Organic gardening is tough!  I swear, I drive by the neighbor's garden and every time I look at it it has doubled in size.  I'm so jealous!  They also don't really have any weeds AND I never even see them out there working!  How do they do it?  Tim tells me that they must be using Miracle Gro and weed killers and that I shouldn't try to compare our garden to theirs.  They've also probably got great soil because they have had their garden in the same plot for years and years. 

I shouldn't complain...our garden is better that last year, so we're headed in the right direction.  Our cool season crops really got away from us and so all we really ended up with was lots of lettuce.  What we had was delicious though!  The potatoes really got taken over by weeds and I think they had too much competition for water that the potatoes kind of stopped growing.  We finally gave up on them and dug them all.  It did manage to produce a small basket full though.  And the first round of onions got quite trampled by the chickens and dogs that would run in the garden after Honey, our milk cow, broke the fence down so they only produced a small bunch of tiny bulbs.  I also gave up waiting for the cabbage to grow and finally picked it.  We've got a good bunch of small heads of cabbage though to eat.  And the broccoli, which was first eaten by the peacocks, bolted before the heads got bigger than just 2 inches wide, so I just picked the leaves to cook and cut the rest down. Well, at least it's something!

Grass clippings mulchBut the warm season crops...dare I say...are looking pretty good!  I decided that mulch was my friend and that I would need a lot of it in order to keep the weeds from taking over.  I've been experimenting with different types and found that grass clippings are the best!  Shredded paper worked pretty well, but was hard to get lots of it.  Wood shavings did not work at all and the weeds have grown right through.  Straw mulch was cheap and easy to use, but sprouted and now I have wheat growing all in the melon row - Darn!  I did read too late though that you can presprout the bales of wheat straw by watering them every day and leaving them in the sun.  Let all the seeds sprout and then when you spread the straw in the garden you will disturb the sprouts enough that they will die.  And dead leaves as mulch work very wellStraw mulch sprouted! as long as you chop them up first.  The grass is the best for me though because it is easy for us to get a lot of clippings and you have to spread it on very thick in order for it to work.  It really smooshes down as it dries out.  Also, we'll be able to till this in after the crops are done and it will add great organic matter to the soil.  In the meantime, it keeps the weed seeds from germinating, helps keep the soil from drying out, and is providing a great habitat for beneficial insects and worms.  Yes!  We have worms!  They have started moving in and I'm so happyWhat happens without mulch about it!! 

So the yellow squash and zucchini are the first producers and we're quickly being taken over by them so I have to find some good ways of preserving them.  I've been on top of the squash bugs and go out every morning and squish the adults I see.  I aslo use duct tape to pull the eggs off of the leaves.  So far, not one single egg has hatched and I only see one or two adult bugs each morning.  I learned a good lesson about the mulch though - pull it away from the base of the plant a few inches.  I didn't do this and it kept the stems of the squash plants too wet and after a good rain they started to rot.  I think we'll lose about 3 plants from this, but luckily the others are still looking strong.  We've also got a few small cucumbers starting, one little okra, and couple of small jalepenos!  There is one watermelon that is about 3 inches big and I'm going to put a paper plate under it to stop it from rotting on the bottom.  And the tomoatoes have grown tall enough that Tim has had to make three levels to the Florida weave trellis.  So I'm trying not to jinx it, but if things continue in this direction, then we just might actually have veggies to eat this year!!!