Final May Update - To Garden or Not To Garden

That's the Question

We've been really busy lately and yet we still don't have our garden planted and it's already the end of May!  Our biggest issue with getting the garden in has been lack of adequate time and equipment to work the soil, at least that's our excuse and we're sticking to it.  Our planned garden is also rather large, so shock and fear of the undertaking may be a slight deterrent.  Thankfully, Oregon has a long growing season so we still have a couple of weeks, so there's hope yet for getting some plants into the ground.  Victoria and I did till and plant a couple flower beds near the farm entrance with the small Mantis tiller we have.  The Mantis is big enough to do small flower beds but not big enough to work an acre garden.  Hopefully our mammoth sunflowers, poppy, marigolds, and forget-me-nots take off and provide some pollen for the honey bees.

Our soils are mostly clay so getting it into gardening shape isn't easy.  When it's wet it's sticky and after it dries it's like concrete.  I did turn over half the garden with the plow but we really need a disc or tiller to break it up enough to get it into planting shape.  Tillers aren't cheap, and we've already spent all our available farm remodel and startup funds.  A recent expensive car repair to replace the solenoid pack on the transmission didn't help either, but transportation is important. 

On the positive side, we did plant a number of fruit, nut, and berry trees and bushes this winter, so we haven't been completely unproductive.  Let's just hope we can keep them alive and healthy.  We're already battling a bit of peach leaf curl in our peach trees and I noticed a bit of scab fungus on our apple trees.  A couple applications of lime-sulfur fungicide seems to be working well and a bit of manual maintenance, like removing the infected leaves.  I believe we'll have things under better control next year since we can apply the fungicide in the fall when it's most effective.   We did perform a lot of maintenance on the apple orchard, removing all fallen apples and reducing the risk and potential food source for the codly moth.  We still need to deploy a few moth traps and keep an eye out for apples that have holes in them to keep the orchard clean.