Blowin' in the Wind

I haven't been able to do any actual planting this year, thanks to surgery and what not. So we've depended on pots for what few plants we have. Rich actually paid one if his Starbucks regulars, an avid gardener, to put together several pots for me. Thanks to him we have a variety of herbs, peppers, and flowers. To supplement that we did one pot of basil and rosemary and bought one patio tomato pot of cherry tomatoes because hey, it was 40% off and already had a ton of fruit on it!

Sadly, the tomato plant was a casualty in the recent storms. Rich came home to find it knocked over and the stem snapped. We may be able to save the lower half, but most of the fruit is gone. Sad. :-( Thankfully our other plants came through mostly unscathed. I kind of like this container gardening...especially when someone else does most of the work!

Today we finally tilled and planted our new garden. It's a bit late in the season, but it's been a weird spring so perhaps it will work out for the best.

The new garden is back by the garage where the chicken coop used to be. Thanks to the chickens, we have beautifully fertilized black dirt that should treat our veggies and herbs quite nicely. The final plan is to fence the garden to keep rabbits (and precocious dogs) out but that isn't done yet. However, I went ahead and planted as we had a backlog of plants given to us by Mom and friends.

I made a garden map this year so that I know what is where even if the garden tags go missing (as they always seem to). It's not a very well-rounded garden, there's no lettuce or salad fixings. But we've found that we never seem to get to lettuce before it turns bitter so I passed on it this year. We have an over-abundance of peppers but we use a lot in our cooking and can dry or pickle some of the excess. I'm also hoping to dry some of our own herbs if we have a good crop.

The new garden location gets more sun and has more space and drainage. We'll probably put pavers down the middle to make access easier and add some trellises for the climbing things. I certainly put more thought into the garden this year and really hope to have fewer weeds than last year. Time will tell!

And now we return...

After some technical difficulties (mostly caused by my own stupidity) I am back in the blogosphere.

The planting season is over and it was a busy one for me. Being that we're on more of a budget this year, our tiny garden got more seeds this year. Previously we've done a lot of started plants from the nursery. The good news about seeds is that as they are cheap, it's easier to take a few risks.

We pared back the herb selection to just the few we really use - cilantro, dill, rosemary, and basil. I planted a mint in a pot but there is still plenty of up popping up EVERYWHERE from when I planted it in the ground a few years ago.

For veggies we did four hot peppers and a green bell pepper, cucumber, sugar snap peas, several tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, an acorn squash, and just for fun - a "Minnesota Melon" (it looks like a variety of cantaloupe).

Oh, and the great potato experiment! We planted five potato buckets, something that is apparently quite common in the UK. I really didn't have high hopes for my potatoes but they ended up looking like bushes! I wish we had used larger buckets as you are supposed to keep mounding them for more spuds but we ran out of room. We'll see our finished product in a couple of weeks, the earliest plant has already died off.

We're having mild bunny trouble but not too bad. Saffy the dog barks from the fence and hopefully scares them off a bit. My biggest challenge has been weeds. When growing from seed it's very hard to tell seedling from weed for several weeks, so I didn't dare pull anything. (I planted in rows, but they weren't well marked.) Bits of my garden are rather overrun but I just try to pull a few handfuls every day as I walk through.

I'd like to find a green option to kill everything over the winter, the spreading mint and the weeds alike. We really only have one desired perennial in the herb garden, the chive, and I can get another cutting from Mom easily enough.

Well, that's about two months summed up in one post. Whoo hoo! More later. :)