Evolution of a Garden...

Tonight when I went out for my nightly perusal of our garden, I was amazed at how much it has changed in just over a month or so. The plants are seeming to explode in size overnight. Some of our rows didn't grow as we had planned--either the birds got the seeds or, well...all I can think of is that the birds got the seeds. But I'm still happy at how the rows have turned out for the most part.

I was going to just post a current picture but I think it's much more of a visual effect if I start at the beginning...

This is the garden on 5/18/09. We had just gotten done with some major planting of seeds. Pretty much all dirt with nothing even thinking of sprouting yet.

This is our garden on 6/7/09, just one month ago today. The corn was coming along, the cucumbers & beans were sprouting, but there was still a LOT of dirt.

Forward to 6/26/09 and things are definitely looking different! My son Collin built a "fence" for me for the cucumbers and everything is really taking off.

And here we are today! First photo is standing in the middle looking left. Second photo is looking right. Corn is above knee-high, most of the tomato plants are in cages, the broccoli is FINALLY starting to form in the middle, zucchini is going nuts and watermelon is sprawling out. (There's more than that growing but you get the idea...)

Every day I'm excited to go out into the garden and see what else I find growing. I'm finding vegetables peeking out from under leaves and vines everywhere. Sometimes I find something that looks like it's been growing for awhile and I like to think it hid there for awhile just to surprise me when I least expect it.
I'll keep you posted...

That's a Lot of Bacon!

Remember this post back in March? Those three cute little piggies we got for the boys to raise for 4H? Just for reference, here they were back in the beginning of April:

Well they've grown just a little...Here is a picture I took just about a week or so ago:

We haven't been able to weigh them and I'm so bad at guessing things like weights and measurements that I'm not going to even attempt to say how big they are. All I know is they pack a lot of power behind them if you get in the way of their food.

Speaking of weighing them, we made an attempt several weeks ago to do this. We were supposed to load up the pigs and take them to a butcher to have them weighed. The whole 4H group showed up but to our dismay the butcher didn't make it so no one could get in to get them weighed. This was unfortunate because it was a very hot day and we don't have an actual livestock trailer.


Whenever we have to transport the pigs, we have to use Randy's cargo trailer. We tried our best to make the pigs comfortable (pigs don't do well in heat at ALL) by opening the vent on top of the trailer and buying several blocks of ice to keep inside the trailer with them to keep them as cooled down as possible.


After the failed attempt at weigh in, Randy & the boys arrived back at home and Randy backed the trailer up to the pig pen area. We opened up the back doors of the trailer and this was the first thing we saw:

I love how he had his butt propped up on the ice block. It did kind of scare us though because he wouldn't move at all and Randy had to kind of shove him out the trailer and he basically just fell on the ground and didn't move at first. We thought for sure we had killed him. But after a short moment he got up on his feet and ran into the pen, so all was well.

Actually, looking at this picture now, it is an even better example of how big the pigs have gotten because you can see Randy's legs in the background for comparison and can see that the pigs body lays across more than half (probably about 3/4) of the trailer width. I told you they were getting big....

Tis the Season.....

...for planting & growing!

This morning I started off "prettying up the place". Randy had volunteered for security detail at a speaking engagement a couple of weeks ago and at the end of the night they gave him a bunch of the plants they had used to decorate. Yesterday I remembered that Randy had brought a large planting pot with him when he moved out here so we got some potting soil and first thing today I got it planted with some of those plants we had. When I was done we still had quite a few left so I decided to put them out in the front flower beds to add some color. I believe that in this zone these plants are considered annuals so they won't come back next year--but for now they add a nice splash to the beds and our front porch. The colors are all red, white and blue so when Fourth of July comes around we'll look very patriotic, lol.


Our garden is really finally taking off, after a few false starts. But I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out. You can't really tell in this picture but almost everything is up & growing. The five rows on the right are all corn which is growing the fastest. Throughout the rest of the garden is garlic, spinach, peppers, broccoli, green beans, cucumbers, watermelon, zucchini, carrots, leaf lettuce and iceberg lettuce. (I may be forgetting something...) We ended up not having enough room for the pumpkins so we had to spend today tilling 4 more rows for them. (You can see Randy starting that to the left of the garden in the picture.) We managed to get them all planted before the rain started this afternoon. The rain we've gotten lately has been a great help because it's cut back on the watering we've had to do this week. I'll keep you all updated on the garden progress as time goes by...

