What's going on my fellow HiveGardeners!? Welcome back to another edition of:
Gardening with The Anarchist's!
Just in case you are new to my Garden Journal, then allow me to give you a brief description of
Our Goal!
My fiance, Murty, and I recently inherited her family home from her parents (her father still lives with us as of right now, but that's an entirely different story)! Now that we have the available space, we started our very first family garden with our main goal being to become self-sufficient! As first time gardeners, as well as being new to Hive, I thought it only fitting to blog our journey into self-sufficiency!
It's been a very rough (yet exciting) road so far, let me tell you what. I've definitely made a few mistakes already, but the way I look at it, every mistake is a learning experience for the future!
Personal Thoughts of the Week
So branching off of that thought, not only have I made a few mistakes in the garden, I feel like here recently I've made some personal mistakes by biting off a little more than I could chew; and I just kept piling more stuff on top of my plate to the point it was overwhelmingly overflowing with all these new responsibilities and projects that I bestowed upon myself. Which, unfortunately, only got worse once we received the news of our miscarriage a few weeks ago.
Once I noticed how much pressure I was putting on myself, I took a step back and thought about the reason why I'm even doing this in the first place: My Family. And then, it all kind of clicked into place. The responsibilities didn't feel like responsibilities anymore; they became my own priceless privileges, goals that I am striving to achieve for those I love and care about the most.
Wow, who would have thought that gardening could be so therapeutic!?
With all this newfound clarity, I decided I needed to start working on sticking to specific timelines and setting minor goals for myself; like working on my writing as I am going, taking quick notes to remember specific thoughts or moments, and using those notes to start writing outlines for blogs in advance to help keep me focused!
One of the goals I've set for myself is to start being more consistent with the publication of my blogs starting with this Garden Journal Update; which will hopefully be the first in a series of bimonthly updates! I'm also going to be working on going into more detail on my watering and general care habits, thanks to a very thought provoking comment on my last update!
So, with all of that being said, I am truly excited to be bringing you this update! It's only been a few days since I posted my last Garden Journal, but a lot has happened in the past week!
The First Mista...Err, I Mean, Learning Opportunities!
So, at the very beginning of the post, I talked about making some mistakes in the garden, which I personally like to think of as learning opportunities, and now, I'd like to take a second to address what I've learned so far in this month and a half of serious gardening!
One of the biggest learning experiences I've had so far is with the asparagus we planted at the beginning of the season. In my very first Garden Journal, I briefly explained how I followed the directions on the packages of asparagus we bought at our local Rural King store and included this picture of our start:
Well, come to find out (after quite a few weeks of monitoring) I planted the darn things upside down!! How in the name of Mother Nature did I plant a root set upside down!? Ugh, this was absolutely frustrating for me to say the very least!
How did I come to realize my mistake? Well funny you should ask!
I actually noticed a little bit of new growth coming from underneath the top of the plant, and breaking up the soil a little bit, I realized that the "top" of my plant was actually the root! Sadly, I didn't have my phone on me at the time to take any pictures
Well needless to say I quickly got to work and corrected my mistake, hoping to have caught the error before the roots were damaged beyond repair, and I'm very happy to report that at least two of the six starts are doing well and thriving under the new conditions!
Ok, so one mistake noticed, noted in my Garden Journal, and finally corrected; we move on the the second learning opportunity I've experienced:
A Late Harvest!
So this learning experience is all thanks to that thought provoking comment on my May Update that I mentioned earlier, by @growingmyownfood!
In the comment, they had not only expressed their interest in our watering habits, but also in how our harvest turns out!
Well, that immediately made me realize that I was so worried about getting the warm weather crops planted that I completely forgot to do some research on harvesting lettuce and spinach, and come to find out, I could have started harvesting them both a few weeks ago!
Well, not wanting to waste another second, I officially harvested our Romaine Lettuce and Spinach for the first time on Wednesday, June 1st, 2022! Here's what they looked like before harvesting:
Originally, I just snipped the leaves of spinach off with a pair of scissors, not wanting to damage the rest of the plant. I started harvesting the lettuce in the same fashion, but after the first dozen leaves or so, I decided to just start pinching it off with my fingers.
After it was all said and done, we actually harvested a total of 18 leaves of spinach and a total of 96 leaves of lettuce of various sizes!
Again, not having my phone on me at the time, I wasn't able to take pictures during the actual harvest, but here are a few pictures to give you an idea of how much we harvested!
 |  |  |
|---|
 |  |  |
|---|
I definitely made a note of the harvesting schedule for both lettuce and spinach, and I will have to start being more mindful of my planting dates so we can harvest more during the fall planting season! Even though we waited a little too long to harvest, I was pleasantly surprised to discover they didn't taste as bitter as I was dreading they would! :)
On another note, I should have been more consistent in my planting, or how close the lettuce were planted to each other, but I honestly didn't think that I'd have such a good germination rate with the seeds! Hopefully, with these first couple of notes I've taken on our lettuce and spinach, I'll have a better idea of what I'm doing come the fall season!
