite flavors, so I'm really hoping I get fruits. Plus the flowers are neat as fuck.
And I'm proud to say it's almost corn season. Probably another week and I'll be able to harvest these guys. Fresh corn is one of my favorite things to eat, especially because it can be eaten right off the stalk raw, which a lot of people don't seem to realize. The flavor is really unbeatable.
Lastly, I weeded for 3 hours this Sunday and prepared some of the beds for more green beans. Really hoping we can get some green beans this year. So far the harvest has been pretty disappointing. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing wrong here, but I think there might not be enough light.
We'll see how it goes. I've never had trouble growing green beans so far, so this has been a learning experience for sure. As always, every garden is built on a graveyard of dead plants.