Gardening and Geysers

In the 25 years that we have been married (Wow, I feel pretty old right now) we have tried all but 2 or 3 years to grow a garden.  One of those years we did pretty well.  I give all the credit to the homeowners that had prepared the soil over the years and we just hung onto their coat tails.  Now the rest of our gardens have been pretty dismal.  This year we decided to really go for it.  We moved our garden plot and spent hours bringing in horse manure adding nitrogen and tilling it all in.  This was all during a very wet cold spring.  We got the whole family out and created furrows, planted and made an irrigation system.  All the while the whole world around us was out watching soccer games, playing, shopping and seemingly having fun.  We just kept telling ourselves that it would all be worth it.

We are now many more hours and a couple of months later.  I had lost all motivation and hope that we would get anything out of our garden.  I have been so discouraged.  We did have potatoes and sunflowers come up pretty well.  The rest of the garden however, is terrible.  I bought fertilizer two weeks ago and never put it on because I was feeling like "what's the use".  I sent all the kids out this morning and we weeded and buried the potatoes again.  In the weeds that seem to love this ground we found a few plants that are still holding on.  There isn't a lot of time left in the season to get much but I did gain a little hope today and plan to fertilize tomorrow.

I hope that the 60 Raspberry plants, 7 grape vines and 11 fruit trees that we planted this year all survive and grow.  Our soil really can't be called soil.  It is pure clay with no nutrients.  Somehow the early Pioneers were able to get this dessert to blossom like a rose but they somehow forgot my little section of that dessert.

We did have a a fun respite from planting at the time.  Doug had just hooked up the piping for the irrigation system and was testing it.  All looked good and he turned it off.  As soon as the nozzle closed the pressure in the system blew the main valve and water spewed in the air over 40 feet.  This is the second time that has happened so we just laughed, made a phone call to the city and had fun.  The kids started running through it and putting their heads in the geyser.  The greatest fun was pulling the weeds and throwing them in the water to watch them go up in the air, break apart and fall.  It was a very fun!