Potager – A kitchen garden where vegetables, flowers, herbs and fruit intermingle. With trains.
A Garden train with a lot of plantings involved is a fair amount of work to keep up with. Any grass you have growing is always trying to take over the whole world, annuals have to be replanted – annually and there is just a lot of pruning, trimming and cleaning up to be done. So this year we decided that for all of our work our garden train needed to be rewarding us a little more than it had been.
This year we have four different varieties of peppers dispersed throughout the garden in containers and several different spots are being cleaned out for our fall/winter garden.
We had grapevines planted and while the plants themselves grew well it turned out that they were a variety that didn’t really care for hot and humid North Carolina summers, meaning that for all of their showiness we didn’t get to eat grapes. So the grape vines came out and early this year I planted snow peas. Critters ate ’em. I followed up with bush beans. Critters ate them – again. Next came pole beans. They survived the local wildlife, but the soil in that bed is not the best as grapes like to be tortured a bit with their growing conditions. So the beans are still there but they are not exactly thriving.
Shortly after we noticed something else coming up. It looked a lot like a squash plant, or possibly cucumber or a melon of some sort. Now we very rarely plant squash as the Engineer does not care for them. Neither of us are fond of cucumber, though we have on occasion put up some pickles. And it has been a long time since we planted melons. And none of those, or anything else edible, has ever been planted in the area where our trains are. Yet here it is.
Now we have a very productive cantaloupe patch growing in a very narrow area between a couple of parallel train tracks.
Dismal Creek Railroad 