A Dream Come True.

I have always wanted to grow pumpkins. I love all things pumpkin. Pumpkin beer, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin jam, pumpkin cream cheese, you name it pumpkin... I love it. So why not plant our own pumpkin patch? And today that is exactly what we did! It truly is a dream come true.

We chose to till up a large square of our front 40 for this patch... Why? Because the soil is so much more richer than the soil in the middle of the property where our current garden is planted. And why is it so rich? Because the family we bought the land from used to have hogs and chickens in this area years ago! The soil is soft and sandy unlike the hard red clay of the other.

Lush soil surrounded by thick lush grass.

And here is Hubby explaining to me exactly how we are going to lay out the rows with the planter attachment we borrowed. He had it all figured out before we started.

And the planting and fertilizing begins!

We had some issues with the attachment dropping the seeds and digging in the rows correctly as the soil was not on a perfect flat plane. So we switched it up and Hubby followed behind the attachment to make sure it was doing its job.

Once all the seeds and fertilizer were dropped into the rows, we went back and walked each row to make sure the seeds were covered. The middle rows were planted with two types of corn. The rest of the rows on one side of the patch next to the corn was planted with white pumpkins and the other side was with orange jack-o-lantern pumpkins. There was also one rows of sunflowers.

After planting we finished cutting the rest of the grass in the front 40 and called it a day.

This Week's Harvests

Pain- Staking Saturday.

After Friday evening's storms did their damage, we picked up and did what needed to be done. Remember the bamboo from last month? We finally put it to use...

This was before the corn staking began...

And this was afterwards.... beat down, dirty, sweaty, hamstrings killing me, ready for a cold one. It was painstaking work... but, hopefully with some sunlight and the good Lord's help we might have some corn from this planting! If not, we accept it and will go buy from our farmer friends in town. So what did we learn from this? We probably did not plant the seeds deep enough. The rows are WAY too close together. And dirt has to be added around the bottom of the stalks so many weeks after they are planted. This helps support the stalks. We also learned Mother Nature gives us her precious rain, but she also gives us her high and fast winds. And therefore, always be prepared... physically in the garden and mentally to be able to deal with it. And having a back up plan helps too. Hence, our second planting of corn on 6/11 and having great friends in town that have a bumper crop of corn!

And the good Lord does have a sense of humor too... look what greeted us after we left the farm yester-evening after all that hard work. Amen.

Destruction

Not so good morning on Wilsons Farms. Mother Nature can be very cruel... The storms took its anger out on our corn.

Just Arrived!

Guess what showed up in the US Mail yesterday? Part of our upcoming project! Cannot wait to break ground tomorrow!! Stay tuned...

Gearing Up for the Next Project

So if you're wondering why we are borrowing a friends planter attachment, we have a new project brewing on the horizon! We are only a couple of days from cutting in another garden spot... As you can see we spent a little time earlier this week staking it out.

Carefully making sure all the sides line up parallel to the driveway... More later on this project!

Onto the garden update: The pole beans now have beautiful little flower blooms.

The peas now have pretty little white flower blooms.

Another one of those nasty big ol' beetles was found. Yuck!

And we give many thanks for today's bountiful harvest. Amen.

A True Redneck!

Guess who drove the tractor to town this morning? Yep, my Hubby is a true redneck! He drove it to town today to pick up an attachment from a farmer friend who has a large garden on the main drag. The attachment will plant seeds and fertilizer in our garden rows. Too funny watching him cruising at 15mph on a major highway!

Great Weekend!

The weekend was spent doing our weekly cutting of the front 40 (a.k.a. our front yard/field of 3+ acres of field grass) plus weed-eating, bush-hogging, etc. Of course, we spent some time in the garden... little bit of weeding, little bit of watering, a lot of watching and planning for next year...

Some of the progress around the garden over the weekend:

The corn is THIS high now.

The peas are growing their blooms now.

Sooooo many peas now! They are so full and big that their runners and blooms are going everywhere!

The cabbages are growing their center heads now.

Event the honey bees were getting in on the garden food supply! They were all over the cilantro on Saturday.

And they were all over the cucumber blooms on Sunday.

Other fun farm work over the weekend included cutting down two old stumps in the front 40. Hubby enjoyed using his chainsaw and then the tractor to haul them to the burn pile back near the barn. The first stump was from a tree that rotted and broke off a couple of years ago.

The next stump proved to be a much larger task... This massive two trunk pecan tree was struck by lightening twice over the past 3 or so years. The first time it dropped onto the old shack barn on the front of our land. The second time, it fell onto it again. It was long overdue to cut the high stump. Hubby had no problem taking care of business.

Time to push it off... Awesome work!

Cutting the ends off to be able to haul it to the burn pile...

FINALLY!! What a job!

Today's Harvest!

Today's Harvest!

How Does Your Garden Grow?

As I am sure you all are tired of only seeing our harvest photos.... time for a real update I guess.

Earlier in the week we did a few things in between rain storms... Needless to say the garden was pretty muddy. So anything more than just checking plants for veggies large enough to pick and training running plants to run the right direction happened outside the garden.

We put mulch all around the fruit bushes to help with weed control. 6 bags of mulch for 12 blueberry bushes and 2 apple trees.

And then I found another one of these under the large leaves of one of the zucchini plants when I was looking for large zucchini to pick. Yuck!

I had to get Hubby to remove him... Those things are huge and nasty!!

Lots of veggies coming in now...

Lots of peppers!