garden notes :: 7.8.14

Garden, sweet, beautiful, growing garden!!  

It feels so wonderful to be home!  Our time in Milwaukee was lovely and very successful, but home is truly where my heart is.  I always try to prepare myself when returning from a trip that things may not look exactly how I expected them to look.  However, on this trip (thanks to a wonderful friend, neighbor, and brother) I was pleasantly surprised with what I came home to!  Hooray!!  

We have a few peppers and lots of pepper flowers!

The cucumbers are growing and starting to flower.  I initially planted six mounds with multiple plants in each and am down to three mounds.  I'm not exactly sure what happened to the others (they were gone long before my trip), but these remaining ones, while not thriving, are still surviving.  I'm hopeful of getting a least some cucumbers for fresh eating.  

The tomatoes are happy!!!  A few of the plants are up to my waist!  And most of them have green tomatoes on them as well.  I need to do a bit of research on blossom rot, though, as one of my sauce plants is showing signs of it.  

We started eating radishes before we left and I was so happy to come home and find them still growing!  Only a few have gone to seed, so we will have a bumper crop over the next week or so!  Yay!

The wax beans will be ready in the next few days and I'm rather excited about them as well!  The pole beans are growing as well, but much more slowly.

The summer squash and zucchini are doing so well!!  Last year I had very little success with either and so to have such healthily, flowering plants this year is making me quite happy.

The shallots also made quite a bit of progress while we were away!

My oregano is getting a bit out of hand and I'm wondering if I should have put it in the ground last fall....maybe I should have stuck to the annual deck pot...hmmmm.....

My rhubarb is finally looking healthy!!  I'm so pleased!  It will be year or two before we really get to eat much from it, but I'm happy to know that it likes its new home.  

Traveling is wonderful and so needed in life.  However, I also love how traveling has made me realize that my home has become my haven.  I've missed digging in the dirt and seeing the daily progress of my growing things.  I'm looking forward to a July full of those exact things!

garden notes :: 6.23.14

Rain, rain, lots and lots of rain!  We are quite saturated here, but my plants seem to be holding up well!  Almost everything has been making good progress over this past week.  My beans are climbing and my tomatoes have been tied to their stakes.  The broccoli and lettuce greens have not been fairing so well, though.  The chickens seem to think that I planted those things for them....(they also seem to think that about the kale and dill on my deck....)  So, at this point, we most likely won't have any fall broccoli.  My hope, though, is to get some lettuce replanted in the next few days.  The new seeds will hopefully fair better than the last.

I harvested our first radishes of the season the other day!!  It was quite exciting!  I planted two different kinds this year and it was fun to taste the differences in flavor!  Yum!

My potatoes are also doing well.  Their leaves are not as full as other people's potatoes, but I think that's due to their mostly shade location.  They are growing, though, in their shady spot, and that's all that matters to me!

The peppers and shallots are also getting along nicely!  I've discovered that shallot greens are quite a nice addition to salads and fried fish!

And lastly, my Giant Allium is now in full bloom!  She's oh-so pretty!  I must plant more of her kind this fall!

I hope your gardens all faired well in these heavy and insistent rains!  Here's looking toward a week of sunshine!

garden notes :: 6.16.14

This past week or so the garden began to really show growth and make me feel like the planting season has indeed past and the growing season is here and in full force!  

The biggest change in the garden has been the mulching of the tomatoes with straw.  Last year I planted cheap tomato plants that I had purchased at a wholesale place.  I had poor success with them, both in fruit quality and in plant health.  Most of my plants got blight last year, which may have been in part due to the low-quality plants, but also probably because I didn't know that tomato plants prefer to be clean!  They don't like having dirt splash up onto their leaves during rain or waterings.  So, this year, I decided to prune my tomatoes (all quality heirloom varieties) to one vine and mulch them.  I started by cutting off the lowest branches to make room for the mulch, then added the mulch.  I'm planning to train them to one vine by cutting of the suckers.  For me, I prefer more compact tomatoes that grow on stakes, because they help me to pack more into my little urban garden.  

The beans are looking fantastic!  The pole beans have a make-shift trellis that is going to get them climbing until a more permanent version is made.  The radishes have been thinned and should be ready in the next couple weeks.  The carrots are slowly starting to make an appearance between the rows of radishes.  Carrots truly are a vegetable for the patient, but they are oh-so worth it!

The potatoes are seeming to enjoy their shady side of the garden!  Yay!  I'm so very glad.  At this point, I'm hoping a few more of them pop through the ground, though, as my success rate is a bit low just now....

My giant allium is also about to bloom!!  Yay!!

How are your dear gardens growing?!  I'd love to know!

garden notes :: 6.9.14

My garden loved the heavy rains we had over a week ago!  And with a few more showers since, it is happy as can be!  The peppers and tomatoes have almost doubled in height since I put them in, more of my potatoes have sprouted, the beans are about ready to start climbing, and the shallots are starting to smell like onions!  Yay!!

On the flower side of things, the peonies have started blooming, much to my delight!  The giant allium is turning a bit more purple each day.  And I now have zinnias and dahlias in the ground, just waiting to bloom and then be brought into the house!  It's all quite wonderful, I must say.

How is your garden growing these days?!  I'd love to hear about it!!

a garden tour, part II

Welcome, again, to my little abode.  I thought I'd show the rest of my growing gardens.  I've been doing so much work in them recently, that I must say, I'm pretty proud.  Please enjoy!!

Last week I showed you my dear vegetable garden and flower bed that are on the side of my house.  This, however, is my new little perennial bed and I'm so very excited about it!  In the middle of it, you will find my new chokeberry bush.  It has white flowers in the spring, black fruit in the summer, and vibrant colors in the fall.  I love shrubs that have multiple traits to show off, and this one seems to be a winner! 

This new bed also includes a couple bee balm plants, a few veronica plants, some wild ferns, catmint, a few varieties of hosts, sprite astilbes, and a sedum ground cover.  I'm hoping to soon add a vernal witch hazel to the other side of the bed as well. Once that's added, then the bed will be complete for this year.  Next year, I'll see how things fill out the space and add a few other things both for fullness and color.  

This bed was somewhat established (the bricks and boulders, not the plants) when we bought the house.  I've tweaked the spacing of everything a bit and added all of the plants to truly make it my own and to make it a focal point of the back yard.  The space directly around the tree was blooming with tulips a week and a half ago, but is now filled with wave petunias, bacopa, and impatients.  The larger area is filled with different varieties of hostas, Siberian iris, day lilies, sweet woodruff, sedum, coral bells.  

Our deck is one of our favorite places to spend summer days.  My mornings often start with some quite reading and a cup of coffee in those garage sale red chairs, while most of our summer meals are eaten at our hand-me-down table and chairs.  The pots on the deck are filled with annual flowers, annual herbs (a bushy dill variety, rosemary, and cilantro), and greens (mixed greens, and kale).  

I'm quite in love with this little plot of land of ours in the heart of the city.  How about you?  What things are you planting to make your space your own??