Send good thoughts to the garden!

Arkansas has been pretty lucky this year weather-wise. We haven't had any major storms - unlike last spring.

We did have some serious storms move through tonight though. Luckily, central Arkansas did not have any tornadoes but we had a lot of wind and a lot of hail. I kept picturing our poor little peppers being ripped to shreds by apple-sized (yes, apple-sized) hail.

In a side note, how do you like the new layout? Yay or nay?

UPDATE: Forget the garden, send good thoughts to Mena, AR instead.

Watering Woes

One big goal for this year is to figure out our watering system. Last year, we were plagued with watering problems. The water pressure at the farm is so strong that our cheap-o hoses were constantly busting, creating "Lake 25x50" instead of "Garden Plot 25x50."

When we finally bought a decent hose, we showed a remarkable inability to learn from our mistakes and hooked it up to a cheap-o sprinkler. The water pressure caused the sprinkler to rise up and flop around in the dirt so that we had to drive spikes through it in order to keep it stable.

A million other little problems kept creeping up with our sprinkler system last year of which I will spare you the details.

So, this year we have created a new watering system. We put two poles in the ground in the middle of the garden. Initially, we attached oscillating sprinkler heads but these proved to be too powerful for our little space.


Then, Adam brought out the very first watering sprinkler-thing we ever used: The Pound of Rain. This he haphazardly attached to one of the poles and it watered the front half of our garden beautifully without also watering our neighbor's plots.

So, we bought another Pound of Rain (so that we'll have one in front and one in back) and found two tiki torches (on the side of the road) which will work better than the two poles when it comes to holding the Pound of Rain.

We are going to test it out today. If it works, we are going to bury the ugly bright yellow hose so that we aren't constantly tripping over it. Wish us luck!

UPDATE: New watering system works wonderfully. We weren't able to bury the eyesore of a hose tonight but hopefully we'll get to it next weekend.

Cold Peppers

Winter decided to make a final push here in Arkansas. The temperatures on Sunday fell dramatically and the whole state was under a hard frost warning for both Sunday and Monday night.

So, we ventured out to the farm in a swirl of bone-cold wind (particularly jarring since we've been enjoying mid-70s weather) to protect our peppers and tomatoes with homemade cloches.

Our plants owe a debt of gratitude to our addiction to seltzer water because we had a large quantity of empty plastic bottles on hand. Adam, ever the boy scout, tells me he was saving these for just this purpose. We'll remove them on Wednesday when the temperatures return to their normal springtime haunts.

Picture of the Day

Look what I found wiggling through our dirt!

We named him Cletus.

After a brief talk (in which I told Cletus I hope I don't accidentally spear him with a garden tool when next we meet) I bid him goodbye and wished him many worm children.

One Tomato, Dead Tomato

Not sure what happened to this hapless tomato but it just did not make it!


Our other tomatoes look great though. You win some, you lose some.

In other news, today we planted potatoes! Yukon gold, red and sweet potatoes.


We used a similar method as we did last year:
1. Cut off portions of the potato with several "eye sprouts",
2. Plant the potato chunks with the "eye sprouts" facing up
3. Cover with dirt and mulch.

Our potatoes did well last year so I'm hoping we are just as successful this year - particularly with those sweets!

Up next:
1. More planting (flowers, herbs and beans)
2. Figure out our watering system