August 9, 2006

I'm attempting to update even if I don't have pictures (which seem to be the item that's holding me back a lot) Pictures don't appear to be working today anyway, better get with the website host.... grrr...

So last weekend I strained my back, but in the end I have a much better looking yard. I dead-headed (is that what you call it?) the lily stems that were making the whole area near the deck look unkept, trimmed up the wild Japanese Maple by the top of the railroad tie steps, and used Dan's father's day gift of an electric hedge trimmer for the first time on the three bushes that we actually try to shape (the three just on the other side of the deck railings near the waterfall)

Last year a lot of my yard clean up turned out to be quite the issue. My garden had done so poorly that I just left everything out until one fine day in November, where I was out from sunrise to sunset ripping up everything dead and re-shaping everything green. I found out the hard way, that's the wrong time of year to do that.

Last year, because I waited until November to prune my bushes, I ended up cutting off the buds that had formed over the summer and this past spring there were hardly any flowers on them. I also cut them back waaay too far. Also a word of caution... hydrangeas. During my massive yard clean up sweep last November I dead-headed the hydrangea out front. Also... not supposed to do that. We're supposed to leave the dead flowers sitting there on the bush all winter, and cut them off in March. Oops. This year I only have about 4 or 5 flower bunches out front, and none out back. My massive late chopping of the forsythia bush also whacked off all the yellow flowers we should have had on it this past spring. This year I cut that sucker back in June, a little while after it had bloomed, but hopefully not way too late.

The basic instructions I've heard from Cisco is that if you have a bush that flowers in the spring, prune it back just after it flowers. Well... now I know.

So with that history of bad pruning, there is a question floating around between us and the neighbors as to whether or not I've just destroyed my tomato plants. Last week I read a little blurb in my Vegetable Gardener's Bible that you are supposed to cut off any "suckers" from the vine... those are the branches that have only leaves and no flowers, because they suck the energy of the plant away from the fruit. This made sense to me, and I also figured that the fruit would then get some sun and actually ripen. This is Year Three with tomato plants, folks... and I have yet to get the massive yield I'm looking for. Year one I had tons of fruit, but a rain storm knocked down the big plant in mid-August and killed it. Year two... I tried planting along the fence and there was never enough sun or water. So... year three I figured I should try something different.

After a few clips on the Heirloom plant, I realized that not only was most of the plant leaf, but the branches with fruit didn't have any leaves at all. I'd make three clips, pull out three branches, and have a huge gaping hole. This can't be good... a plant needs leaves to feed itself, right? So I left tufts of leaves at the very top of the plant. I worked on the early girl in a similar fashion, then moved on to the roma. Now that one, I didn't even know I had fruit on that plant because the leaves were so dense... it really needed a trimming. I took it easy though, leaving some branches in the middle so it wouldn't look so scrappy.

Dan took one look and said I killed them all, and to be honest it did look really odd. My folks grew tomato plants every year, we never trimmed off the leaves - but they also planted them against the front of the house where they were fried all summer and riped really early. At any rate, I checked on them yesterday and the all-green fruit is starting to shift to the slightest hint of yellow. The vines look healthy and the tops are exploding with new growth. I'm hoping this means I might get a tomato or two out of my garden this year.

Here's another issue... you're "supposed" to trim off the top of the vines to prevent them from growing too big for the cages, but I can't bring myself to do that. I see more flower buds and I want more tomatoes, so I let them continue to grow. The heirloom is huge, and all vine... I might end up stretching that across the other two cages just to hold it up... and ordering larger cages from my dad for next year.

July 25, 2006

It appears my weekly garden update is turning out to be monthly *sigh*

This past month saw a lot of drama in my life so the garden was pretty much on it's own for a couple weeks. My how it's grown!

My triple tomato plants are crawling over the tops of the cages, and all are finally producing fruit. Nothing is ripe yet, however there are many gems on the roma and early girl... so far I've only seen two mini-fruits on the Mystery Heirloom, I'm excited to see exactly what kind of plant I ended up buying.
I've added two tomato plants to the garden... a grape tomato in a pot at the end of the mid-path, and another heirloom (black krim) in between my squash vines. I know it's late in the season, but they were 50% off and looked very sad in the garden center, so I thought I'd give them a nice home. Grape has two fruits on, the heirloom hasn't even bloomed yet, but appears to like it's new home.
The squash are going crazy, I've already picked 7 zucchini over the weekend and judging by the speed in which they grow, we'll have another dinner's worth of veggies by the end of the week.
Off in the distance you can see the back corner of the property... Dan cleared a lot of weeds and created a secondary fire pit with the leftover cinder blocks from the garden. He also cut down a cedar sprout and has started clearing some oregon grape from that triangle section. Eventually we want to expand the garden and hang a sky chair from the big cedar... slowly but surely we're actually landscaping a new area of the yard.

