Gardening?

It was going to be so much fun. The climate here is great for gardeners. We knew that because when we moved here we had a very large lawn that had been nurtured for years. It was trim, manicured and looked nice. That's why we bought the place, it really had curb appeal.

So Jerry bought his stock, cantaloupes and honeydew melon, green beans, green peppers, corn, and of course tomatoes. We did not buy any squash, people around here tend to overgrow them and we are the recipients of their excesses. Well we're just two people that don't always eat dinner so two squash go a long way! Anyway, I digress, back to our gardening story. All got planted after the frost and before summer was well on its way to some hot days (so we thought). We had been a little hot last year in July and August when the temperatures soared to 106 and stuck there. We found out that living at 5,000+ feet in the Rocky Mountains has a little different affect on the weather than living at 1,700 (barely) in West Texas! In Arizona the temps would fall at night so that sleeping was possible. . . NOT in Texas. It went from 106 down to 94 or so and was miserable.

We are not ones to abuse air conditioners, in fact we'll wait until we are really uncomfortable until we turn one on. We would have to turn on the air half an hour before we went to bed, just so we could sleep. We then slept with the air on all night, just so we could sleep. So we were preparing for this "heat wave" and hoping we would harvest everything before the heat "hit"!

It was great, we got rain. Everything started peeking through, the carrots and onions first. Jerry was happy, he had put a lot of fertilizer into the rich soil to help it with nutrients for his project. He could see that it was worth the three trips to the neighbor to get his cow manure that had been, shall we say maturing? Then we got more rain. Suffice to say that the rain was constant all spring. It rained every weekend, hardly ever got a drop from Monday through Friday when I was at work in the office, no, every weekend we got it. It dumped on us every weekend and it wasn't small showers either. We not only live in the "Bible Belt" we are also,it appears, on the edge of the "Tornado Belt". I myself fit into the "tight belt" category and Jerry, as everyone knows is in the "having a belt" category! It got so wet that Jerry couldn't walk into his garden to pull weeds. It was just too soggy, so very soggy, soggy, soggy. We weren't too concerned, we would have Monday through Thursday to let it dry out and every time Jerry said "it should be dry enough by tomorrow to pull weeds" guess what happened? Yes, it rained, and rained.

I do love rain and I was really enjoying this year of rain. The cotton farmers were going to be happy, even though the hay farmers were concerned. Too much rain and they can't cut the hay, it would mould if its put up wet. I was not too concerned, Jerry would get those weeds cut and we'd have a great harvest. Got to, look at all the rain we're having.

The picture above is the result of rain on Jerry's vegetable garden. I am 5 feet tall and some of those weeds are as tall as me! He is not able to venture among these giants to harvest his crop. We got some wonderfully sweet honeydews. A few enjoyable cantaloupes. Enough tomatoes for me to make four pints of my own recipe for tomato sauce. We were never able to find any carrots or onions. Sadly the green beans and corn never made it. Our neighbor Robert would come to visit and he told Jerry that green beans and corn don't do well here. Seems like he was right, he would know, he's lived in Texas a long time. So we learned that we won't plant a garden without pre-planning for inclimate weather. We will put down weed cloth and probably spend $1,000 putting in raised beds so we can harvest a crop of tomatoes that would have cost us $40 at the store. I know, we were never too good at economics. Why does doing things yourself to "save money" always end up being so expensive?