And they all came tumbling down

The other day I looked out my window, and much to my non-astonishment discovered a tragic sight.

Those pole beans finally did in the plastic posts I had attempted to support them with. Since I haven't been able to be using the beans anyway, and it's near the end of the season, I just pulled them all out, poles, twine, and all. It never ceases to astound me how much these pole beans just keep GROWING! And I still have the beans in my planter (on the right in this pic) so I am not lacking in beans after pulling these suckers out. (I am really hoping to get some seeds out of the beans still in there, but the weather is turning yucky real fast so I'm a little worried).

Next year we are most definitely doing something different with these beanies. I have thought about growing them against my house, but I think it does not get enough sun for beans. I have also debated about growing them up a part of my fence. The back fence would be ideal since it is chain-link, but our yard is quite large (three-quarters of an acre large) and I had a hard enough time getting out to pick the beans when they were right next to my house. I also may grow them up the fence behind my flower bed which is just off my house, and I know they'd get plenty of sun there. The only catch is that I would have to put some netting or fencing against the fence for them to grow up since it is a wood slat fence. And then there is my original idea of building a wood frame, which would look very attractive and still may be my method of choice but does require the most effort of the three.

A long and tiring time...

So I have not posted in a long time due to my pregnancy starting to really take its toll on my energy level! I have not even been out in my garden very much this month. All those poor beans I picked just got sent to the compost pile, because I just did not have the energy to blanch and freeze them! And then I just haven't even picked any beans after that! I even have a bowl full of tomatoes in my fridge right now that desperately need to be frozen. There is just a lot that needs to be done that hasen't been. I am getting some things done, but not as much as there is to do. *sigh* I didn't think quite far enough ahead when I decided to grow a full-blown garden this year. I have been learning a lot this year, though, so it's not a total loss. And we did get to eat quite a bit of the stuff from the garden, epsecially earlier in the season when I had more energy and it was exciting that things were starting to grow! I am glad for all the things I have been learning and am excited for next year to be able to do things even better (and hopefully with a lot more energy!) One idea I am getting really excited about for next year is to have a farm stand out in front of our house. I just kept thinking it was a shame to be composting so much of our garden's produce, and then I decided woudln't it be fun if I could try to sell some of it! And with a little more structure of the space out there, I could easily have plenty of plants growing lots of produce to sell! We'll see where I am next year but I am very excited to try out this idea.

Veggie Pizza with Sorrel Sauce

I made this veggie pizza for myself tonight (made a more normal pizza for the rest of the family), and I thought it turned out the most delicious pizza I've ever tasted!

So this was after I had eaten one piece, and decided I just had to put it in here. It looks somewhat weird, but it tasted SO good!

The sauce I made with sorrel, which is a leafy green I discovered from my friend's farm this summer and absolutely love (and plan on growing next year!). It has a very strong lemony-taste and can be eaten both fresh or cooked. When you saute it, it "melts" into a sauce, which is fascinating! The whole leaf just kind of melts all apart. So for this pizza sauce, I sauteed some shallots in butter first, then added the sorrel leaves (with the stem parts removed - probably about ten medium-small leaves, they really melt down a lot) and sauteed that out until it was all melted down, then I poured in some heavy cream - just enough to make it a little thinner than I wanted, and then I simmered it for just a few minutes to thicken it up to be just the texture I wanted for my pizza.

Then I spread the sauce on the pizza, and topped it with sliced tomatoes and zucchini (the zucchini was sliced very thin) and covered it all with some parmasean cheese and mozzerella (I could have used more mozzerella, as you can see).

The sauce is what made the whole pizza! It was creamy and tangy, and complimented perfectly with the tomatoes and zucchini! I would have never thought before to put zucchini on a pizza (or sorrel for that matter) but it turned out spectatular! I shared a piece with my husband, and he said it was really good (this coming from a "I don't like veggies" guy). I definitely will be getting more sorrel from the farm this week and making this again (especially since I have TONS of tomatoes and zucchini coming out of my garden now!).

Now I just need to find a good gluten-free family sized pizza so I'm not having to do so many personal sized ones!

Garden Veggie Shepherd's Pie

Here's my on-the-fly version of a shepherd's pie kind of dish with my garden veggies:

(Ok, so I confess, those are ALL from my garden. Actually, only the green beans are. But those veggies COULD all be from my garden. I had some produce from a nearby farm that needing eating so those went in there instead. But I do have all the veggies in there growing in my garden, including the onion.)

All I did was put in chopped scallop squash, green beans, carrot, onion, and browned ground beef in a cassarole dish. I poured over that some chicken stock and cream, and added summer savory, salt, and pepper. Then I made up some biscuit dough (I'm gluten intollerant, so I use a gluten-free baking mix that is superb!) and dolloped that all on top. Then baked it at 350F (it might have been 375F) for about half an hour. The biscuits were nice and golden, though some of the veggies were still a little crisp, so it probably would have been better to cook on a lower temp for a little longer. But it was really yummy still! I was pretty proud of myself for being able to toss it all together, and even my husband said he really liked it. It's a keeper.

