ag cloth | Farmgirl Unleashed

I shared with you how we were converting one of our gardens to using ag cloth as a weed barrier. We got stopped in the middle of our process because of travel and rain-lots of rain. We hit our field again over the last 10 days to rescue what we could, say goodbye to what we couldn’t and plant for the future. A gardener is always optimistic right? You lose a garden, you plant another and with that comes hope again.

When we stepped back after the rains stopped this is what we had–

Grass was up to my knees in the garden.

Yep, there’s a sweet potato in there somewhere!

I can see the corn but not much else.

It had me feeling pretty hopeless on what we had.

However, the bed where we laid the cloth looked pretty good so we concentrated efforts there first. We still had 5 rows to plant and there was crabgrass in the empty rows but we took care of that and finished off the planting.

Hubby is great at pulling that crabgrass!

I got to planting the rest of our tomatoes. Yes, tomatoes! I know it is July, but when you have almost 100 starters you have been babying inside during the rainy stuff, you put them in the ground! We are Zone 6 and they need about 80 – 90 days in the ground until harvest. We will have a late harvest, but when everyone else is picking pumpkins, I will be eating tomato sandwiches and canning for the winter. (see where the optimist comes in?)

So with that garden done and planted we felt very satisfied.

I moved onto sweet potatoes and digging the grass out from around them. And they were thriving down in there!

Hubby cleaned out the rest of the grass later and they are loving life again.

Jasmine just enjoyed the view.

And frankly our view while working wasn’t so bad either!

Meanwhile hubby went after Garden 1 (which was planted in the spring). It was overgrown to say the least.

We grabbed the last of the lettuce, beets, collards and purple kale and cut it down and started again on it for a late summer/early fall garden.

Mowed it really close.

Added compost and ran the tiller through one time. It is ready!

We decided all gardens would get the ag cloth treatment! We invested in the good stuff and it is being used!

With this being ready for planting, I got to go play in my seeds and get a selection out. Zone 6 tells me 1st frost is around 10/15 so I have a bit of time still. I grabbed my seeds that are 55 – 75 days to harvest and got planting. What did I plant? Beets, beans, squash, radishes, spinach, lettuce, endive and some flowers. By the end of the weekend we had two, very good looking spaces.

And this morning there are signs of life in both.