Vegetable Garden

Even vegetable gardens have ‘rules’ or ‘guidelines’ or ‘advice’.   ‘Advice’, ‘don’t put your garden in until Mother’s day’, and since we’ve had frosts recently this is good ‘advice’.  Then there are the ‘rules’.  My Loving Spouse informed me that you must ‘never plant your garden on Sunday’, (this one is new to me, and is an old wife’s tale, but  I am thinking it might have been started by a wife/mother who didn’t want to spend Mother’s day planting her vegetable garden, just wondering…)

Our garden is almost ‘in’.  We’ve a few items to plant still, but the bulk of the work is done…except for the fence and except for the pumpkins, which we know need a spot to wander and grow big and except for figuring out the watering and except for the growing and the eating!  I will be working on fencing, as the dogs like to run right through the garden and the cats like to poop in it, which is sort of gross.  My vision is for another picket fence, the antique bed I scored at the farm auction for a gate, nice markers, straightly planted lines and poles for beans to climb, a whimsical scarecrow, oh and a flower bed across the front… a Pinterest pinning fantasy.  Yes, well, this is what we really have:

Beds for a gate – check

Nice markers – check

Straightly planted lines – sort of check

Poles for beans to climb – check

A whimsical scarecrow – no

Any kind of scarecrow? – no

Flower seeds planted – check

Flower seeds stepped on and stomped on while dealing with fence issues – check

Picket fence – NO

All it will need to be complete is mostly patience……figures.

I did start to work on the ‘temporary’ front fence on my own.  (‘Temporary’ meaning… I don’t want this to be here for next year’s vegetable garden, but I am practicing patience).   I am sort of proud of my new-found fencing abilities and banging the fence posts in with the fence-post-banger-inner is always kind of fun.  I put in 4 and had to move 2, moving them is actually the hard part.  I had to rely on my trusty assistant, Jubal to help pull the fence posts out and trust me, I was a tad bit more careful the second time I banged them in.  I installed the front and side part of the ‘temporary’ fence with left over wire netting (I don’t really know what it is called) that we saved from the ugly old dog run.  It worked well and I love re-using the stuff we have here.

The back fence will begin to be built tonight.  This will be the non-temporary picket fence, as we have the wood and we want the protection for the plants as a sort of wind break.  Digging the post holes is an easy job for the two of us, but I could well mess it up on my own, so occasionally I get smart enough to not try something, that will have to be redone… not always, but sometimes.

The vegetable garden has been an item we’ve been talking about and dreaming about long before we packed our first box to move.  To have the seeds in the ground has been immensely rewarding and exciting for us!  Turning the old dog run I found “not particularly pleasant to view” (which means I found it ugly and I hated that I had to look at it right out our bedroom window) into something that will be growing and exciting and someday… Pinterest pin-able….is what they say in Ellensburg… ‘even better’!