This is a closer view of the tomato half. As you can see, my beets are very sporadic (only maybe 15% of the seeds I threw down are growing) I barely have enough beets for a pint, I'm debating about bothering to pickle them this year... especially since Mom put up 25 pounds this summer. Perhaps I'll stick to pickles.

Dan actually picked out the cute little flag, doesn't it brighten things up? It seems to have bugged the deer, because since we put the flag up I haven't seen any new hoofprints in my garden. They have nibbled the extra reaching tomato vines from the other side, but they haven't gotten to the fruit, and the vines can be trimmed back anyway. Hopefully we won't end up with another missing cage this year!
The tall guys in the center of the pic are my cucumber plants. This is the first time I've planted cukes that actually grew straight up the trellis... I think I need a taller trellis next year! Lots of cukes are starting to grow, so I'll need to brush off my jars and get ready to make Grandma's Famous Dill Pickels this year!

6-18-06

I was really thinking I would update weekly, but it seems that being the only one doing the yard work takes up a lot of time. Ugh!

So far this year I've learned how to start the blower and weed whacker all by myself. I've become really good with the blower (getting our driveway clear every Sunday because every time I blow it off we get more wind and more crap from the trees!) The whacker... I'm not so good at. The stuff I whacked last week sprouted back up... so I didn't whack it so much as pushed most of it down.

My favorite part of using heavy equipment (read: anything loud) is that I get to wear the noise canceling headphones. Underneath that, I wear my iPod headphones. This means that every time I go out for hard labor I'm treated to some private music listening time (which I seem to require more and more as my stress level rises) On top of that, our lawn tractor has a cup holder. Mowing the lawn is now my most favorite chore... music, coffee in my travel mug, and driving around in circles. Woo hoo!

Alrighty... we're a month into my garden, so here are the photo updates:

This is a shot of the entire garden area (see my shiny coffee mug in the Lawn Buddy?) The zucchini is coming along pretty well, still under my bird netting to keep the squirrels out of it. I've had one cucumber plant eaten, but the other 8 are going strong and are so far not bothered. I did string fishing line up around the beds to keep the deer from walking through. I know... everyone else does 8 foot fences, but they won't walk through if they rub up against something they can't see. They could still stick their heads in and eat stuff, but they usually don't like what I grow.


The early girl tomato plant (in the center) is growing like crazy. The Mystery Heirloom is doing well (on the left) and the roma already has some flowers on it. My beets are doing... poorly. I found the beds covered with little sprouts of Forget Me Nots (AAAAAHHHHH! *slams head against wall*) I sat there this morning pulling out little sprouts trying to not disturb the rows where I planted the beets... but after about ten minutes I said "fuck it" and just scraped them all out. I only have about 10 beets coming through... I think I planted the seeds too deep. I have another pouch of seeds so I'll be throwing those in the ground to see what happens.
Oh yeah... there were also foot prints through the middle of the garden, from the fucking racoons.
Fuckers.

Some creature shots for today:

Mr. Wolf Spider

This creepy crawler made a home underneath Gayle's toy truck in her sand box. I emptied the water from the cover today so she could get in and play, and found the cobwebs covering this truck, and Shelob hanging out in the middle. Ick.

Happy Tree Frog

This fellow was hanging out near the fire pit on a little shovel I'd left out (which I'd picked up and carried before seeing him there) I scooted him onto the rocks next to the pond, where he hung out for a picture.

Incidentally... I tried to empty the pond out today so I could clean out the dirt at the bottom (which came from the fucking racoons diging out my water lilys) As the water drained I saw one, then two little squiggly guys swimming... tadpoles! I had no idea the frog eggs survived the last cleaning, but there they were. So I stopped the draining, pulled out as much dirt as I could with the shovel, and filled the pond back up. The water lilys stay (with rocks in their buckets this time, hopefully they'll stay upright!) and hopefully we'll have more mini-frogs this year.

5-20 update... late

I took this series of shots and poorly spliced them into a panorama on May 20th - I'm just getting around to posting it now.



Our dogwood never did turn pink this year, it bloomed mostly green with a couple of pink flowers here and there. The orange Rhodie is in bloom and I finally went out and took proper pictures of it. We planted some flowers in the pots, and finally picked a plant for the big blue pot on the deck (it's some sort of olive tree, it smells incredible!) Everything has leafed out so the yard is looking very full now. It has also been raining since I took these photos and everything looks very droopy. The good news is, I haven't had to bother setting up the sprinkler system yet this year!

