Pumpkin planting and garlic hanging

Planting out the tomatoes seemed a simple objective for a weekend in the garden. After all, I needed only to drop a small punnet of a dozen pumpkin (squash) seedlings into the existing garlic bed first and I’d be ready to get into it.

Fifteen hours later, with the pumpkins and garlic sorted, it had become abundantly clear that the tomatoes would have to spend another week in their pots and I’m left to rue my complete inability to guestimate just how long any particular job in this garden will take.

Gardening – like painting the house – is 95% preparation and 5% actual doing.

In order to get the pumpkins in I needed to get the garlic dug out and hung in the shed, the watering system tested, the soil profile re-wetted, some ‘blood and bone’ fertilizer in to feed the colossal pumpkin plants that will produce a crop, the drip tubes back on, the pumpkins planted (15 minutes) and the mulch back in place.

Along the way the cook offered to pull about 100 onions that were going to seed early (the chooks had buried the working end of the drip line and they’d dried out), leaving me to hang those in the shed too.

As for the tomatoes, all I managed was to wet-up that bed, water the pots and get mulch onto the soil to minimize evaporation.

Maybe next week?