And It Just Keeps Coming...

Have you ever been woken up at 4:45 a.m. by someone pounding on your door & ringing the doorbell? It's not fun. That happened to us this morning and when my husband went to check on who it was, there was a cop standing at our door. That's enough to give anyone a heart attack in the wee hours of the morning.
It turns out someone's horses got loose (two of them) and the police assumed that since we had a pasture with an open gate, they belonged to us. The truth is no, we don't own any horses (which we told the policeman) and we only keep the gate open because my husband parks his truck behind the house. But even after we told the officer that they weren't ours, they just said, "Well we put them in your pasture and secured your gate. You'll probably be getting a call from someone later." Then he promptly left. Um......they're NOT our horses!
So later this morning, once the sun had come up, we made the unfortunate discovery that these horses had trampled through our garden. Yeah, the one I'm having trouble with anyway. Those few precious tomato & pepper plants that survived have now been trampled under horse hooves. Really? Is there anything else fate would like to do to our garden?

On an up-note, we got a call from our neighbor last night--the neighbor who we've been getting the pig feed from and who arranged for us to get these pigs. He said that if we sell the pigs now, we'd lose our shirts so he made a deal with us. He is going to supply us with our pig feed at no cost for now and then when the pigs are sold and we receive our checks, we can pay him back for the feed then. I'm so glad we have nice neighbors! I think people are really pulling through & rallying with their neighbors during these tough times. Like bringing over tamales for no reason like our next door neighbors did the other night or what Hobie is doing by working with us so we can keep the pigs. This is why I love where we live.

How Does Your Garden Grow?....(not so well actually.)

Okay I don't know how my sister does it... She has had a really awesome garden for years now and from what I understand they're expanding and planting even more gardens. They plan to sell a lot of what they grow at their local farmer's market in West Virginia. I've done small gardens before but have usually bought plants & planted them directly to the garden. This year I wanted to save money so we bought all seeds and I started some of them indoors to give them a head start. This past weekend we transplanted all of the plants grown indoors. But soon after we planted them we had a late frost warning two nights in a row. I ran to the store and got some plastic cups to put over them for protection and just today took them off to see how they did. Yeah...not so great. I lost all but 2 or 3 of my pepper plants and only about 1/5 of our tomato plants made it. Oh and the onions I planted also didn't make it either. It's SO disappointing because now we have to start over from scratch. It's already the middle of May and my huge garden hardly has anything in it. I honestly feel like giving up. We wanted so badly to have a big garden so we could give back to friends & the community (through a local foodbank) and now it looks like we may not even have enough just for us!

Then to make matters worse, today my husband made the decision to start looking for someone to buy our pigs. These were the pigs we bought at the urging of a friend so the boys could do a 4H project and sell them for profit at the end. The problem is you don't see any of the profit until the end of summer. It's only May and we've already spent about $250 per pig (including purchase cost, food, etc.) You see these are "show pigs" so we've been told we can't just feed them slop. If we could, we'd be doing okay. But these pigs have to be fed grain and believe me they eat a LOT. The problem is that with me only working 4 days a week now and Randy still not being able to find a job, how are we supposed to feed pigs with expensive feed?

I don't know, it's just incredibly frustrating to have everything falling apart like this. No garden, no pigs, no jobs.... I've been trying so hard lately to think of something I can do for extra money right now. I mentioned before about the talents of my mom & sister. I watch shows where people have started their own businesses with just their God given talents. I just feel like I don't have anything I can do that is worth making extra money. It's kind of depressing actually. This is supposed to be the start of a "better life" for me and instead with all of the economy problems and things that keep happening, it just seems like things are getting worse instead. I'm sure my ex will call it karma or something. If anyone has any good suggestions, I'd love to hear them...