a song came true

Hi Everyone

So I wonder how often songs come true....... Well a song about a dream comes true?

I sort of feel like my song “Here on the farm” has finally come true.

Who would have thought that a song about being a farmer could come true, by leaving the country and moving to a city.

To anyone unfamiliar with my song “Here on the farm” I will include a link at the end of this so you can download it or just listen to it.

I have about 20 tomato plants planted in pots, in the garden and 8 of them hanging upside down in plastic milk jugs (and one bowel prep jug).

I have two oak barrels plum full of potatoes. I planted them in layers and waited for the shoots to come up and continued to bury them, now the first barrel has about 20 healthy appearing shoots, and the second barrel I am only half way up. (you can apparently grown 100 lbs of potatoes in each barrel).

I have taken tall paint barrels and cut circular holes in the sides and have stuffed each hole with strawberries.

We moved the wood frames from our raised beds over in bandon. I filled the first 6 inches up with weeds I had pulled. I then covered the weeds up with cardboard, and then we then brought in loads of compost soil from the local mass production composter company.

The reason I put the weeds on the bottom was to allow them to compost without the risk of them growing, hence the cardboard covers. PLUS this decreased the amount of soil we needed to purchase to fill the raised beds. I have about 30 red pepper plants in greenhouse still (too cold to put them out yet)

I recently read about cattle panels, which are 1/4 inch thick metal rods welded to make a fence panel (to keep in cows), sold in units 4 feet by 16 feet. They are used for “vertical gardening”. We have several of them, and I have zuchinni, cantelope, yellow squash and more tomatoes that we are going to grow up the panels.

I feel SO LUCKY I found 4 rooted asparagus plants yesterday, so am starting an asparagus patch. I have recently read that celery is hard to grow, and since it is something I can eat, and always loving a challenge, have started 50,celery plants that I am going to try to grow into the fall.

We have planted plum, nectarine, apple, and pear trees, as well as many more blueberry bushes.

We are working hard to improve the soil, but I am thinking that the native soil might not be so bad. I have never in my life seen more worms. Everywhere I did, I can usually see 5-10 worms with every shovel. I tend to dig more gingerly, trying not to slice a worm in two. I have never seen night crawlers before and the first few I saw at first sign I thought somewhat grotesque. THEY ARE HUGE! Knowing what important work they are doing in my garden makes it much easier to ...... embrace ? ..... if that is the right word. :)

Mark our neighbour has said that night crawlers fetch a pretty decent price amungst fishermen. I was thinking perhaps as a promo for my cds, I could give away a night crawler with the purchase of each and every cd. The ones that are mailed out would arrive, just worm castings, a cd and a worm, (or two).

Have I mentioned how much I love growing things?

The way I feel, it is hard to find organically grown food, and much more expensive, so the more I can grow myself the better. A friend recently told me about the “dirty dozen”, which foods were the most important to buy organically grown.

http://www.organic.org/articles/showarticle/article-214

I was at whole foods market yesterday and regular red peppers were 3.99 a lb and 7.99 for organically grown.

I will try to put in photos of my garden soon, too many rainy days to take pictures.

My vision has completely come back to normal, cannot see computer screen with out my 200 readers and I can see quite clearly in the distant.

This is the link the hear "Here on the farm:

http://janetbates.com/music.html

Just scroll down the page to the album "for all of his wealth" and open it and then down the the song "here on the farm"

I have set it up so it can be downloaded. Somehow it seems so relevant now to me.

A song came true. BTW these pics are not from my garden, I got them off the internet.

Love

Janet Bates

jankenb @ gmail.com