May Flowers!

As promised, I've got some flower pictures to share.

First, the gorgeous annuals I found for the front garden:

They're called Torenia, or "wishbone flower", and I saw them for the first time this year when I went to a plant nursery with my mother-in-law, looking for stuff for her garden. I bought a 6-pack of mixed pink, white, and purple ones, and I want to go back and get a dozen more for the back yard, where the petunias met a premature demise. I blame bunnies.

Now for a couple of my back garden favorites, finally blooming! I have loved Oenothera (Sundrops) for years, because Mom always had some in her garden and they are so cheerful and sunny. They look like giant buttercups and they flower profusely for weeks.

The Nepalese Cinquefoil, or Potentilla, I bought because of the five-lobed leaves. I figured that even when it wasn't flowering, it would add some visual interest to the garden. Lucky thing, too, because last year it didn't produce a single flower. But look how wonderful it is when it decides to bloom!

I really enjoy having a pretty garden to look at, even if it's a lot of work. Right now it's a little eclectic and crowded, because I haven't been sure where to put what, but I hope that within the next couple of years, I'll have an established family of perennials in their permanent homes.

Garden update

I'm constrained in what I can do with my gardens right now, because there are backyard projects in the planning stages that might impact the garden area, and I don't want to invest too much work if I'm going to need to move everything in a month. I keep having to talk myself out of buying just one more perennial to fill this space or that space - I need to wait until I have a plan. There's a drainage pipe being put in near the shed, and we're figuring out where to build a raised-bed planter for veggies, but it's not clear yet whether any of this will happen this summer or next, so I need to keep from putting too much effort into changing the garden around.

Yeah, I totally bought more perennials. 

Some of them were acquired for free from a neighbor redesigning one of her gardens - a big chunk of Salvia (not the hallucinogenic kind), and some tiger lilies. I split the plants up and put a little of each into the front and back gardens. In this picture, the Salvia is in the far left corner, and the tiger lilies are behind the shepherd's hook.

I also added pink creeping Phlox to the front right corner, because it will spread well and hopefully keep weeds from getting settled. There are some annuals in there to fill up the empty spaces - white and pink petunias. I picked up a perennial I'd never seen before, called Cupid's Dart, and I put those in near the Salvia. I plan to have a bed of irises in the back, against the deck, but I haven't moved the side-yard irises over yet. Which is good, because that space is currently the only available spot for my cherry tomatoes. Recurring players from last year fared quite well: the daylilies survived, as did the white Echinacea and the yellow Oenothera (evening primrose). I was glad to see the silver-mound come back after it was crushed by the pine tree - it's much smaller than it was last year, but it's alive. The Cinquefoil looks like it's going to flower this year, and the purple-leaved thing in the back is healthy, although I've forgotten its name already. The only one not to regrow was the Gaillardia (Blanket Flower), which is really disappointing because I loved it so much. It comes in an annual and a perennial form, and I suspect the plants were mislabeled and I got annuals last year.

Last year's Gaillardia (blanket flower)

Last year's white Echinacea

Nothing is flowering yet this year except the Phlox and the lone iris in the back, but I will be posting pictures of the flowers as they bloom. The evening primrose should be first, because it's already heavy with flower buds. the tiger lilies won't be far behind.

And that iris? Enough to make me reconsider tulips as my favorite flowers. 

Flowers in January

I found a crocus in my yard today. A beautiful, sunny, yellow crocus, poking up out of the grass by the mailbox.

I'm very happy to see it, and it makes me smile, but for crying out loud, it's January 29th! Apparently crocus bulbs are triggered to flower when they encounter a warm spell after a long enough cold dormant period, so the strange weather we've had all winter confused this little guy into waking up early.

My tulips and daffodils are sprouting up too, and I hope they don't get killed off by the frosts that are coming, because there's a way to go before spring actually gets here, and I'd like to have some flowers in March and April!

Tomato tasting

Independent sources agree: my tomatoes are delicious.


