Good afternoon, good morning, good evening wherever you may be Hive community. It has been a little while since I or @parsons86 have posted here the garden is our first priority and the weather has been very up and down over the past few months. In the beginning of the season we had a hard time hardening off some of our plants because there were temperature swings from day to night of at least 20° Fahrenheit. Eventually we were able to harden off plants and start seeds in our live soil beds. We also till the new plot of land, I was going to upload pictures for you guys but I'm having an issue uploading my pictures through the app. Hopefully when I get to some Wi-Fi I will have better luck because I have some great pictures to show.
In the meantime let me tell you a little bit about what we have done over the past couple months with our garden.. we have amended the beds with a special topsoil mix we got from a friend, compost from a local farm, blood meal, feather meal, kelp meal and humic acids. The new plot of land was filled with roots, rocks and a lot of clay. We were able to get the roots cut out some rocks pulled out and added some compost to help break up the soil, it is doing much better now and where we planted we filled in with dry amendments and worm castings. The worms in our boxes are plentiful and we are transferring some to the other plot to help with the breakup of the ground also in the fall we will plant daikon radishes as a cover crop to help to continue to loosen the ground.
The past few weeks in New England has been hot and humid both day and night with many thunderstorms everyday. This has actually been helpful as we have not needed to use our irrigation system and most plants are loving the heat. Although the heat has brought on many pests, every day when I come home from work I try to examine the plants and get rid of the pests. We have also been brewing a compost tea containing worm castings soil from our beds and a dry amendment to use as a feed and a foliar spray to help with disease and pests.
So far in the garden we have a box and partial shade with lettuce, peas, carrots, beets, Swiss chard and radishes. In the three other boxes we have eggplant, tomatoes, hot peppers and various flowers. Our our live soil mixture seems to be doing well when you dig in there's plenty of life worms and other such critters and because of this humidity we have seen lots of different fungi pop up over the past couple of weeks which is a sign of a healthy soil.
In the large plot that we just tilled this year we have pumpkins, squash, corn, cucumbers, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers, pole beans and sunflowers.
The plants in the boxes are doing a little bit better but I'm impressed with the plants in the new field considering how hard the soil was.
In one separate box near the house we have planted onions, bush beans, hot peppers and sweet red bell peppers, nasturtiums and basil. Also I forgot to add which are growing very vigorously right next to that bed we have two 12-ft rows of potatoes we have had to heal them almost every day as they are growing quite fast although I think the heat is starting to get to them because they have flowered but eventually it will cool down I keep telling myself hahaha.
My mother is a professional photographer of landscapes and a professional Baker she sells some of her photography at a local nursery with very good quality plants. The owner gave her some hot pepper plants that she started this year from seed, from a friend from India that he brought back. I think the name qas jwalla. I am excited to see how they turn out and to harvest seed from them for next year. Basically all the brassicas in the garden have small caterpillars eating them and they really like to blend in, all but one thing they aren't blending into is the red cabbage, I'm happy I picked the red over the green at least for that. @parsons86 has received a tractor from his uncle, I think it is a 1960 simplicity lawn boss it is a very well made tractor and has a mowing deck, a rototiller, a plow for snow and we are about to acquire a plow for the field to use with it. We have had several belts break on it as they are old and it has been difficult to find the OEM belts for it or they are very expensive. We are making do with what we have for now if anyone does know a good place to find original belts for simplicity mowers of that era please tap in it would be greatly appreciated.
As I said earlier I was not able to upload pictures which is upsetting because I was really excited to but I hope this post can help you guys visualize what we have going on.
Early next week I will have access to Wi-Fi and will upload the pictures to go with this post and any updates I may have. Thank you for reading have a wonderful weekend. If anyone has any questions about gardening or live soil shoot me a message, we are always happy to help people learn and to learn from other people. I think that's what makes the world goes around. This is Daney Boy and @parsons86 signing off until next time grow grow grow!!! ✌️🌱🌻🌾🌝🌈🤗🙏🧑🌾🌺🌼🌻🍁🍄🌄🌦️🌎🦉🐞🦋🐛🕷️🐝