Tomato Pruning

So this year I tried a new method of pruning tomatoes that I learned from my farmer friend (this is how they do it on the farm and it's suppose to boost the plant's production). I'm not sure officially what it's called, but I call it the tall and skinny method.

It's simple - you find the main stem and prune the suckers out.

Not so simple is to figure out what exactly a sucker is.

But I tried it on a couple of my tomatoes, and I think I actually got it right finally on one! Here's what it looks like now:

This is one that I am growing under the eves of my house on my deck where it's nice and hot and sunny and the Seattle summer rains won't bother it. It has been growing fabulously, despite my son hacking at it several times with a pair of scissors (hence the reason it is pretty bare on that bottom half). As you can see it has grown very tall. I actually have twine strung up from the base of the plant to a nail in my house eves to support it, and that has been working quite well. It did take a little longer to show flowers and produce tomatoes, and I think starting to prune it earlier would have helped. But now it has got some tomatoes and lots more flowers in the works at the top!

It turns out the sucker is the little part that grows out between a leaf and the main stem:

And here's another pic (sorry it's fuzzy).

You can see with both of them the sucker grows out of the middle of the stem and the branch. So you let all the branches grow, just not these little suckers. If they grow, they become another stem. (That's how tomatoes normally get so bushy)

This method is suppose to help the plant concentrate on just that one main stem and since it's spending less energy growing stems all over the place it's supposed to grow more fruit.

(And another benefit of the tall and skinny method: my kids can't reach all the tomatoes!! Hooray to actually having tomatoes ripen on the vine!)

I really like this method, and next year I plan on doing it with all my tomatoes. It saves on tomato support as well - they will all only need one long stake or some stringing up like I did here!


A side note: as you can see I have basil planted in the pot with the tomato. According to my new favorite book, Roses Love Garlic and Carrots Love Tomatoes, it is mutually beneficial to grow basil and tomatoes together and since I love cooking with basil I love that I can have it grow with the tomatoes right by my back door! (Tomatoes are also good to grow with a whole slew of other plants because apparently they have a chemical they produce in their roots that deters a lot of bugs that pester other plants). I highly reccomend this book. I wish I had gotten it earlier since it is a fabulous book and very fascinating! I plan on using that book as my guideline for planning next years garden! (Something to do during those cold winter months when I can't be out there in the dirt!)

The Tomatoes Are Coming!

My tomato plants FINALLY started pumping out their tomatoes!

Here's today's harvest (I got about the same amount yesterday too but gave them to my mom since she helped fund most of our tomato plant section)

Aren't they pretty!

We've got several varieties out there. Most are normal red tomatoes (some roma-style, some beefsteak), but we've also got a couple Green Cheroke tomato plants (the yellowish-green tomato front and center) and Purple Cheroke plants (hard to see in this pic, they are just slightly purple-ish - the one in the upper left corner is one).

Many of the plants have started not looking very happy about a month ago, but they still seem to be able to give us some tomatoes.

I plan on freezing most of my tomatoes. I was going to can them, but I am a bit intimidated by the whole process plus I'm not sure I'll have time (or energy - pregnancy really sucks that out of you). Freezing is just so much simpler, and it's suppose to better preserve their nutrients. I did research yesterday on how to freeze tomatoes, and there are several ways, but the simplest is to cut out the stem scar and surrounding hard area, then freeze whole on a cookie sheet. After they're frozen you put them all in a ziplock bag and pull them out as you need them. To get the skin off, supposidly you can simply put the frozen tomato under hot running tap water and the skin is supposed to sepparate and come off. I guess we'll be seeing how it works this winter!

Obviously you really can only use frozen tomatoes for sauce and such, since freezing them gives them a mushy texture (I suppose that would be a benefit of canning). But since that's pretty much all I use canned tomatoes for anyway, I think I'll be good.

My First Green Bean Crop & Thoughts on Pole Beans

Those pole beans all of a sudden have started producing green beans out my ears! Here is my very first full crop picking of green beans (minus some that got eaten on the way in):

I'm so proud!

I was going to freeze them, but after cutting them all up, my mom told me that it's really best to use only the skinnier, younger green beans for freezing, not the bigger lumpy ones. *bummer* So I'll have to start really being better at picking when they're young, which I haven't been.

I did have some thoughts come while I was picking.

I have two areas of pole beans, one long double row which I made a fancy twine lattice for all the plants to grow up, and another bunch in teepee style.

Here they are when the plants were young:

And now this is what they look like!

