A Question of Faith

There is a part of me that always doubts that I will get anything out of the garden that's edible. Between the weather, bugs, and plant diseases I always feel like something is going to doom the garden and cause it to waste away. Last year it was a plague of persistent bunnies that wiped out everything except the mustard and tomatoes. This year cutworms took out a number of my greens and aphids have been weakening everything but the garden is holding up pretty well. I did a lot of weeding yesterday, and still have plenty more to do. The weather has been rainy and the splash back has the leaves of everything covered in dirt, which I know is bad. Still overall it keeps growing and for every setback another plant seems to leap forward. I just need to have faith that the plants will do what they need to do.

I'm not sure I could call this a pea tower anymore. It is more a pea tangle attached to a tower. The back peas are in the tower and then the rest of the peas are holding on to each other in a chain as they reach towards the sun. There are plenty of blooms and it looks like there will be a decent harvest of peas soon.

The potatoes have been going gang-busters, but unfortunately there are invaders attacking them. The three-lined potato beetles have been breeding on wild ground cherries for generations in the back of the garden by the shed. Each day I come out and squish the ones I can, but they are really quick beetles. I'm looking forward to digging these up in the fall:)

I spent hours this weekend carefully weeding the sides of the tomato bed. I had to be very careful as they are full of carrot seedlings mixed with grass and other weeds. With the seedlings been so fragile it was a delicate process of pulling some and snipping others off at the roots. I still need to weed the middle of the row, but that can be done with a stirrup hoe and should be fairly quick.

The rainy weather was causing the plants to start to topple over, so the weave has started. I'm so much faster at it after a year of learning and can weave a whole row in the time it used to take me to do a section or two. One key I learned last year is to use sisal twine and not hemp. The hemp will stretch and sag while the sisal will remain taught. I tried using the hemp because it feels softer, but found it also burned the plants more when they rubbed against it than the sisal did even though it feels rougher.

I try to take photos of the garden every week so I can look back and really see how far things have come. It helps me to see the growth over time and renews my faith that all the effort is worth it.