I could say I was busy here, there and everywhere. And I could say it was the weathers fault too. After-all, we did have a very wet and soggy summer. Seemed like it rained every Saturday and twice as much on Sunday. But that just isn't how it happened. See, I was, in point of fact, lazy. That's right, I am a man and I am admitting to falling prey to laziness. It happens. But, I understand that it's real hard to grasp the concept of being lazy about gardening for an ENTIRE summer. It is what it was.
So now, I am left with the fallout. When I was taking the pictures below of the state of the gardens as I found them, it struck me that I should be embarrassed. After some mental flagellation, I decided to accept what it is and move on. No sense in bemoaning the past as they say. So, be that as it may, this is the state of my gardens in all their natural beauty.
Not a pretty site indeed. As you can notice, the ground is wet. That is the story of this summer. It has rained consistently and heavy the entire summer. I have friends who have gardens and they say their plants/crops were very much affected by the wet soils. Low yields and yellowing plants were the mainstays of the summer. Not to mention the tomatoes which were good one day and then broken open the next from excessive rains. Now, to be frank here, my beds were absolutely overrun with weeds several times. I had to resort to using my lawnmower to control the weed growth as the soil was just too wet for my Mantis rototiller. Even using that, I had issues keeping it under control.
I am under the impression that if I had gardened this year, I would have been very upset with the way I imagine it would have turned out. So maybe, this was God's way of relieving my stress. He does, as it is said, work in mysterious ways.
So, to work I went and with the given wet ground, I had to go the old school route to get the beds drying out. I can't just throw the seed into the cleared ground. So I brought out what I consider the mother of all gardening hoes. See the monster below.
Looks can be deceiving here. This is a very old hoe that I inherited from my wife's grandfathers' garage. It's made of heavy iron and is very industrial. But I will tell you this, it is super effective when it comes to weeding and breaking up tough soils.
So the hoe and I went to work on the beds. It took a very concerted effort, but I finally removed what I have to call a very stubborn group of weeds. After about 4 hours of tilling with the hoe, I was able to clear all of the weeds away from the beds. After raking them over several days to remove the dead weed debris, I then seeded in the Winter Rye for the cover crop I use each winter. I use a rotary lawn seeder to broadcast the seeds as best as possible. And after seeding the beds, I cover the seeds with about an inch of peat moss to dissuade birds from stealing them.
It's been about a week since I seeded the 3 beds. After waiting out the rain this afternoon, I went out to check on how the Rye was growing. All in all, the rye seemed to be doing good. I used 1 year old seed so I expected a little germination issue. I have to be honest, there were a few more areas than I anticipated. It probably had to do with the fact that I was a little late in the season getting it in. But with that taken into account, I was pleased with what I encountered.
The brown areas are where I seeded in new seeds earlier this month. There are plants coming up but there were bare spots around them so I decided to experiment to see if I could get thicker coverage. Again, I should of seeded about mid September but was just not able to get to it. We shall see how it works out in about a week. We're supposed to get rains tomorrow and Tuesday morning so that may work in my favor. As I say, nothing ventured - nothing gained.
Well, that's all there is for now. The gardens should keep me busy for about another month so I hope I can get it all done. Happy gardening to everyone!
