This Year.

[sheepdog 10]

It has been a very interesting growing season to say the least this year. If you had access to water for any gardens or other plantings, it wasn't too bad, but boy if you didn't have a way to water this year you were really wasting your time and energy trying to plant anything. Fortunatly this year I remembered to string the soaker hose down threw my flower bed before I seeded it, unlike last year when it somehow slipped my feeble mind. I wouldn't of had a single flower if I hadn't remembered it this year. All things considered my flower bed was spectacular this year. I started getting some new colors of zinnia blooms that I have never seen before, there were some big flowers that were absolutly drop dead gourgous. Even though I seeded it late, I had a really long bloom season. I normally dig my cannas ever fall, but didn't get that done last year, so when we tilled it up this spring we just tilled a much narrower path next to the cannas, and then I seeded that part. It worked out really well because I had a lot of volunteer flower plants come up, Cosmos mostly, that added a lot of nice early color, though oddly, none of the early volunteer plants ever set any seed, which I thought as reallly strange. I have strong tendencies to lean toward the organic style growing, but this year I broke down and used a fungcide on my zinnias, which always before sucumbed to rot long before the growing season was over, and boy did that ever make a difference this year. They are still going strong and are showing no signs of the black rot that has taken them out every year pryor to this year. I only did one spraying about middle way during their growth cycle. According to package instructions you are supposed to spray every 2 weeks or so, but hey, if once gets the job done I'm happy with that. I did get smart and ran a hot wire (electric fence) on the pasture side of my flower bed. In past years they have done a lot of damage reaching threw and over the fence to munch my flowers. Not this year! Matter of fact, I think a few of them must of got zapped real good the first few days I had it hooked up because for several weeks they even completely stopped grazing in that little pasture! And when they did come back to it, I noticed I got a lot of dirty looks from the herd while they gazed longingly at the pretty green flower plants while their pasture turned brown and dead from the drought. That must of been pretty terrible temptation for them. But it worked and I didn't have a single leaf nibbled by my cantankerous goats. But the most amazing part so far this year has been my seed harvest. In just the first 2 pickings alone I had more flower seed saved back for next year than I got from the whole growing season year before last. I am going to have plenty of seed this year, I can probably even sell a little, if I can ever find the time to go to growers market with it in the spring. I am out there every few days picking the mature flower heads, and looks like I will be at that for quite awhile yet. And the regular cosmos hasn't even started making seed yet, it always comes on much later than the zinnias, last year I was afraid it wasn't even going to beat the frost, but it did, and I had lots of seed after all. I'll try to attach a couple pictures one is the length of the bed, it's 194 feet long, and sadly you can't see the glorius color it has in the picture that you can seeing it up close and in person. It really looks great. And I have a close up of one of the blooms. This one was a fantastic color that also doesn't show up real well in the picture, it was a pink/salmon color fading out to a pretty sunny yellow color. I saved that particular flower seed by itself. I want to do some experimenting to see if zinna's breed true color from the flower or if they produce different colors from the same flower seed. I am dissapointed that we didn't get an actual food garden planted this year. We managed to actually get the spot plowed this time, but then things just got away from us, and we never had the chance to get back into it and get it planted. Really bad, since it looks like the drought is going to wreck hell and havoc on grocery prices this year. At least we had a good fruit crop this year. I guess the mild winter made life easy for the fruit trees. I should be peeling apples right now instead of sitting here typing all this stuff!

[sheepdog 10]

Well, I am in the home stretch of finishing up the flower bed this year. Just waiting for the cosmos to finish up developing their last seed heads. It is a pretty hardy flower and is not completely killed out by cold tempratures and light frosts. I worked on harvesting seed a couple hours this afternoon. There are 2 or 3 small zinnias left in a sheltered spot under the cane patch, but all the rest of them are done for now. I hated having to give up on my organic gardening tendencies, but that one application of fungicide really made all the difference in the world with them this year. I still plan on burning off all the old stems and junk on the bed to keep funguses down next year, but I am going to spray it again during the next growing season. It really did help it a bunch. Then when the seed finally finishes off, I have all the canna's to dig, I may cheat a little and let the hired man help me with that job, I usually do all the flower bed work myself. The Cannas didn't do as well this year as they usually do, and I think I'm going to try an experiment next year, I'm going to put a double row of soaker hose down the bed, one row right over the cannas. I've noticed the last few years of using the soaker hoses they don't wet down a very wide area. Canna's seem to grow in direct proportion the the amount of water and sunlight they recieve. Several years ago I planted a row along the south end of a set of dog runs that have an automatic watering system for the dogs, with a drainage pipe down the center to keep the pens dry, but there is a lot of water coming under the runs that keep the lower end where the flowers were quite moist. That year I had cannas nearly 12-25 feet tall! I've never seen them so tall! What has amazed me the most was the amount of seed I got this year. I counted 39 jars, and I still have some drying and a lot of cosmos to wait on to finish maturing. Last year I think I got 7 jars for the whole season. I should have plenty left overs after reseeding it in the spring to sell some at farmers market, along with some cane roots, and of course, hopefully lots of eggs in the spring. Sure aren't getting any now, I think my chickens have gone on strike. But I will have that batch of young pullets that I just raised up so I will have several more chickens than I do now. I have another gardening experiment going on right now. I've always heard that you can take cutting off of tomato plants and get them to root if you put them in water. So right before we had the first frost, I took a bunch of clipping off the one plant I had that I set out late that was still pretty and green. Hopefully that will work, if they root and keep growing I can keep taking cutting off of them to keep them small until spring, and then hopefully won't have to buy a bunch of tomato plants. Or take the slow path and try to start them from seed, which I am not real lucky with at any rate. Anyway, winter will be here before long, bad as I hate it not much you can do about it except wish for spring to hurry up and come!