July 19th – July 25th, Week 17
RuthAnn’s Weekly Garden Diary
Documenting Progress and Reflections in the Garden
My attempt to document the planting, growth, harvesting, and preserving of our family’s 8000 square feet of garden.
Northeast Iowa Gardening in growing zone 4
Last frost date May15, First frost date September 15
July 19th to July 25th, WEEK 167
I have embraced all the stages of grief over the June Garden and am working on embracing the harvest Garden.
Crops that are spent and done need to be removed or broken down, bare soil needs to be covered, and weeds need to be controlled.
What we harvested this week:
- 30 ears of short season sweet corn (for fresh eating)
- A couple dozen tomatoes for fresh eating.
- A few Green and banana peppers.
- Red raspberries, by the handful for snacking and for smoothies.
- Early red potatoes for fresh eating.
- Cucumbers by the bucket full, my poor, blighted cucumber plants keep producing!
Other Garden Tasks:
- We dug the rest of our early red potatoes. They produced abundantly this year, and I hope the potatoes that we planted for winter storage produce as abundantly. While red potatoes aren’t generally known for their long storage, they will keep for a few months in our cold storage.
- Hilled and weeded the late planted Kennebec potatoes. Discovered they have soft rot in their stems and decided to wait to add hay/straw until the soil dries out and the soft rot is cured. I lost about a dozen plants, and another dozen look like they might recover. Soft rot is caused by a bacterium that enters the plant through damaged stems, insect bights or natural pours. This bacterium breaks down the pectin inside the stem causing it to rot. This bacterium thrives in wet, poorly drained soil and warm humid conditions. The potatoes are planted in an area of the garden that stays wet longer and we had 3 inches of rain followed by very humid weather. Dry soil and sunshine are the cure.
- I ordered buckwheat seeds to use as a cover crop in bare areas.
Reflections
This week we had guests on the homestead. Many of you probably recognize the name, the “Anneofalltreades” from her popular social media accounts.
Anne, her husband Adam and son Alexander spent a few days here with us filming for their YouTube channel. We spent a lot of time in the garden talking garden things and in the pasture with the cows talking about our favorite homestead animals.
Anne walked me through pruning fruit trees, helping me plan for pruning next spring. My biggest take away from our walk through the orchard was that pruning gives a tree balance and helps it stay strong and upright during windstorms even when loaded with fruit. She also helped me decide which trees to take down and replace. A few weaker trees that will likely never grow to be strong, healthy and abundantly producing trees. She helped me recognize that our resources will be better spent starting over with a new tree, utilizing what we have learned, to get better long-term results than to continue to put our time and energy into a weak and struggling tree that will never become what the homestead needs.
Woodchip gardening:
You may have heard me say that I am not a big fan of wood chip gardening. I have seen very successful woodchip gardens, but woodchip gardening doesn’t seem to give me the promised results of greater soil health! I have visited with many gardeners in our region, and they all have the same negative experience surrounding woodchip gardens as I have. The conclusion I have come to is that woodchip gardening is not a one size fits all, and while I will likely continue to learn about soil health for the rest of my life, I have decided that I can learn a lot by observing a soil’s natural state. What a soil returns to when it is not cultivated.
While our gardens are vastly different, we shared a passion for soil health! Anne gardens in Tennessee where trees are abundant (52%-53% of the state is covered in trees) and I garden in Northern Iowa where trees are much less abundant (only 6-8% of the state is covered in trees.)
Walking through my garden with Anne, listening to her talk about soil health helped me make some more connections about different regions.
As we visited, I had a lightbulb moment!
If left alone, Anne’s Garden would return to forest.
If left alone my garden would return to grassland.
This means that the soil microbiome, the bacteria that lives in the soil and are essential to healthy soil are going to be different bacteria families in Anne’s garden than in mine. The bacteria families in Anne’s Garden are going to be more efficient at breaking down and utilizing woodchips because she lives in a deeply wooded state where the soil stays active year-round. The bacteria in my garden soil are going to be more suited to breaking down grasses because I live in a prairie state and our soil becomes dormant (frozen) for up to 6 months during winter.
So simple and yet explains so much about why woodchip gardening is not a one size fits all!
Wondering what to use in your garden? Look around yourself and ask this questions:
In its natural state, what does my property cover itself with? Trees or grasses?
If trees are your answer than woodchips are going to be a better fit for your garden.
If grasses are your answer, then your soil is likely more suited to using hay/straw/grass clippings.
The shared goal, the goal all of us gardeners have in common is healthy soil. Because a healthy soil grows healthy crops and healthy crops are full of nutrition for our bodies.
I would love to say that the reason these experiences kept turning into negative experiences was because the children frustrated me, bickered and whined and complained until I lost my cool. But the truth is it was all me. It was my lack of staying emotionally regulated amidst normal pressures of parenting. And as usually happens, the more I tried to keep my cool and create positive experiences the more I failed.
When I finally remembered to take this issue to God in prayer, he gently remined me of what I had learned about babies and emotional regulation as a foster and adoptive mom.
Infants and toddlers (and older children too) do not have the development or skills to self-regulate their emotions. They depend on the proximity of caregivers whom they are bonded with to regulate their emotions. The calm breathing and heart rate of a mother (or caregiver whom they are bonded with) helps to not only calm a child but teaches them how to calm themselves. Simply staying in contact with a bonded caregiver is essential to an infant, toddler or young child’s survival and proper emotional development.
If I, as an adult was struggling to stay emotional regulated under the pressure of motherhood who was I to draw close to?
My Heavenly Father, that’s who! The more time I spent in prayer and His word the more bonded I become with my father and consequently the more my emotions and reactions can reflect that of the Father. The more I leaned into this relationship of my own the more emotionally regulated I became and the more positive shared experiences I was able to successfully create for our family.
Creating positive shared experienced through mundane everyday life is the greatest advice I could give you about supporting sibling and family relationships. The foundation of family bonds and relationships is not found in grand vacation memories (although these are great memories too) but in the nitty gritty everyday shared experiences that compile together to make a cement of sorts that binds families together for many generations!
