Replanting

There are times when you plant something and it comes up and everyone is happy. This was not one of those times.

Okay, so I’ll freely admit that I planted my squash and beans a little early this year, but with the weather we’d been having I figure it couldn’t hurt anything. Then Alaska sent her cold winds and the Pacific sent her torrents of rain and what didn’t get killed off by the frost was drowned out by the excess water. This isn’t to say that every one of my beans and squash died, as we still have a few, just that most of them didn’t even bother coming up because of the weather… or the seeds were eaten by birds, squirrels or mice.

So while I was at the feed store yesterday to pick up chicken feed and cat food I perused their selection of vegetable starts and seeds. I knew that I wanted to have the Fairytale Pumpkins and didn’t think that any of those had come up, although I was fairly certain that at least three sugar pumpkins had sprouted and maybe a jack-o-lantern, I grabbed a seed packet for the Fairytales and jack-o-lanterns. As tempting as it was to just get starts for the carving pumpkins I knew I’d want more than I could get from a seed packet. However, since I knew that we only needed two zucchini plants, I did pick up two starts for those since pricewise it was the similar to a seed packet and these were bound to work. Besides, who really needs more than two zucchini plants anyway, let alone more than one? I also picked up more purple beans since only a few of those had sprouted and greens beans and sunflower seeds to round out the back fence gardens.

While I had weeded the day before I hadn’t quite gotten all of the smaller weeds so I grabbed our hoe and hoed the ground, careful not to harm the tender young plants that had been gracious enough to survive and/or sprout in the first place. I then planted the mammoth sunflower seeds along the fence line behind both garden sections, spacing them about a foot apart. After that plotted where I wanted the zucchinis and spaced those five feet apart to allow for growing room. Once those were in place I planted the beans in sections of three, leaving space between each section for a second planting in a few weeks for both the purple and green beans. I decided to go with bush type for the green this time, and the purple were already bush, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about a trellis, even though my ghetto trellis is already in place. Once the beans were planted I made mounds about three to four feet apart in both sections and planted two mounds of Fairytale pumpkins in the canning pumpkin area and two in the carving pumpkin area, as well as four mounds of jack-o-lanterns.

Hopefully the rest of June’s weather will cooperate and these will take and fill in and be plentiful. And if not I will be sad and have to tell the children there will be no pumpkins for Halloween this year and everyone will be sad about that.