August 14, 2009

It appears that I treat my garden blog the same way I treat my garden... plant it, then forget about it for a couple of months.

I actually haven't been that bad at neglecting the garden itself... but once we prepared the house and yard for the summer season we pretty well let it just manage itself for a while. For June and July we were either hosting guests, or out of town on any given weekend. I weeded the garden beds every couple of weeks, and the sprinklers kept it watered when the rain ceased... but I otherwise just wanted to let it grow and figured I'd pay more attention when things calmed down in the house. About a month ago, though... I was next door and saw my neighbor's massive squash plants - which were in the ground weeks *after* mine were, yet were easily 10 times the size. I suspected then that the dirt our gardener used to fill up my garden beds this year may not have been particularly rich in nutrients, so I dashed back home and threw some Miracle Grow on my garden.

Then we had a massive heat wave, and with 109 temperatures I frankly could have cared less if the whole thing dried up and blew away... it was too damned hot to care.

The heat passed, and we've returned to a respectable Northwest rainy spell.

Ahhh... rain!

So there's my list of excuses for the lack of updates. Haven't been here, and there hasn't been much to look at anyway. Moving on to photos:

This is a new resident in the back yard... we have so far named him "The Brown Rabbit". So far as I can tell he has not disturbed my garden, but I suspect he might be eating the hostas under the bird feeder, because the deer haven't been in back all summer and yet those particular plants have been munched on in the last couple weeks. But the bunny is cute and fluffy and eats clover in the grass, so we like him.
So far.




Please excuse the messy look of the yard... but I saw the "how's the garden doing?" request from SMT this morning, and I thought if I don't run out there and take pictures NOW I'm just going to forget again. So I hauled out there with my umbrella and snapped some shots - weeds and all.

The herb garden is doing great, now that it's being watered regularly... I've chopped down my oregano twice this year (each time I got over a pound of plantage) One nice thing about our heat wave... I chopped the oregano the day before it got supid hot, rinsed it, and laid it out on a giant metal tray to dry. Then we ran away to escape the heat, and the oregano dehydrated right there on the tray in my kitchen - no need to tie it up or anything. Woo!

I haven't been cooking with chives much, so they've flowered a bit... and the light green tuft you see behind the thyme is a type of really thin-leafed basil. Regular basil gets eaten to the ground the minute I put it in the garden... but this variety seems to thrive so long as it is watered properly.




Middle of the frame at the top is a small lavender plant, who is here temporarily while we decide if we want more lavender in the front. The middle row is the oregano, once again filling in thick and lush after having been mowed down just a few weeks ago. The 4 rosemary plants are the bottom row... and they have grown like crazy as well.
I bought these to potentially replace my BIG rosemary which grows at the top of my firepit wall - if they didn't recover from last winter's odd freeze. Turns out they did recover, quite nicely, so we are up to our ears in rosemary now.

One thing I LOVE about rosemary is that the deer don't eat it. Actually, nothing seems to eat it except for us humans... so these are plants we can move to the front yard when they get sizeable enough.



The right half of the vegetable garden. After feeding my plants, the tomatoes finally started to grow decently lengthed vines, and we've even had a few ripe cherry tomatoes. The front-most leafy plant in this pic is a foxglove - we can just pretty well ignore that, (I left it in the path between the garden beds as decoration, but it didn't flower this year) The squatty little plant on the right (can you see the little yellow flowers in it?) is my zucchinni. Tiny... I know... but keep in mind, this particular plant was eaten down to the ground when I first put it in my garden... then sprouted one weak little leaf so I let it go. In the grand scheme of things, it's not doing too badly.
The big squash plants are yellow zuchhinni, which I'd planted to replace the one that was eaten and came back from the dead.


My yellow zuchinni plants are doing quite nicely now, and I picked the first two veggies from them this morning after shooting these pictures.


This is the left half of the garden, another story all together. Since this was the half that was filled in significantly by the garden guy, this is the reason I suspect his dirt was not particularly nutrient rich. Those little squatty plants are lemon cucumber plants... and they are struggling to grow. They were nothing more than a couple leaves until after I fed them last month, and I will be feeding them again this week.
My beans did somewhat OK for a while - they grew and produced enough sugar snap pea pods to collect for a side dish for dinner (however I ended up eating them as a snack like potato chips instead) The Looooong bean plant on the end is the one Gayle planted in school - and it made a respectable height before drying up.
I think I'll be pulling what's left of these plants this weekend, and maybe tossing in a different kind of bean seed just to see if I can get another bunch of plants before October rolls around.


I do have a few tomatoes getting ready to ripen... we are supposed to heat up again next week so perhaps we'll get some red ones.
It kills me that we had so much heat a couple weeks back, but my plants were not yet big enough to take advantage of it and ripen.


