The Garden...

I love experiments, but hate moderation for some reason.  We have an entire field below the house, so when it came to rototilling time, it seemed like a good idea to keep making the "garden" area a little bit bigger.  It's a bit hard to get scale, but the main section is about 40ft x 60ft, with a long area for all the melons, artichokes, etc.  

When I went to buy potato starters, I didn't speak French at all.  Our friend Patricia had told me to buy "a little box" of starter spuds, so I went down to the local gardening store (by myself).  It was prime potato buying season, so there were 10 different varieties, all of which came in "little boxes".  Not being able to read the labels, I just more or less blindly picked one and returned home after much bumbling about at the cash register.  When Patricia saw the box she laughed...I had unwittingly purchased 100 starter spuds, which turn into about 250 kilos (500+ lbs) of potatoes!  

Needless to say, I pawned a few of the spuds off on her and planted the rest... about 75.  Now the spuds have all come up and are flowering (pictured above).  Who knows what we'll do with all the taters...I'm guessing a lot of fries, gnocchi, and random potato gift baskets to friends.  Maybe we'll have Mr. Potato Head decorating contests...

Our very first bean, beets, radishes and pumpkin and watermelon plants which have begun flowering. 

Getting pepper plants started has been hard...I just finally moved them into the garden.  Just in time for it to be rainy and cold for an entire week.  To compensate, Patricia and I built a really ghetto shelter out of scrap wood and pallet plastic wrapping that seems to be working ok to help keep them a little bit warmer. 

I also found a French gardening book that had some cool, innovative tricks in it.  This one is to bury a perforated container next to the plant and simply pour water into it.  It allows the water to penetrate quickly and easily to the roots, making watering a ton easier overall.  This method also seems to waste less and is considerably quicker.  

You can use any number of containers, but I have been using old 2 liter plastic water bottles.  I punch a few holes in them, then bury them next to the root ball of the plant.  Thus far, it has been very effective and most people seem to think it's a cool idea.  However, one French guys scoffed at it and said I would never get any tomatoes if I tried to do it this way.  He was adamant that I should build a Roman canal irrigation system in the garden instead.  I think there may be some downfalls, but I'm fairly certain the idea will work well for the most part.  As for tomatoes....

Tomatoes seem to grow really well here.  It was like a giant tomato plant swap a couple of weeks ago and somehow I ended up with 30+ plants (after giving away about 20).  Many of the plants are starting to get fruit and I'm psyched for the salsa this summer. 

I totally mixed up the seeds of several plants, so thought I was planting Cantalope ("melon" in French) when actually it was Zucchini...  To make it more amusing, I gave a random assortment of people some of these super quick growing "melon" plants, so now a bunch of people have stray zucchini plants where they don't want them.  Patricia has dubbed zucchini the "melon Americain" in my honor. 

Eggplant and a small glimpse of a whole lot of lettuce plants crammed into a really small area.   After losing the entire first planting of lettuce to snails and slugs, I went overboard and planted way too many seeds.  Now we have a smashed salad party in half of the garden that needs to get resolved soon.