Ongoing Challenge #4 Moey -- 30 Minutes in the Garden

One thing I am trying to accomplish with these Ongoing Challenges, is to make a habit out of doing *something.* Sometimes I let my expectations and dreams get too big for what I can reasonably expect from my time and energy in this stage of my life. So then, I feel defeated and don't even try. The garden is one area where I tend to do this. I have lots of wants and wishes for the garden, but nowhere near enough time to accomplish what I want to out there. But I thought it would be a good idea to see what can be accomplished in the time that I do have, maybe half-an-hour a day, and why not see what happens?

So this goes on my Ongoing Challenge list too -- 30 Minutes in the Garden, Daily.

In our vegetable garden, we currently are growing lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, yellow squash, cucumber, big tomatoes, roma tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, capsicum and hot peppers. Everything is doing fairly well at the moment although the tomatoes are suffering a little from the humidity and fungal growth -- which reminds me, today I saw toadstools growing in the squash plants, and now I am wondering if the squash will be safe to eat...hmmmm...the humidity is killer here!

Anyway, so I have been getting into the garden for my 30 minutes -- I try to do it early before it gets so darn hot! and I have been able to make some good observations (like the fact that we have squash vine borers again, and the lettuce has bolted) and do a couple of necessary things like pull up the bolted lettuce (saved a couple good ones for seed, though) and harvest the ripe vegies, and whatever.

Last week, when I had decided that I would do my utmost not to waste another bite of food, I went shopping in the pantry for potatoes -- had a little 5lb bag that had not been opened yet, but when I went to get out the potatoes, they were all wrinkly and starting to mold and sprout. There was only one good one in the batch. So, (uncharacteristically, and only because I had made it a challenge,) I cut up a couple of the ones least moldy and yet sprouty, and dug up a little patch to plant them in. My oldest son helped me plant the potato pieces, and so far there has been no sign of life.

So today I dug one up a little bit, and could see that it is sprouting some little leaves down there in the soil. Life!

I went and looked up what I should have done to plant potatoes (soak in salt water, plant in spring because they don't like hot weather, etc.) and it wasn't very encouraging...still, it didn't cost me anything but 20 minutes of cutting, digging and planting, and if I get a new batch of potatoes out of something I was going to throw away, I will be very happy. :-)