It’s Almost Lettuce Season!

I hate winter. I don’t like the cold, I really dislike the snow (after the first thrill of watching it fall), and I hate not having items to harvest from the garden. As soon as the weather starts showing signs of spring, I get really ramped up to go outside and work in the garden. Our temps will hit the 60’s today and 70’s tomorrow. WhooHoo!

Okay, it’s not time to put anything in the ground yet, or even disturb any protections offered to the garden by doing a clean up. The temps are warm now, but next week it is expected to feel like mid-February again. But it is time to start thinking about when, where and what type of lettuces I want to plant. Last year was my first experience with growing lettuce and it was wonderful.

Growing lettuce is very easy and trouble free. Put the seeds in the ground, keep an eye on watering needs and let it go. Forty-five days later you can start harvesting. The harvested lettuces can’t be beat. They are so much fresher than store bought and hold up much longer. I find it very frustrating to spend $4 on a container of baby lettuces only to find they have started to disintegrate after only a day or two. The harvest season can last from mid-spring up until it gets really hot. I think it is also important to stagger the plantings a bit to extend the harvest as long as possible, before the lettuces start going to seed.

This is my chosen site, last year’s veggie garden. This year I plan to scale it back a bit and leave more space to work. I’ll put in lettuces early on, then beets (another garden treasure), tomatoes, herbs and cucumbers. I would love to give zucchini another try, but last year's disaster with squash vine borers has left me feeling like it’s not worth the trouble. Right now I have few herbs that are hanging on, some parsley, catnip, thyme and rosemary. Well see if they strengthen up when the real spring weather hits. Until then I’ll sit inside dreaming…

Writing for School, But Not for The Blog

I started the summer semester on June 1st.  Note to self, next summer, only take one class.  I didn't think the schedule was that condensed, but it is condensed enough to take up most of my free time.  Anyway, that means I have not spent as much time here on my blog writing for pleasure.  I have also abandoned my search for new healthy recipes.  Drag, this school thing is all consuming right now.  I am going to have to see if I can squeeze in a few other things.

I went out the other day and took some pictures in the garden.  Most of them turned out well.  All the gardens are doing great and love this super awful hot weather.  The top shot is of one of the Dahlias in the cutting garden.

This is Ms. Gigi modeling the hydrangeas that are trying to take over our front walk.  I had the cut a chunk out of each side so we could get to our front door.

These white echinacea are one of my garden favorites right now.

This is shot of Ms. Gigi and the driveway garden.

And here is shot of the veggie garden.  I took this on Thursday last week and the tomato plants are already about a foot taller!

Well, gotta get back to school work, but it was nice saying hello.

Passiflora Passion!

I've decided to become a collector.  I love passion flowers and I am hoping to collect a new variety each year.  I found a great site called Passiflora Online. I will be using this site quite a bit. There is information on varieties, tips on care, and places to purchase vines and seeds.  I just purchased two more varieties while writing this entry!  OK, so more than one new variety this year, although my guess is that the plants I ordered today may not produce anything this year.

This first picture is of Passiflora Passion Red Lady Margaret and is the second addition to my collection. I purchased it about a week or so ago at Behnkes Nursery.  I am trying to decide if I will re-pot it and keep it on the deck or put it in the ground like my other passion flower vine.

This is the first of my collection and I believe the variety is Passiflora Alatocaerulea.  I grew this on a fence last year and it was spectacular.  I dug it up in the fall and put it in a pot. I kept in a sunny window over the winter and now it is back in the garden in the same spot.  No flowers yet, but lots of buds!

My Crazy Edibles Garden

This is my crazy edibles garden.  I call it crazy because it is incredibly informal.  I was very eager to get things growing this season and would plant some seeds and buy a few plants every week or so, and as I kept adding things I just put them wherever they would fit. 

We had a few nights with frost warnings and temps in the mid 30's, it seems to have caused issues with some things but others are fine.  Just this morning, I saw that the ambrosia plant I thought I might need to replace, has all of the sudden started growing.

