Volunteers Help in the Garden

This late spring’s planting season weather has been strange. Frosts in May and the 90 degrees two weeks later. Tomatoes got a very late start with the summer heat approaching. Three of 30 early planted tomatoes have survived. The volunteers don’t mind at all. They come just for the joy of gardening. There is nothing strange about the urge to see things grow and get soil in your hands.

The kind people at Exencial Wealth Advisers have adopted garden! They come once per week to volunteer. In the last two weeks they helped finish planting (90 tomatoes, 100 pepper plants, tomatillos, okra, squash and almost 500 feet of corn!) and mulched.

Weeding and cultivating are the chores they took on this week. The picture above shows D’Anna Boone and Ryan Fuller. D’Anna used her hoe to cultivate potatoes, hilling soil around the plants and clearing weeds. Ryan weeded tomatoes, and I think (in the picture) is noticing the low hanging storm clouds moving our way. Within 15 minutes of that picture, we we swamped in a downpour. We hastily loaded up the buggies and sped for the barn. We were all soaked.

The unpredictable weather continues and our enthusiasm remains strong. A small sign of things to come are ripe strawberries! They are sparse and won’t make a crop, but next year they will.

Small as it may be, this is the garden’s first product.

The sweet peas in the background will be the first real crop. The trellising has worked perfectly as almost all of the plants have attached to it and are blooming! I wonder if they need side dressing of fertilizer? The peas, onions and potatoes seemed to have disregarded the frosty weather and look pretty good.

Just visible in the foreground are asparagus fronds. The Martha Washington is emerging for the first time.