Weigh-Day for Wing Nut, Starting Our Veggie Seeds and Straw Bale Gardening

Wednesday is Weigh Day for Wing Nut. He as been doing well for the most part. He gained a lot of weight at the very start, I am guessing that it is because he was so far underweight. A few weeks ago I was disappointed when he didn’t gain any weight. And I am kind of bummed today after weighing him that he didn’t gain any weight from last week. The good thing that I can hold on to is that he is not loosing weight. As long as he is holding on to the weight I am happy. I do worry that the weeks when there is no weight gain, that it’s because there are other underlying issues and that when he is done with his 3 months of Periactin that he will loose all of this weight and we will still have to continue with tests, most likely endoscopy, which terrifies. For now I am happy and feeling good that he is not loosing weight! Embrace the good and step around the bad.

A few days ago I got my veggie seeds started. I am bummed that I didn’t get them started the first week of April, like I was hoping, but the seeds have sat in their damp, dirt filled little greenhouses germinating away. Being that we live on a tiny, little suburban lot, I don’t have much room for a garden, and even less after we built the addition and then last year started a huge wooden play set for the kids. I have tried to make a nice play space for the kids so they can be active and get the most out of our small space as well as have space to plant veggies to feed those active children. I love sending them out to play and watching them harvest and eat fresh produce when they want a snack, one less thing for me to do! Last year another blogger mentioned straw bale gardening, which I haven’t thought of in years! I have looked for my gardening book that talks about straw bale gardening, but can’t seem to find it. I have a feeling it may have made its way to the Goodwill in a moment of OCD style purging. I have a few dozen gardening books still on the bookshelf, so I am hoping that if I just take the time to look hard enough it will jump out at me.

Since I can’t find my book, I did the next best thing, I had a chat with Madam Google who hooked me up with some YouTube video clips and pretty much reaffirmed everything I already knew. One thing I knew for sure, was that I didn’t get the straw bales soon enough, which I should have gotten at least by the week I should have also been planting my little seeds. I got 3 bales of straw the other day, and am going to do my best to get it soaked with water and fertilizer in the next couple of weeks so that we can have some tasty veggies to lay back and eat as though we were Greek Gods basking in some marble bathhouse…or at least a bunch of happy folks laying a blanket in the backyard doing homeschool lessons and playing on the playground.

I don’t have a lot of time, I like to get my veggies in the ground Mother’s Day Weekend, which is the only thing I really want from my family, to hang out in my backyard, digging in the dirt teaching my kids about growing their own food. I tossed the three bales in the old hard plastic kiddie swimming pool and covered them with the richest organic fertilizer we could get and left them out in the rain last night. I was hoping to that between the rain and the hose, we could fill the pool with water and let the bales soak up the water and flip and fertilize them every few days, but the pool is cracked and doesn’t hold a lot of water. It does hold some on one side, so I know there will be some soaking going on, just not as much as I was hoping for.

I have some super duper made of awesome compost that is just waiting to be tossed on the tops of the straw bales in a few weeks. We had a good rain last night and I can tell the fertilizer granules that I sprinkled on have soaked in a bit and are doing what they are supposed to do. I have several dozen seeds started. My favorites, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, brussel’s sprouts, corn, beans, red & yellow peppers, eggplants, and probably some more that I can’t remember at the moment. I am not going to put all of my hopes and dreams of a good turn out into the straw bale gardening, I am going to plant a least 1 of everything in the straw bales to see how well everything grows to see what is best to plant there next year if I decide to go that way again. I was digging around in the newest garden bed, that started out as red clay after excavating for the addition, I dumped a huge amount of mulch there a few years ago but the mulch on top wasn’t enough to make up for all the hard clay under it all. After a few years of decaying mulch and dyeing plant growth, and I have a pretty good garden bed. I have been weeding it this week and getting it ready for veggies. With a little bit of lightly turning the soil with some hand tools and another layer of mulch, I think we are going to have an amazing garden this year!

So. Darn. Excited!

Are you gardening this year?