Planting This Year's Garden

Hey guys, what a week! Through the crazy busy-ness that was this past week, we managed to make time to get the garden planted! Trent had to take his truck in to get repaired, so I had to pick him up from work at the end of the week. Then we saw Luke Bryan Friday night, and went to a birthday party yesterday! Today we're finally home again getting things done around the house.

We had gotten the veggies to plant last weekend, but didn't have time to plant them all until Tuesday night. We got it all done just before dark though, and so far it's looking much better than last year's garden at this stage.

We even got some rain this week which helped to get those plants going once they were in the ground. And we're trying a new rabbit-proofing system this year, but I'll get to that a little later. :)

So, on to what we planted. Last year, we went all certified organic and started mostly from seeds. This year, we have a mix of organic and conventional, and are starting mostly from plants.

We have a few different types of tomatoes: organic Red Beefsteak and Husky Cherry Red tomatoes..

Cherokee Purple and Romas..

As well as organic Better Bush tomatoes. We'll see how all of those tomatoes do this year. I think they'll do a little better, since these plants are a bit more mature than those we planted last year.

We have another watermelon plant this year...

Butternut squash, Cucumber...

Red Bell Peppers, and Sweet Potatoes! We're kind of excited about these sweet potato plants. This might be the first time we've done them, though I can't remember for sure.

And finally, we did get a couple of seed packets. Sweet corn and these interesting Kaleidoscope carrots that Trent picked out...I'm not sure about these, but we will see how they are I guess!

Trent did the majority of the digging and planting, while I got the plants out of their containers and prepared them to be put into the ground. Many of the containers we got were actually the decomposable kind that you have to soak first, remove the wrappers, and cut the bottoms off before planting. Then you leave the decomposable paper containers around the plants when you put them into the ground. This is supposedly to help the plant with transplant shock.

We had old tomato cages from previous years that we put around the plants.

The garden space we have out back is pretty large, so we were able to space out the plants pretty far apart this year, which is especially nice for the cucumbers that tend to spread out quite a bit.

The tomatoes are on the far left end, followed by the cucumber plant, peppers, and butternut squash. Then there's the row of sweet potatoes, and a couple of rows of corn and carrots, then a mound for the watermelon.

We also finally got to plant my wildflower seeds at the end of the garden. I'm excited to see if these will grow into beautiful flowers this summer!

Now, here is the rabbit-proofing method we decided on for this year's garden: We got a roll of chicken coop wire, about $10 at Lowe's. Then cut sections of it and wrapped them around each of the plants we put into the ground. 

We are hoping this will prevent little critters from getting in there and eating our veggie plants, which happened quite a bit last year!

We'll probably take these barriers off once the plants get larger and established, to make room for them to grow. I think we had about 15 total plants to wrap the wire caging around.

It was getting dark by the time we finished all of our cages, but they're all done!

We ran the hose out back after finishing up, and started the sprinkler on them for a little while, just to make sure the soil got nice and wet.

Then Saleen wanted to check out the garden, too. I think she approved, though her face said she wasn't quite sure...

I'm glad the planting stage is all over! Now our next step is just to put down a little weed preventer, pull the inevitable weeds this summer, and wait for our tiny plants to grow into some yummy veggies! Should be a better crop than last year's!