Don't even ask me how he got the thing up there to snack on it - that tomato was on a very low branch and already had bites taken out of it, which is why I left it there. I thought maybe leaving one ripe, accessible tomato on the vine would keep the critters away from all the other ones. Mr. Squirrelly over here has ruined that plan with the super-squirrel strength and coordination needed to hoist a huge tomato up onto the deck.

Squirrels are why I can't have nice things in my garden. The bird feeder was wrecked in a day, and the pretty painted birdhouse Mom gave me has suffered significant roof damage from squirrel attacks. I'm glad we have the fence fixed now, because it'll keep the deer away from my veggies, but the bunnies and the squirrels are sneaky little enemies. Unless I go to the trouble of building a wire cage around everything, I think I'm stuck with cute, fluffy, tomato poachers.

Nobody is bothering much with the cherry tomatoes except us humans, so I think maybe I will stick with those next year. They are delicious, and if I pick them before they're completely ripe, they're mostly flawless. The big tomatoes, on the other hand, are all getting bites taken out of them, or splitting at the seams.

Tomato update

My tomato plants are enormous.

Also, I desperately need to weed that garden and get the Gaillardia staked up, but that will be a task for next weekend.

I wasn't expecting these tomato plants to get so big, and the cages I bought are much too small to properly support and restrain them! They're also much too close together, which means that finding and picking the ripe tomatoes is a bit of an adventure. I've had some stinkbug issues, but they seem to only go after the leaves and the ripe tomatoes, so picking the tomatoes just as they're starting to blush has been working well for me. I go tomato picking with a paintbrush to flick away the stinkbugs, because it still completely freaks me out to touch a bug.

Here's my current tomato supply:

My husband has claimed these particular tomatoes in the name of salsa, which he will make tonight.

I've been counting and weighing my tomato harvest since the very first cherry tomato came off the vine, because I'm a dork like that and I want to see how much money I'm saving by growing my own veggies. I grew these from seeds, not from starter plants, but I suspect that once I factor in the cost of the special seed-starting soil and the little pots, it would have been just as economical to buy little seedlings and start from there. But I did this for the challenge of growing something edible from a seed, and I succeeded and I'm proud of myself.

First Tomato!

Well, even if it's the only one I get, I suppose this means I can call my attempt at vegetable gardening at least a minor success. I went out to check on my plants this morning, hoping they weathered last night's storms without too much damage, and I saw red! And not the kind that means I was angry!


Aww, look, he's blushing!

So I picked him, because I was so excited about his not being green anymore and I decided that blushing tomatoes belonged in the kitchen.

In hindsight, perhaps I should have left him there to set an example for his peers, because he's the only one out of several dozen cherry tomatoes and half a dozen big tomatoes that has shown any indication that they want to ripen and be eaten. Precocious little guy. I will reward him by having him for dinner and delighting in his deliciousness.

This used to be a seed! And I helped make it into a tomato!

Itty bitty tomatoes!

I've got tomatoes! They're tiny and green, but they're here! I managed to mix up my plants when I moved them to the garden, so I'm not sure which are the "Big Boy" tomatoes and which are the cherry tomatoes, but I'm guessing I'll be able to tell soon enough. I've got them caged up and comfortable, but they're too close together so they're sort of sharing cages, with a plant stake and some string making up the slack. So far so good; the big storms we had this week didn't knock them over.


I'm just praying that no critters come to eat them before I get a chance to harvest and eat them myself.

First harvest - green beans!

I am totally stoked about the fact that I can tag this post with both "garden" and "dinner".

I love green beans, and I was so excited to try growing some on my deck. I am delighted to report that the teeny things from last week are now all grown up and ready to eat! They look delicious and I can't wait to roast them up in the oven with a little salt and devour them tonight.

Picking them was easy, and I hope I managed to leave the plant unscathed so it can keep making me beans. The ones I picked are all about as long as my fingers and a little fatter than a pencil. I had forgotten how fresh-off-the-plant green beans have that weird fuzzy Velcro feeling to them.