May 19, 2006

Boring title, but I think for this blog it's appropriate, since I'm just updating my garden.

While I was in Montana for my grandmother's funeral, Dan ripped out the old boards from the garden beds and bought cinder blocks. We'd talked about this for a long time, so he decided to do that for me while I was gone. We even started planning to expand the garden this year, plotting out where we might plant fruit trees and such. Then he broke his knee After that disruption, I opted to just go with what we have for a garden space, and we can expand next year. So today I finally got around to getting out to dig up the clay in the garden beds.

I own a pry bar and a pick axe. These are not my heavy landscaping tools... these are tools I use on a regular basis whenever I need to dig anywhere in my yard.



This is my Prize Rock for the year. Three years of digging the same beds with the same garden fork, and I never ran into this beast until now. To show you how big the rock is...




That's me cleaning it off.


Here is a before shot of the garden. This was actually taken when we moved in, so the beds were still full of weeds - but you can see how they were built with boards which rotted out very quickly.


Here are our beds today.

The ground is actually really uneven up there, probably due to the trenches dug by the previous owners for the sprinkler system. I tried to level it as much as possible for the bricks, but it's temporary anyway, so I didn't spend a whole lot of time on it.
The back bed has tomato plants (roma, early girl and the Mystery Heirloom I picked up) and rows of seeds for beets. Mom handed down her pickled beets recipe, so I want to grow a bunch this year.
The front bed is home to two zucchini plants so far. I put up the green wire guides for the pickling cucumbers, so when I find those plants in the store I'll be ready to get them in the ground. I left a lot of room for the squash to grown, I know they're going to take off.


This is a view from the other side of the garden, to show the entrance. The wood on the inside are tree trunks from a couple of small trees Dan removed last month. We have a bunch of trunks and large cedar branches piled up that we figured we would "do something" with in the future (probably line paths in the back of the property)


This is my tomato area. The Prize Rock is now the entrance to the garden, and I plan on painting something cute on it at some point. Maybe. Anyway, there are my tomato cages... hopefully the deer will leave these alone.

Spring Sets In

Today we are mowing for the first time of the season. Well... technically Dan is mowing and I am staying inside with our sniffley daughter.

We are starting to develop our Big Spring Plans for the yard. Experience tells me we'll only accomplish one big project for the season, but inspiration is edging me to believe we can accomplish anything - including expanding the garden area and building a new fire pit to be in the middle of our new patio at the top of the yard surrounded by fruit trees. It's obviously not going to happen as there is no chance we could even design a patio before the trees would have to be put in, but the picture is so clear in my mind I can't help but dream.

One step at a time... this week we're focusing on getting the lawn taken care of (possibly even killing the moss and over seeding) then finishing up the winter yard clean up of tree branch piles and tree trunk placement.

If we, work together we can make the job seem fun

We had an oddly wet end of summer last year. On the one hand we didn't have to water as much, but on the other I didn't need to be outside so much... so this blog took much of the fall and winter off. I also obliterated my photos when I switched websites last fall... hence no photos from last year. I could go back and re-edit them all, but that would take an awfully long time, so let's just move forward from where we are now, shall we?

Today is our two year anniversary of living in our house. I remember spending our first spring wandering the yard wondering what was a weed, what was a plant, and why the previous owner left tags on every single bush she'd planted. Two years later, with the help of trial and error and a whole lotta books, I now feel confident in yanking weeds and general upkeep of our landscaping. I even know the names of a bunch of plants that I would have previously called "the green one with the flowers". We have high hopes for the yard this year, it'll be interesting to see just how far we manage to get.




This was our yard after one wind storm last month. I just wanted to have a record of what we are starting with.



Here is the driveway and you can see part of the roof. Trees are pretty aren't they? *rolling eyes* We are contemplating removal of several firs, not only because of the mess, but because of the amount of times we had Gayle sleep in our room over the winter because we were afraid the wind would blow a fir into her bedroom.



The front yard now, all picked up. We even planted some colorful flowers along the steps - if you look close you might even see them.



This is a thumbnail of the panoramic of our backyard, I took a series of 4 shots while standing in front of our kitchen window. I know the big one is going to screw up the page, so I wanted to include a smaller full view.



The main thing I remember about moving into our house was that the star magnolia bloomed the day after we arrived. It's amazing how a blast of white makes the whole backyard brighten. Our bulbs broke ground a few weeks ago, but it wasn't until the flowers burst open in the star magnolia that we knew spring was here for good.

So, there we are, the beginning of our gardening year. Hopefully I'll do a better job of updating, even if it's notes without photos now and again.