Alright, so now that I've explained the mistakes I've made so far and how I've learned from them, I think it's finally time we dig in where we left off at the end of last week's edition!
We had just finished planting the seeds for all our warm weather crops, a few more potatoes and onions. It's only been a week, but a lot of them have started to pop and are already looking really good! I can honestly say that all I've really done is tried to water consistently, but I'll explain a little bit more about that process in just a moment!
Also, I think I've forgotten to mention this, but I did use Miracle Grow Shake and Feed Fertilizer when I planted our seeds, using as directed on the bottle. Supposedly it feeds your plants for up to 3 months, which is why I only used it during the initial planting. You can also see some of the fertilizer in most of the close up pictures!
Now, let's dig in to our update on the rest of the garden!
Daily Breakdown!
From Sunday, May 29th through Tuesday, May 31st we watered the entire garden every evening after the sun started to set! It's always still light out when we water, but we wait until the sun ducks behind the maple and oak trees in the front of the house, just to avoid burns!
We've been experiencing a good amount of heat this last week, and the ground cracks just continued to get worse, which is why I try to water everyday. There's been a lot of helicopters from our maple tree that have littered the garden, so I've also been performing a basic weeding every night when I get home from work, one small portion at a time!
As to the way I water, normally, I just use our garden hose with a brass nozzle. Using a quick sweeping motion, with the nozzle closed to a medium heavy spray rather than a jet, I stand to one side of the garden and water a 10 foot section or so until the ground starts to puddle slightly, then move to the next section. Once I'm done with the whole garden, I'll go back through and make another quick pass, just making sure that the ground didn't soak it all up on the first round.
As I mentioned above, on Wednesday, June the 1st, I harvested our lettuce and spinach for the first time, getting a really good harvest from the lettuce in my opinion! If I would have started harvesting the spinach sooner, I'm sure we could have gotten a substantial amount during harvest, but sadly it has gone to seed now that the weather has picked up. Although, that will leave me with plenty of seeds for the fall season and next spring as well! I didn't water on Tuesday or Wednesday, because we were under a severe thunderstorm warning, and I didn't want to potentially flood the plants!
By Thursday, although we hadn't gotten as much rain as we thought we were going to, we were finally out of the severe thunderstorm warning! I hadn't watered much at all the last few days because of the storms rolling through, but they were spotty to say the least, and I knew I needed to water soon! As I was dragging out the hose however, I started noticing some corn and melon sprouts had started popping! They were small, but still there! Not wanting to over-water them, I decided it might be best to wait another day!
 |  |
|---|
After a short (although it seemed to last forever) work week; I got off early on Friday, June the 3rd, and checked out the garden thoroughly to monitor for new growth before I started to water for the first time since Monday! I noticed that a lot of the cucumbers and zucchini started to sprout, and on top of that, I noticed 3 more potato plant sprouts and most of the eggplants had popped as well! What a happy day indeed!
On Saturday, June the 4th, we were supposed to have a nice heatwave coming through, so I decided to water again as soon as I got up, right around 6:30 AM, making sure to give it a thorough watering before the sun came up. We had a few errands to run that afternoon, and had ended up making plans for that evening (details on that in a separate blog next week!) so I knew that if I didn't get it watered the heat might burn them up.
It did end up being a scorcher that day, so I decided I was going to play it safe and watered again in the evening just to give them that extra bit of moisture they needed and deserved! This time we let our little sprinkler, that our kids like to play in, do most of the work for us! I try to set it up to where the kids have a fairly decent amount of room to run through, while the sprinkler is able to water almost half of the length of the garden at once!
When the kids and I woke up that next morning, Sunday, June the 5th, we immediately started playing in the backyard, and I watered before the heat got too intense that day. Going back to our trusty hose, I watered just enough to darken the soil, making sure I didn't soak the leaves along the way! Our family spent most of the day outside playing and just running around being crazy, and we all had fun at one point running and jumping through the sprinkler!
All in all, we had a very eventful, and very enjoyable, week! Unfortunately, this post has taken me a lot longer to write and edit than I intended, and this weekend we have a trip planned! One that I will be sharing with you all very soon! I hope you all had a great week, and I hope you tune in next time for another awesome update featuring some new, and rather unexpected, additions to our garden!
Thanks for joining us, and I hope you have a wonderful week!
Stay Trippy, My Little Hippies!
- All pictures taken, and edited, using my trusty Moto G Stylus
- Signature designed and custom made by @doze