The Garden, Huzzah!

The Whole Garden

Beautiful tilled soil

Yay! I finally got a garden planted. It's my first garden since around 1996.

Our neighbor, Larry, brought his tractor over a couple of weeks ago and broke the ground. Uncle Charles brought his tiller over this morning, and Max tackled that. Unk was good enough to stay and help raking the clods. Max likely would have had a heart attack without the help <ducking and running).  I am deeply thankful to both of them.

After they did their thing, I had to man up and go outside and plant. Pity I can't just wiggle my nose and have it done. Although it started sprinkling, it didn't rain hard enough to stop the planting. So in the garden at this time are:

• 13 tomato plants ( I misplaced one. How does one do that????)
• 3 Ancho Pepper plants
• 2 white eggplants
• 3 purple eggplants
• 3 squash plants
• 1 cucumber plant
• 1 hill of sweet pumpkins
• 1/3 row of Hutterite Peas
• 2/3 row of Ky. Bush Green Beans

I need to fill in the second row of tomato plants. I want a lot! Bring 'em on - sauce, juice and tomatoes here we come. I need to plant a row of okra. I need to fill in with a few more cucumber plants. If I can find them, I want to plant some pimento peppers. I want to get a few more green pepper plants. I also found and ordered some cream pea seeds.

The Hutterite Peas are a pale pea that the Hutterites developed that supposedly makes a fantastic bean soup. I bought it because the place I was ordering from, www.seedsavers.org, didn't have any cream peas. However, today I did a bit of googling and discovered the cream peas we eat in Memphis are also more commonly known as cowpeas. I found the cream or cowpeas at www.victoryseeds.com and placed an order for those seeds, along with the okra seed and some Mortgage Lifter Tomato seeds for next year.

As an aside, I like to order from these two companies because they specialize in heritage seeds and non-hybrid seeds. That means the plants I grow are non-GMO (not genetically modified), and the seeds produced by the plants can be saved for the next season.

This page (click here) has the peas. I got the Sa-Dandy Cowpeas. The cowpeas were developed for our hot southern summer temperatures. In Memphis, all I've ever heard them called are cream peas. They're a small pale creamy pea, about the size of black-eyed peas. However, unlike the black-eyed peas, the cream peas are, well, creamy. They don't have the particular twang BEPs do, nor do they have the large black eye. Actually, now that I think of it, they're more like a pale version of purple hull peas.

Until the seeds come in I'll be trying to get rid of the clods surrounding the garden. Ouch. Eventually I'd love to put a white picket fence around it. Yeah, in 10 years and my dreams.

Oh, yes, and I'm eating Ibuprofen like candy tonight. I used my own redneck seed planter and didn't spend as much time as I thought I'd have to bent over, but planting those transplants couldn't be done with squatting and bending, dammit.