Food

After the things that happened in my marriage, I find that I have one almost instantaneous reaction to cuts in our budget.  I find ways to make sure that we will have the food we need, especially food that is safe for my son to eat.  I had already started multiple garden beds before we got the horrible news a couple of months ago.  Now I've started more and added fruit.

Right now we are up to 6 1/2 garden beds, all fully planted.  One is about to be emptied and replanted with new crops.  I'm learning about what works here and what doesn't.  Sometime today I will be going to Lowe's to get connectors so that I can put up the trellising for the tomatoes and cucumbers which are growing very quickly.  I'm debating putting up a simple low arch trellis over the sweet potatoes to give the plants more room to spread leaves.  I'm hoping the crops will help with redirecting food money to things that I can't grow or raise - yet.

This weekend I went to a local flea/farmer's market that has a big crowd of vendors on Memorial Day weekend.  There are always vendors with fruit trees and bushes.  The only problem is that you can't be sure that the tree you are getting is actually what it is marked.  Oh, a peach tree will be a peach tree but it might not be the cultivar that it is marked.  But the budget is severely limited and I felt a very, very urgent need to try to get most of my "orchard" in the ground.  Trees from these vendors run $8 - $10.  So I took the gamble.

If the labels are correct.  I now have two Damson plums, one Methley plum, one Redskin peach, one Elberta Peach, two Climax blueberries, one Tifblue blueberry, and one Premier blueberry.  I spent Sunday putting in the plums.  Then I spent yesterday putting in the blueberries.  Yes it took all day because I have clay for soil.  So I had to dig big, deep holes.  Then the holes were half filled with compost.  Then I added sulfur to acidify.  Then I mixed the original dirt into this mix.  At the end of the day all four were planted.  Today I will be putting down weed cover and mulch.

There is room for three more blueberries but I will be waiting until next spring to fill those spots.  I want to make sure that the current plants can cross pollinate one another.  If they can't I will pay the extra to grab three that I know the cultivar.  I already know that three of the plants are early crop blueberries.  They already had berries on them that were turning blue. 

Sometime this week I will do the peaches.  That is another all day project because I will have to cut down and remove a large Pampas grass before I can plant the peaches.  The grass is at least 5 feet round and will be a pain to remove.  But then the peaches go in.  And then I'll also be able to put up the bed for the muscadines, although that will probably wait for a few weeks.

All of this is added to my two pears, two cherries, one fig, three grapes, and full bed of strawberries.  And I'll most likely add more blackberries and raspberries.

I'm not a great gardener by any means.  If the plants are indoors they are almost guaranteed to die.  But I try.  And I learn from my failings.  So hopefully, the so-so garden things this year will be much much better next year.  I'm already applying some past lessons to some crops.  For example, last year my sweet potatoes got overrun by weeds.  The plants never really grew any.  So this year I put landscape cloth down until the plants really got going.  Then I gently pulled the landscape cloth up and let the plants take over.  The bed is doing fabulous now.  I'm also put landscape cloth down for the cucumbers and tomatoes.  It's worth the expense to avoid the extra weeding since I am the only person working on it.  But I reused the cloth from the sweet potatoes for the cucumbers.  No point in wasting it.

Anyways, it all comes back to food.  My yard is slowly being planted with things that are edible, which is my preference.  Yet those edible plants also serve the same purpose as the non edible.  The blueberries are a protective hedge around my front porch.  The blackberries and raspberries will become the "fence" between my yard and my neighbor's yard, replacing forsythia and spirea plants.  I will most likely be putting mints down to serve as ground cover.  And it all looks like normal landscaping.