I think I picked them at the appropriate time. My taste-test tonight will tell me if I was right. Everything I read online said to pick them just before they start to bulge, but, not having a time machine, I can't anticipate their bulginess before they achieve that state, so I waited until they looked enough like the ones I buy at the store, and then picked them. The best part is, because the plants have more tiny beans on them, I'll get more beans next week too! I wonder how much these things produce over a summer?

It's cool to be eating something I grew myself, even if these little guys weren't grown from seeds. I paid $1.50 for 6 tiny bean plants, plus some money for fancy dirt for them to grow in, and I'm planning on weighing the useful yield of beans, to see how much money I'm saving versus buying them at the store.

My tomato plants have flowers, but no baby tomatoes yet. I will post photos of tomato babies as soon as they arrive!

My herb garden

By popular request, here is a look at my herb garden, in a flower box by the deck.


From left to right, we have parsley, oregano, dill (beside three measly chives), two giant basil plants, rosemary, and sage. I had some thyme, but I keep killing it, so I won't bother spending the money for yet another thyme plant just to watch it die. That's just cruel. Everything you can see in here except the dill and chives was purchased as a small plant - the seeds I started indoors with my tomatoes, back in the spring, didn't do very well at all, except for a couple of very small oregano and basil plants growing from the leftover seeds I tossed into the box this spring, but you can't see them from this angle because they're still tiny and flat.

The soil is dry and sandy and not very good, so I count myself lucky to have anything growing at all. Next year, time and money permitting, I want to dump this box and fill it with good potting soil so my plants can do better. I think I'll paint it white, too. The flowers and butterflies aren't my style.

Brush Clearing - part 2

After two afternoons of work, here is what the front yard looks like.


I am so proud of my "after" picture! That was so much work!

The plan to put in hostas and daylilies and various shrubbery has fallen flat due to the amazing number of pine tree roots blocking our shovels, so we opted to put down a fabric weed barrier instead, after getting up as many weeds and roots as possible, and then we dumped some mulch onto it. I'm hoping that once we've done that to the whole area, I can maintain the weedlessness with a half hour a week of patrolling with a bottle of Roundup.

We did get a few daylilies into the ground, and you can see them there, off to the right, behind the mulched area. They naturalize quickly and should spread like wildfire within a few years, assuming they survive the transplant. I also bought two azaleas today because they were $4.49 at Home Depot, cheaper than most of the perennials they have for sale. I will find spots for them under the pines, but they can wait in their pots until next weekend gets here, because I have completely run out of steam.

Brush Clearing

Last fall, we paid some guys to clear out the brush under the pines in the front yard, because there were baby trees and poison ivy and vines choking everything and looking like a jungle. It looked great after they were done, but the thing with plants is that they grow back. Bastards.

Here's what I had to deal with:My neighbor across the street offered me a huge pile of orange daylilies she cleared out from her garden, and I plan on putting them in this area to take over and fight back against the weeds. Or to at least blend in with the weeds and look pretty, so it looks like I'm making some sort of effort in my yard. I also purchased a few hostas recently, with plans to put them under these pines. I have visions of a low-maintenance, jumbled daylily-and-hosta garden under the trees. But first I need to clear out all this crap, including the six inches of accumulated pine needles, and make some space.

After an hour of tugging and ripping and cursing, here's what the front looks like:

So proud of myself!

But now I'm a little itchy and concerned, because of the three-leafed, urushiol-laced menace crawling all over my trees.
I used gloves, and I wore long sleeves and long pants. But reading online, after I was done (I do this sort of thing backwards a lot), I see recommendations about wearing two layers of rubber gloves and several layers of clothing, goggles, and rubber boots. Gently pulling on the vines to uproot them and stuffing them into doubled-up plastic trash bags. Removing the clothes carefully without touching anything and then laundering them immediately, while going to shower in cool water with no soap.

I used regular garden gloves, ripped those bastards up like I wanted them to die, and flung them into a huge pile. I went inside, took off the clothes to toss them in the wash, and then showered in normal water with soap.

