Friday, June 19, 2009

Jimmy's No-till Garden

We heard that it rained every single day while we were off on our Trip West and we're glad that it rained here at home and not on us. lol. When we came home Jimmy of course went out to look at how his garden was doing...how his tomato plants & a variety of pepper plants were doing, but he couldn't find them for the weeds. The weeds had taken over his garden making the vegetable plants barely visible. I took a picture of it and he threatened me, yes muah, with harm if I should put it up on my blog, so you won't see his Western Garden here. Just take my word for it, it wasn't a pretty site. He began calling it his Western Garden because it was the result of us going West and leaving his newly planted garden behind.

Jimmy could see that it was going to be a BIG JOB weeding around his plants so he left the garden alone until this morning. The weeds were so big and stalky that he had to just break the stalky weeds down making a foot clearance around each plant so they could get some sunlight. To his surprise he found the two bell peppers pictured above, several large green tomatoes and some nice banana peppers which he said needed some sunlight because they were a whitish color instead of that nice yellow they are supposed to be. They were large enough to pick but he'd like them to get yellow first. I wonder if they taste different when they're whitish?

The neighbor next door was out working in his weed-free garden, so Jimmy had to of course shout over to him and show him the bell peppers. Jimmy also laughed as he told the neighbor that he thinks this no-till method of gardening is more productive. The neighbor came over, took a look and was surprised to see all of the veggies that were hidden among the weeds. The neighbor hasn't harvested anything yet from his garden, but is now considering letting the weeds grow a little.


I knew that I had taken a second picture yesterday of the second waterlily bloom but I didn't find it until this morning when I checked my email. Since I used my cell phone to take the picture, I emailed it to my computer inside so it would be there, but I emailed it to an email address that I rarely use. Don't ask me why I did that. Maybe it was just there handy.

We have three different colors of waterlilys, pink, yellow & white, but so far we've only seen the pink. I hope the others are okay. Last year we had that unknown creature in our watergarden that would bite Jimmy's finger each time he reached in there to cut off the old lily bloom stalks. I think we now know what it was....Another neighbor two doors down told us that her pet turtle got loose and disappeared. I think it made our watergarden his home and he ate all of our very large water snails before he moved on, probably to the creek. I'm glad it's gone because I didn't like the idea of being bit everytime I wanted to check something in the watergarden. And how about our poor little cats drinking the water? I wonder if they ever felt a nibble on their tongues?

3 comments:

Peter said...

How unsporting of him, tell Jimmy I thought your header picture was his garden.

Sandy Hatcher-Wallace said...

Peter...Jimmy only wishes that my header picture was HIS GARDEN.

Kerri said...

I think those peppers must be the result of all that wonderful ferilizer the kitties so generously provided :)
Our veggie garden is wet and full of weeds, but Ross is working on getting rid of them...slowly but surely. We're not mulching with hay this year because of his lung problem and the weeds are having a heyday.
AND...a rotten woodchuck ate our peas and is working on the beans. I surprised him in the compost pile last week, and a couple of days later we saw him running out of the far end of the garden while Ross was weeding on the other end. AND...Ross found deer tracks in the soil the other day, and the spinach has disappeared. Bah humbug!
AND....(unrelated to the veggie garden) we have a gray fox that's been trying to catch itself a cat dinner! There's far too much wild life around here!
Speaking of your new header..it looks just like an Australian bush scene. Where was it taken?