This is Gayle's Garden - she planted this pumpkin seed in school as well. This patch of dirt is the very back part of the back yard... it had been overrun with blackberries until we had our big wind storm a few winters back - half a cedar fell into this spot and killed everything that was growing there. Since then it has been a hotbed for weeds... and we systematically scrape them off. When Gayle's seed sprouted she wanted to put it in the yard, but I didn't want to put it in the garden beds where it would take everything else over, or potentially grow out into the lawn.
Enter the Empty Patch. We plunked her pumpkin seedling in the ground and I re-aimed the sprinkler so it would swing around to hit this spot. Now we have big beautiful leaves taking over the weed bed, and Gayle has her own garden spot.
The vine has sprouted over some of the odd ferns we have in the back, so after I took this photo I re-aimed the vine to wrap around in front of the bird on the dirt. Next year I think we'll plant a bunch of pumpkins, and turn this area into a whole pumpkin patch.

June 1, 2009

I'm failing in the update arena again this year... ironically it's the photographing that slows me down. One would think in this digital age I could snap a few shots more often, but when I'm all dirty and grimy from working in the yard, I don't want to handle the camera.

This is the before picture of my garden... taken Saturday morning. I've been wanting to make the makeshift cinder block wall prettier, and stop the weeds and grass from growing up through the center of the blocks... but still make it possible to easily take apart in case I decide to change the shape of the garden later.




It only took two years, but I finally found the paver stones that are the exact size of the top of my cinder blocks. I give you... the neat and tidy garden wall.



Such as it is.

I lifted all those myself. 50 paver stones from the shelf at Home Depot to the big flatbed cart... through the store and out to the truck, where I loaded all 50 into the trailer. At home Dan drove the trailer to the top of the yard, and I pulled each stone off the trailer and onto the wall, pulling weeds and straightening bricks as I went.

This is one of the reasons I go to the gym... so I can do projects like this without killing myself.



The plants themselves are coming along. Something ate my crookneck squash plants, so I've replaced them, and added a couple other veggies. My peas are growing like crazy, just reaching the bottom rung of my volley ball net-like climbing wall.



Here is the herb side of things, just prior to me chopping down the oregano (that's that tall leafy thing on the far end) We've gone a little crazy with rosemary this season. I wasn't convinced my big plants would grow back, so I bought some replacements... then the big stuff kinda sorta came back. It still looks a bit woody... and half of one plant is gone forever... but the rest is turning green, so I've stuck a few extra little rosemary plants in my herb garden, they'll probably find homes around the yard next year.



I whacked down over a pound of fresh oregano. I thought it would make the garden look barren, but it just looks like it got a hair cut.

We are doing a *lot* of projects around the yard, getting ready for a summer of visitors and parties galore... next weekend I'm planning to pace the yard and shoot all the improvements we've made (oh, so many decorative pots and we even finally bought a wine barrel planter!)

Happy May Day

Our winter was kind of a nasty one. Not too many snowy days, but all in all the cold weather came in and just stuck around from about mid-Fall to... about two weeks ago. Our temps were so cold for so long that my freakin' rosemary froze. It's supposed to be this really tough evergreen plant, and it just dried up, froze, and 4 of the 5 large bushes dropped their needles like a Christmas tree. We've trimmed back the the sad little plants, but I have little faith they will come back.

The rosemary can be viewed from my kitchen window, whereas my garden beds are a trek up the hill from the back door... so my general outlook about my yard has been based on my poor, scraggily rosemary. You can imagine my surprise when, after two weeks of "warm" weather (read: above 50) I wandered out to my garden to find my oregano, chives, and thyme thriving.



If you listen closely, you can hear it saying "I'm not dead yet!"

The two bits of dried up stems in the center of the bed were my lovely lemon balm and citrus sage... I'm not sure those will make it back from the dead either. I'll give them all a couple more weeks, then if I see no progress I'll replace them.



My chives were a couple of strands of green a few weeks back, now they are developing great purple flower buds already.



The oregano has spread out to where it has overtaken the plant label. Looking forward to lots of dried oregano this year.



I swore off tomatoes again last year, so this year I decided to plant some sugar snap peas. Just before vacation I ran out to my prepped garden beds and plunked some seeds in the ground, just to see if they would grow. When we came back I only saw one little sprout, so when I went to the garden store I picked up some sweet pea plants. Today when I went to plant them, I found that my entire row of seeds had sprouted (see below) So I had to improvise a spot to stick the plants I bought... hence... the tomato cage (see above).



My wee little sprouts are barely the size of my thumbnail, but every one of them sprouted.



I know... I swore off tomatoes last year.... but after talking with our landscaper guy I changed my mind. All my neighbors had a horrible time with tomatoes last year, however when I mentioned this to the guys doing our yard clean up, he said "everyone says that, but I had a ton of cherry tomatoes!" His secret? He stuck his plants in the ground the end of April instead of waiting for Mother's Day like everyone else around here.

So what the hell... $10.00 in plants, it's worth a shot. This year we're trying yellow pear tomato, roma, and a red cherry.




The raspberries need some TLC this year. We didn't cut back the stems from last year, and they have sprouted a rather impressive bunch of leaves already. We'll need to build some kind of support structure that will hold them upright against the fence.



The raspberries also spread like MAD... there are a few weeds in there, but most of this is little raspberry sprouts. The long stems above are the "early" crop, and these little sprouts will be a late summer bunch of berries. With any luck I'll have enough to make some jam.