The first things I seeded were lettuces, broccoli and beets.  We have harvested most of the lettuces and they were fantastic.  I will always grow lettuce in my garden for now on.  Although I hear it's hard to grow in the height of the summer, so I will try and seed some more in September for a fall harvest.  The broccoli and beets look good, but I don't really know what to expect of them, this is also a first for me this year.

Mr. Max the Garden Cat waiting for a few snips of catnip 

One of my garden favorites is the tomato.  I have 5 plants this year, each a different variety.  I love the taste of homegrown tomatoes, so I can't wait until these start producing!  I am hoping for an abundance so I can put some away in the freezer for pasta sauce this winter.  I also have a two pepper plants, one bell and one jalapeno.  I put these in before the two frost warning nights and they are still very small.  I am not sure if they suffered damage from the low temperatures or if they aren't in dry enough soil.  The jalapeno plant has one little pepper on it, so maybe it just hasn't been hot enough, long enough for them to really start growing.

Ariel view of the tomatoes

This is a new garden and I need to figure out how it works.  I can tell that the area where I put the herbs, which is very close to the peppers, holds water.  Of course, where I need it dry, it's wet. Some of the herbs may need replacing. I moved a few second year parsley plants from other areas in the yard and they just want to go to seed, no real growth happening.  The basil is also not doing so well.  I need an abundance of both of these herbs for cooking this summer.  I'll put a few new ones in in another section and see how they do.

This is how the garden started earlier this year.  I tilled out an area around the deck.  I had some old edging stones from the garden that used to be where the deck is now, so I used them them to map out the edibles garden area.  The long area on the side of the garden is what I call the cutting garden, I'll talk about that garden on another day.

The beginnings of a new garden plot!

 

Stones and border in place, ready for planting!

This shot was taken a few weeks ago.

This shot was taken today - lots of growth!

Mr. Max walking in the garden with the broccoli, beets, yellow squash, cucumber, tomatoes and sunflowers.

The Hillside Garden

All my gardens have names, mostly because I keep a notebook with plant names, planting dates and other notes on each of them and need to keep them straight.  This is the hillside garden.  It is in my front yard on a slope that borders my neighbor's yard.  It gets really great sun exposure which is good and bad.  Plants that love the sun and some dryness do well there, but some plants find it too harsh.

Over the years this garden has changed quite a bit.  When we moved in it was not a garden but a hillside covered in weeds.  I put a black tarp over it for about year and then seeded it with Zinnias.  It was nice at first, but got of hand and weedy, so much for a year of putting up with that black tarp.  In retrospect, it would have been better just to dig the weeds out and add some new soil.  That's how I have handled each section as it has grown over the years.

For a while I didn't consider it a garden, we just planted grass and forgot about it.  There was the crepe myrtle down at the end, and two holly bushes that we just couldn't get rid of after several attempts so I finally gave up and let them stay.  I put two butterfly bushes in between the crepe myrtle and the hollies and decided a new garden had been started.

Since then I have added quite a few plants including lambs ears, tall phlox, several varieties of peonies, forget-me-nots, russian sage, echinacea, roses, saliva, yarrow, lavender, maiden grass, hibiscus and more..

Right now things are starting to happen and by the end of the summer this garden will be crazy.  I love this time of year, it's great to go out each day and see what new developments have taken place.

 

This Morning's Harvest

Sweet success!  This morning I picked my first batch of lettuces from my garden.  Salad will be on the menu tonight!  Too bad the cukes and tomatoes aren't producing yet.

This year's vegetable garden is all new.  I plowed new space and put in a few items I've never grown before.  Last year I tried lettuce but pulled it out before it got going so I could get my tomatoes in the ground.  This year there's more space, although if things go well I may want to expand it.  I can already see that things will get crowded over the summer.

