We've had some crazy weather the past few weeks. Crazy like a foot of rain in the past week. And a few tornadoes. Tornadoes close enough that the houses on the other side of the "crick" from my garden don't have roofs (rooves?) anymore. Like I said, crazy. I wasn't sure what to expect when it finally dried up enough that I could get out in the garden. Here's what I found:
Not as bad as I figured! The ridiculous rain has made several little rivers through the garden, but the majority of it (including the fence, somehow) is still standing! We did lose a big branch off the cherry tree that was full of cherries, and an entire peach tree was uprooted. Grandpa decided to leave the peach tree where it is because it still has one big root in the ground, so maybe it will hang on? Nothing to lose by trying! On that note, does anyone know if you can pick cherries prematurely and ripen them off the tree? They're pink, but not bright red yet and that branch is loaded!
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| Broken cherry tree |
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| Broken peach tree |
By and large, the rest of the garden seems to be intact. My potatoes and onions are going crazy! A few of the onions are looking a little wilty, and some of them had to be reburied because the earth washed out around them, but nothing major. The saddest looking things are some of my tomato plants. I don't know if they're waterlogged or what, but I have 3-4 that look pretty pathetic.
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| Go potatoes and onions! |
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| We got a little more dirt on these sad onions. |
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| Sad tomato plant |
My grandma thought that the tomatoes could use some fertilizer, so I got on the magic internet and looked for non-chemical fertilizers I could make. I've been saving egg shells because I read that tomatoes need extra calcium in the dirt. So I powdered those and mixed with with epsom salts and crushed up aspirins (supposedly a root motivator?) and we fed the plants this evening.
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| Gram supervising us newbies |
After everything was fed, we started our first veggie harvest! Not a ton today, but I got a bag full of arugula and an armload of green onions! Gram says that when the onions start to flower they get tough, so we pulled all the onions with blooms on them, plus a few because I have a toddler.
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| Showing off her first onion! |
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| I felt like Miss America with my "bouquet" |
We weren't out there long today, but it was nice to check on everything and get a little dirt on my hands again. (I have been out there since my last post, but I didn't figure you'd want to watch my plants grow millimeter by millimeter so I didn't post.) Anyone have any miracle tomato-life-savers? Know how to ripen cherries off the tree? Know how to hold off the rain so we can dry out a little?