I'm paranoid that I'm going to wake up in the morning covered in itchy blisters, despite the fact that the little itches I am feeling all over my body are probably completely psychosomatic and not actually the start of a poison ivy rash.

Garden update - green beans!

I transplanted the tomato plants into the garden today and I'm praying that the yard bunnies don't like salads of tomato leaves for lunch. I haven't caged the plants yet because they're still small, and the cherry tomato plant isn't supposed to get very tall, according to the seed package. One of the plants has a tiny yellow flower, so I think I might be doing something right. Hopefully getting them into the ground will help them grow better.

I started spreading out the green bean plants into separate planters on the deck to give them more room to grow, and I was surprised to see that there are teeny tiny green beans growing on them! It seems awfully early to me, and maybe they grow very slowly, but it's barely June and I wasn't expecting to see anything for a while.


But there they are, teeny little beans, ready to grow up and be eaten. I can't wait!

My herb garden is doing great too, with the basil starting to flower and the sage and oregano growing out of control. I'm going to chop some of those up in the next week to use in recipes! Sadly, I only have three chives, not even enough for one measly baked potato, so I don't think I'll bother trying those again next year unless I buy them as plants instead of seeds.

Surprise irises!

I found the leaves for these earlier in the spring and didn't think anything would come of them because they're in a messy overgrown area of the yard and completely choked with weeds, but look what they are now!

They're gorgeous! I'll move them later this year, so they have their own space where I can enjoy them. I'll be needing good gloves, though, because their current home is basically a bed of dandelions and poison ivy.

This yard has had so many surprises!

Mother's Day flowers

This year, we came up with the idea of buying flowers for my mother-in-law for Mother's Day - but not the kind that get delivered in a vase. I know she'd have enjoyed them a whole lot, but she had been talking about how she never gets around to fixing up her front garden. So, she and I went flower-shopping on Saturday to choose some plants for her garden, and we headed back to her place so I could do the dirty work and get them planted. When we got back, she found a box of flowers on her step, a pretty bunch of tulips sent by my brother-in-law and his wife, so I guess it's good we didn't do the same thing and look like copycats. They were really pretty, though, and I'm a little jealous - my tulips are all done and I have none left to bring inside for my table!

We tried to find a plant nursery my neighbor told me about, called "Ten Oaks", but when we finally saw the sign for it, we were blocked entry by a chained-off driveway and some construction equipment. So we took a scenic drive and ended up at a great little plant-and-produce place called Frank's - right near my usual shopping area, and I'd never known about it! They had half a dozen large greenhouses full of annuals, perennials, and vegetables, and their selection was huge. We had to get a wagon to hold everything we bought!

I was amused at how we have different favorites - she wanted dahlias and begonias and verbena (all annuals) and I was attacking the perennials section to find stuff I could plant and forget about. I managed to talk her into a perennial Dianthus and I hope she's happy with it! As is usual with my mother-in-law shopping trips, I found more for myself than for her, but that's ok. We laugh about it - if we go to the mall so I can help her find a dress, I leave with full shopping bags, but if we go shopping for me, I never find a thing.

As I build my garden, I seem to be choosing many of the same plants my mother had in her garden when I was growing up. I saw a beautiful "silver mound", and just had to have it. Because I like it, or because Mom had one? Not sure, but it's living behind the Rabbit Crossing sign now. I also bought some white Echinacea, some yellow Oenothera (evening primrose) and a yellow daylily. Oh, and a sage plant, and two Gaillardia (blanket flower), and some brilliant red verbena to fill in the gaps. I'll take some pictures when everything settles in, but this is how it looked at the end of the day:


I'm surprised at how much fun I'm having with the garden, since I loathe being dirty and I am terrified of bugs. I was on my knees in the dirt, digging holes for these plants, and had a short moment of not quite recognizing myself. But maybe it's genetic and inevitable and I'm just falling into my role in the world. Who knows. At least my backyard is starting to look good.

Bring me.... a shrubbery!

