Garden Heartbreak

    Something horrible has happened in my garden. Many of the seeds I'd planted have not germinated. I've been worried for a week now, I've checked the soil, watered, prayed, but much of the garden remains barren.  My tomatoes, which were plants when they were added to the garden, aren't dying but don't seem to be growing either. The weeds, however, are just fine.


     The mistake I made, as far as I can figure, is that I planted too deep, not accounting for mulch. I also mulched right away, I should have waited for the seeds to germinate first.  This is the first year we mulched the vegetable garden. My husband had cut down half of the cedar wall in our back yard and has spent days mulching it all for our flower beds and gardens.  We were so pleased with how it looked, still are, just a little disappointed at our mistake.


    So I am off to the garden centres today to buy seedlings and plants for my garden, if there are any left.  It feels like cheating, and they won't likely be from organic seeds... and I am trying not to be a big baby about this... you know that saying, you don't know what you've got till it's gone?  I never realized how much I enjoyed growing my own food, how much pleasure and pride I took from bringing something from seed to the table. But if I've learned anything from gardening it's to be tenacious, time to Farmer Up!


    A quick trip to the local garden centres has me stocked up on zucchini, acorn squash, cauliflower, cabbage, more peppers, lettuce and some solid advice on what went wrong.  It's the mulch, not really necessary for a vegetable garden, as the fella at Botanix put it,"You don't mulch a vegetable garden, you weed it." Alrighty then, I've pulled back the mulch, planted the new additions and replanted the beans and peas, maybe I'll get a late crop. Fingers crossed.


Shannon D.