Where is everybody these days??

[tinkerer]

Bob, you sound like quite the gardener! I also am an avid gardener, but not quite to your extent. We have a 40' by 60' garden that keeps us in produce for most of the year. I tried drip irrigation using PVC pipes this year and so far its working really well. It sure is alot less weeding and you save alot of water when watering.
Ben

[Frank S]

Bob B you remind me of something I did a long, long time ago in a land so far away.
my wife at the time, decided she would like to have a small garden in our back yard .
OK I said but the soil is Highly alkaline and laden with rocks don't expect much the first 2 years until I can get it well composted this was in January. I was working 6& sometimes 7 12 to 15 hour days the last thing I needed to do was spend what little time I had left breaking up  virgin soil in the back yard of my suburban home So like most of her ideas I put it as far back in my mind as I could.
  One sat night in mid Feb I get home only to find 2 dump truck loads of compost about 20 tons worth,in my yard,
So Sunday morning I hooked up my trailer and  was off to a rental place for the biggest ugliest ground breaking machine with a loader bucket I could find that could fit in my yard, I located a Bobcat 963 with all the necessary attachments.
all day and through most of the night I set about preparing a garden spot. Good thing I had Monday off as it was 4 in the afternoon when I returned the bobcat.
Short story getting longer by the time the veggies started coming off in bushel baskets full in late spring early summer once again I realized why I had left the farm as a teenager . breaking that ground I had removed enough rocks to fill a dump truck. The black alkaline clay infused with the 20 tons of 6 year old barnyard compost was as fertile As Myrtle the turtle  A lot of people ate pretty good off of that 150x40ft home garden.that was the summer of 78

[JohnF]

Bob;

As you now know, that's WAYYYYY too many tomato plants!  Better perfect the concept of "drive-by tomato-ing", I got really good at it a few years ago when I planted too many.  Hint - convertibles are great targets, you can leave pounds of the things on the seats and make a quick get-away......

[Frank S]

Bob I learned that tomatoes and cucumbers are either the most over producing things in the garden or they hardly produce at all there is no in between

[mike90045]

Bob I learned that tomatoes and cucumbers are either the most over producing things in the garden or they hardly produce at all there is no in between

Tomatoes and zucchini.   I swear, I've finger size zucchini one day, and they are thigh size the next,  Monsters!  Cukes are wimps.

[Thob]

"A man should never plant a garden too big for his wife to take care of."
-I don't remember where I first heard that.

And yes, I'm guilty.  But we only have 20 tomato plants this year.  They are just now getting ripe, and boy are they good!  Gave away a few at church this morning.

Last year we got a couple of ripe tomatoes, and then a hail storm destroyed everything in the garden.  Good thing I've got a day job!

[Carlb]

We have a modest size garden.  We just got our first 2 zucchini yesterday they were about 13" long and we got only 1 cucumber about 7" so far this year. 

We have 9 tomato plants 25 assorted peppers, 12 Broccoli Rab, 25 lettuce, 20 garlic, 25 onion, 9 cucumber, 6 eggplant, 6 watermelon, 12 cantaloupe, 9 honeydew, 50 Idaho potato, 2 Sweet Basil, 50 Sweet White Corn, and a bunch of carrots.

We had a late frost that i thought wiped out a good portion of my transplants but only a few didn't survive.

Its my job to get the garden started and since my wife is a school teacher and has off in the summer she does the harvesting.


our garden is easy to take care of, we have  very few weeds, we use a weed blocker and lots of mulch and we also use a drip irrigation system with a driper at each plant that is controlled by a timer so no watering is necessary.  There is even an liquid fertilizer injector that injects small amounts of fertilizer into the water each watering.