We have a great bounty of azalea, rhododendron, boxwood, rose-of-sharon, yew, English laurel, and holly bushes in the yard. Most of them are in sorry shape after years of neglect. All of them are in desperate need of pruning because they're much bigger than they should be, but unfortunately in most cases the green healthy layer is only a couple of inches thick, and the whole interior of the shrub is a mess of twigs.

Pruning them to the size they need to be will probably kill them unless we do it over the course of several years, and even then it's a long shot.

So we've decided to take most of them out. They're taking over the deck and patio and they look scraggly, so we're going to pull them out and start from scratch with smaller shrubs or other plants that we can keep under control.

This is before:
And here's that back corner after a couple of hours of work:

It's hard to see the difference, but there are three trash cans full of twigs and ivy sitting at the curb now, with those two piles of twigs and ivy you see in the photo left over to be tossed next week because we ran out of trash cans. It's going to take forever to clear out this yard, and it's going to leave things looking a little naked for a while but I think it makes the most sense to do it this way and start over with a blank canvas, choosing new plants and shrubs that don't need much care, while making sure to give them that little bit of care so they don't get out of control.

Yet more gardening

I added a few things to my garden today. Some seeds for forget-me-nots and Lunaria (silver-dollar-plant) are now sowed in the back garden, so there will be something growing there once the tulips are finished. I am in love with the hundreds of pretty violets sprinkled across our front and side lawns, so I dug up a couple for the back garden - they will spread like weeds, which is fine with me. I don't have a lot of money to spend on perennials right now, so anything I already have and can use is very helpful. I also found some beautiful and sweet-smelling plants growing under the pine trees in the front, so I dug those up and moved them too.

I was sure they were Phlox, but a little research corrected me and now I know they are in fact Hesperis matronalis, or Dame's Rocket. Technically an invasive weed/wildflower and often confused for native Phlox species, it's actually outlawed in a few places (Massachusetts, Colorado). As far as I'm concerned, they're free pretty perennials and so they can live in my garden. I left some under the trees too, because there were a lot of them, and if they're growing well there it'll make that area look nice.


In other news, it turns out that the big azalea by the front door, and the one by the back door, are both pink. The other one in the front of the house is red, and the third one by the gate isn't flowering yet so I can't be sure, but the buds look dark so I'm going to guess red. Sadly, they are attracting bees. Billions of bees. So I think I will move them to the side yard in the fall so I can enjoy looking at them from the computer room but not have to dodge bees every time I need to leave the house.


The huge rhododendrons we salvaged when the landscaping guys gutted the area under the pines are still alive, and a couple of them are flowering. I'll prune them back after they're done flowering (the azaleas too), because they're so gangly and spread out and I want to try and make them fuller and healthier. Or I will kill them by pruning. It's a fine line!

I also moved the tomato plants to bigger pots, and I expect to put them outside within a few weeks. I bought green bean plants too, and will give those a shot in a container garden on the deck, and see if maybe I can grow something edible. A good skill to have in case society collapses around us.

Weekend plantings

This weekend, I planted a bunch of perennials in the garden. My garden is very big and my plants are very small, so there's a lot of empty space left over, but perennials keep coming back every year and they spread out and multiply, so it'll fill in nicely over the next couple of years.

In front, I planted two different kinds of Dianthus (common name: "Pinks"). One is a striped pink-and-red variety and the other one is a shocking pink color. They should look great together once they start to flower. I also put in a heather shrub, because heather smells incredible and once I sniffed it at Home Depot, I had to have it. It's not supposed to get more than a couple of feet in height, so it should stay comfortable in the front garden. If it gets out of hand like the mutant lavender did at the old house, I'll have to move it. The shrub is the small pink-flowers blob by the post, behind Solar Duck, and the three Dianthuses (Dianthi?) are in a triangle in front. You can see the tulips are getting huge, also.

