Joan- everything looks so lush and healthy!!! Good for you! I notice in your post, you say the last two years weren't so good for you. I would be interested to know what you did differently?? What do you attribute the change to? (I can already see a lot of hard work was involved!!) Congrats and enjoy all that delicious food!
Before I planted, I tilled in 13-13-13 fertilizer, my compost heap I had cooking all last summer and my worm castings.
Last spring we had flooding rains in April and May and my garden sits low and stayed wet for to long I believe. This year we haven't had the heavy rain so I've been doing the watering.
The past two years I didn't use fertilizer - except compost, so I think that has a lot to do with it, although I used very little - I sprinkled (2) 1 quart nursery cups of fertilizer on my
26 x 46 garden. I side dressed my corn when it was about knee high. I know some folks cringe at the thought of commercial fertilizer, but I chose to use it this year.
For a good number of years, I put synthetic fertilizer in my compost pile. As I was completing it in the fall, about the required amount for that garden would go in with all the frost-killed plants.
Since the compost wasn't used for 18 months, I felt that this approach was reasonable and safe. A Louisiana garden would have a 12 month growing season, I suppose. That would mean organic matter would be decomposing at a steady clip, year around. It would, no doubt, double the yearly addition for someone with only a 6 month growing season . . . and I don't even have that :/.
These days, organic fertilizer goes in my veggie garden (altho' synthetics go in the ornamentals). The darn organic fertilizer is so expensive, I can't bring myself to put it in the compost pile! I will buy composted chicken manure for the pile, however. I've never owned sufficient chickens to match the size of my gardens. I don't even like to think how many that would take !