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.

Planting the Garden - Day 1

Saturday was another great productive day on the farm for us! After working the delivered top soil into the plot with the new tiller attachment over and over throughout the morning, Hubby had the garden area ready for cutting rows.





All the while this was going on, I had started setting out and planting in the raised beds. I planted all of the strawberries in one bed, one tomato plant in each bed, all of my sweet potatoes in the 2nd bed, a couple of cabbages in the same, and then my herbs (rosemary and cilantros) along with one squash and one zucchini in the 3rd bed. You see you have to really pay attention to how big the actual plant will grow to in order to know how much room you need to fit with the other plants into the same bed. Mathematics in the garden!



Once the beds were fully planted, Hubby had the garden rowed about the same time...



So I moved on into the garden and proceeded to plant every last one of the other plants we had on hand: More tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and the remaining squash, zucchini and cabbages.



At the same time, Hubby was seeding the perimeters around the garden and raised bed areas with fescue seeds to try and stabilize the soil with grass.



I forgot to mention I made a trip to the local feed store earlier in the morning to check out their veggie seeds. I picked up seeds for sweet corn, pole beans and pink-eyed peas. After planting all of the other veggie plants, I managed to plant the seeds for the sweet corn. I have to say what a pain-staking process! I do not know how farmers could stoop over for hours on end planting seeds. OUCH!



This was the position I stood in for what felt like hours on end. Of course, I had some help (notice dogs- one who just wanted to sleep between the rows and the other wanted to eat the seeds)... But, I know there has to be a better way!!




These were most of my views of the dogs while seeding towards the end of the day. They were so tired from watching us plant the garden! And this girl was beat too: aching back, knees and hips. Ouch!
But, the view at the end of the day made it all worth the effort!