At the far right is the herbs section with some of my favorites for cooking - Basil, Thai Basil, Rosemary, Italian Parsley, Dill, Chives, Oregano, Cilantro and some Nasturtiums.  The rest of the garden contains Broccoli and Beets (a huge experiment, both grown from seed), Tomatoes, Lettuces, Spinach, Cucumbers, Ambrosia Melon, Watermelon, Yellow Squash, Zucchini, Green Peppers, Jalapeno Peppers and some sort of beans (Gigi started the seeds in class and brought them home).

The thing I've been reluctant to do, but know I need to, is put up some sort of deer protection.  What a drag, I love to go up and putter at the edge of the garden unhindered.  But I guess so do the deer.

How Does Your Garden Grow Part II

This is the driveway garden. This garden also did well this year. The perennials came up wonderfully and the mystery plants turned out to be a beautiful White Phlox and and some sort of Mum.

As with the driveway garden I expanded a bit, since I had the time... I really enjoyed the mix of perennials and annuals. When I first started gardening, I only used annuals. Then I expanded to the perennials, which really helps building an established garden. I like adding in the annuals to fill in blanks spots, plus some off the annuals ended up being the work horses of the garden, blooming longer than most of the perennials.

Some of my favorites in this garden this year were the Pomegranate Achillea (just starting to bloom in the picture with Mr. Max), the White Phlox, the White Cleome and the Snapdragons.

This last picture is of the Passion Flower I grew on the fence. Last year's Passion Flower did not make it through the winter, so I dug up this year's plant and brought it inside. Wish me luck, I'm much better with plants in the garden, than with the ones in the house.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

An old friend of mine commented on my garden blog post from April and I realized I had not updated this since I first started it. I think most of my gardens did exceptionally well this year. It helps being home full time, plus there were very few super hot periods so they all received lots of attention.

These pics are of the side garden. I expanded this garden at the beginning of the season and am really happy that I did. This garden has taken years to understand. It gets the best and hardest sun, so it's important to put things here that can handle the conditions. It also helps to have some tall plants like the butterfly bushes and Maiden Grass to provide some shade.

Those plants did well here, and so did the Echinacea, Lavender, Rosemary, Russian Sage and Roses (although I had keep them sprayed with Deer Off).
One interesting development in this garden was the surprise appearance of the Wave Petunias. I did not plant these here, at least not this year. Several years back I had some Wave Petunias here and must have activated some old seeds in the soil when I turned it up during the expansion. During the August heat they really took off and were a great addition to the garden.

Garden Blog - Seeds Planted

It's spring! Finally. And that means it's time to get the gardens cleaned up, planted and set before it gets to hot to deal with the heavy work. I have several gardens in my yard all with a varying degree of help needed. The one in the best shape right now is the side garden (above). Over the years, I have kept a spiral notebook documenting the rise of each garden, the fall not so much because by that time I lost interest, hence the fall of the garden. I think I will try to do this electronically at this point.

Today I cleaned most of the weeds out of the what I call the driveway garden. This is a garden in my front yard, next to the driveway. The show piece of this garden is a huge white Peony which is due to bloom in about 20 days or so.

There are few things in this garden that have not come back yet...will they? There are also two things that I don't know what they are. One, I think is some sort of mum, the other, I'm not sure. I'm not even sure that it is not a weed. But for now I will let it stay. I have started keeping the tacky plastic plant markers just for this reason. I think also taking pictures and labeling them will help when it comes to identifying things next year.

The driving force behind today's clean up was so that I could plant some seeds. Earlier this year I stopped by Brookside Gardens and saw some beautiful tall snapdragons. I purchased some seeds recently and today put those seeds in the ground. Historically, when it comes to seeds I am either wildly successful or the opposite. So wish me luck...

I also planted a number of seeds in the side garden. Chinese Forget-me-nots, two types of Zinnias and Portulaca.

Oh and while I was out there Miss Tootie the cat came along, meowing a very self satisfied meow. When I got closer I saw she had blood on her paws. I guess I'm just glad I didn't have to see what it was that she killed...