In the backyard, I put in some English Daisies, again in pink. I'm not sure why I bought mostly pink things for my gardens this year! I think I'll pick up a couple more of them, because those two look lonely. I completely forgot about Mom's garden "rule of three" where everything should be planted in groups of 3, or at least in odd numbers.

I added Sedum (Stonecrop) to the rocky flowerbed where my grape hyacinths are currently blooming. They're a nice ground cover and they only make tiny flowers and shouldn't attract too many bees, which is important since that area is near the back door.I bought some daylilies, but I'm not sure yet where I want to put them. They would make more impact in the front, since people would see them from the street, but I think I want them in the backyard so I can enjoy them from the kitchen and family room. Still deciding on that, and I'll plant them next weekend. They can live for another week in their little plastic pots.

I'll put up some better pictures of the new plants once they're settled in and blooming happily!

The Saga of Solar Duck

In an earlier post, I lamented the unfortunate name given to a new lawn ornament - Solar Duck. Unfortunately, as it turns out, not only his name gave me grief. Solar Duck was not doing his job. He was not being solar. Oh, he was cute and all, and I still wanted to keep him, but Dave decided that if he wasn't going to glow in the dark, then he was going to be returned to the store. No free rides!

I'm lazy. I got as far as finding the receipt, but washing the duck off and bringing him all the way back to the store, was too much work. So he sat there for a few weeks, being a lovely but non-glowing garden ornament.

As it turns out, my laziness was actually fate intervening on Solar Duck's behalf. While at Sears looking for patio furniture, I saw a shelf full of solar creatures. No ducks, but the cats and butterflies and frogs were definitely made in the same style as our defective little guy, so I picked one up, and saw that it had a big square tag attached to it. A big square tag with instructions on it. Which, naturally, ours was missing when we bought it. Yeah, it seems there's a plastic thing inside him with a switch on it, which needs to be switched to - get this - ON, before it will glow. I popped Solar Duck open and fixed the switch that morning as soon as we got home, and sure enough, that night, we had a blue glowing duck in the front garden.

He works really well, too, staying blue almost all night. It's a good little solar cell he has in his butt.

Garden update

My tulips are starting to look like they'll actually flower, and that makes me happy-dance. The buds are huge - I hope that once they bloom, the flowers can stand up straight and not flop over! I am amazed and delighted that the bulbs were not eaten by squirrels and the greenery was not eaten by rabbits or deer, and I hope this is a good sign for the future of my gardens.

My grape hyacinths are doing their thing and starting to open up a little. It looks like I have two different kinds, which is weird because I bought and planted one big bag of what I thought was all the same thing. Some of them sprouted skinny striped leaves in the fall after I planted them, and then waited until the spring to push up a flower bud, but others didn't appear until this spring, with one wide tulip-like leaf with a bud nestled inside it. My online research leads me to believe I have some Muscari latifolium in my mix: the broad leaf is characteristic of that species. Don't you love the Latin name for these things? It's also the origin of the French word for them: muscari. Sounds so pretty! I also have a mix of white and purple, which was also unexpected, but not a problem. Both are going to be pretty. They're not quite blooming yet but you can see what color they'll be.

I hope to have another garden update tomorrow, because I bought a few plants last week and I want to put them into the garden if the weather is nice enough.

Seedlings Update

The seedlings were getting bigger and some of them had more than one set of leaves, so I transplanted them this weekend before they got too crowded in their egg cartons. The big tomatoes are growing the fastest, which surprises me because they were the last to sprout!

They're pretty tall now (on the right, in the photo) and have 3 pairs of leaves. The cherry tomatoes (on the left) aren't doing as well, but they're still alive and green, so I won't give up yet. The herbs are pretty pitiful, and I think that from now on I'll just end up buying little herb plants for $1.50 each at Home Depot instead of trying this seed thing ever again. For example, these are my chives:


I don't have a nice warm, bright spot for the herbs to grow from seed - the window I had them in, which was the best spot in the house, only gets a few hours of sun a day and I think they need a lot more than that. I'd need to invest in grow lights, and I'm not that dedicated to gardening quite yet.