At first I thought the teepee style looked much nicer (plus took MUCH less time to do). But as they've grown the plants in the teepee have way overgrown their stakes and fallen back down around and all over the place, so now it looks more like a pillar than a teepee. And they are bunched really close together. The plants in the lattice have also grown everywhere, but are still spaced much farther apart. As a result, I discovered while picking, the beans on the lattice plants are much easier to see and pick, where the teepee beans are all hidden underneath all that overgrown folliage and very hard to pick!

The one problem I have run into with the lattice plants is that the stakes I used for the ends are too weak to support all that growth (I had no idea they would grow THAT much!) and they have started bending over. I've had to make-shift supports by tying rocks on twine to the end poles to pull them back out.


So next year, I have two ideas for how to better grow pole beans (which I think I may still grow since it's fun to watch them grow crazy! And I can get seeds from my plants this year).

One is to build a sturdy frame out of wood with sides & beams across the top box-style - untreated pine probably since I have some already - and then I can string the twine down from that to the plants like I did before, only I think I will do two plants to a string intead of each plant getting it's own string.

The other idea I just had while reading Better Homes and Gardens and seeing how they use plants on verticle surfaces, is to grow the beans along one side of my house on my deck! I would just have to put pots on the ground, and then hook some netting onto the side of the house, and the beans would grow right up! It's north facing, so I'm not quite sure it will get enough sun, but it's warm and I think it may get just enough sun (I'll have to keep track and see if it's getting at least 6 hours).

I may try both methods in case the house one doesn't work.

Also I am going to do more pinching of the runners as they reach the top to hopefully not have so much overgrowth at the top and more bushiness down at the bottom (a tip from my mom).

Today's Harvest!

Today I went out and got a great harvest from my garden!

LOTS of green beans, several summer scallop squash, three yellow zucchini, four tomatoes, five ears of corn (I could have pulled more probably), and my four walla walla onion, plus I cut some dahlias and hydrangeas. I just thought it looked so pretty all together!

I think most of my corn is finally harvestable! I've never grown corn, so I'm not sure how to tell it's ripe. But according to my mom, the tassles should be brown, and then she usually peaks to see if the corn looks developed. There are several ears out there on the bigger stalks (the ones I started indoors) that the husks on the corn have even started drying out, so I figured they were probably ready and picked five of those for us to have for dinner tonight. They were perfect! My whole famly loved them, and they are so much sweeter and crisper than when you buy them at the grocery store! Thought I am a little dissapointed that you only get one or two ears of corn per stalk! This summer I've been looking at a seed catalog (which my mom lost, so now I have to rememer which company it was for) that had a corn variaty that was multi-colored AND got 5-6 ears of corn per stalk! I think I will try that one next year.

My onions I really had no idea when to harvest them, and I guess with onions you can harvest them young and they taste just fine just smaller sized bulbs. I forgot to mark when I planted my onion starts, so I didn't know when the 110 day growing period was supposed to be up. But they had really just stopped growing (may be because kiddos kept ripping all their leaves off, the poor things), so I decided just to pull them up. One onion is HUGE! An awesome specimen of walla walla. The other three are just ok, one being really on the small side. This was a first time for onions as well, so it was a fun experiment! It will be fun to see if they taste sweet like walla wallas traditionally do when I go to use them!

Aphid Troubles Revisited

And update on my aphid issue. After many attempts to simply hose off the stinker aphids that didn't work, I did indeed go out and buy a spray bottle and fill it with warm water and about a teaspoon of dish soap (I estimated). I sprayed the one pot of sweet peas quite heavily with the soapy water solution, and because I found a couple aphids had crept onto the neighboring sweet peas, I sprayed them as well, tho not quite as heavily. I did this for two days in a row after watering.

Well, it worked as far as killing the aphids! There are now no aphids in sight. However, I don't think the plants liked it very much either, because right after the second day of spraying, the plants in the pot that I had sprayed heavily started to yellow. It has been at least a week, and they still look somewhat sad:

It is only the pot that had been heavily infested with aphids that yellowed like this, so I don't know if it was from the damage the aphids had done and it just didn't show up until after I sprayed, or if it was from the spray itself, perhaps because I sprayed too heavily.

After I noticed this and could see that there were no more aphids, I made sure to rinse off all the plants thouroughly to make sure there was no more soapy residue (in case that was what was damaging them). They looked sad for quite a while, tho just in the past couple of days they look like they are starting to recover.

The Sneaky Snipper Strikes Again

Today I woke up and let the dogs outside to discover this:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

Somehow my son, who gets up a little before me, had found my garden scissors (which I had been working so hard to keep out of reach!) and snipped my beautiful tomato plants on our deck! Luckily these two guys were big enough that he couldn't snip them off at the stalk (tho snip marks on the stem say he tried) so instead he cut off most of the leaves! (I suppose I should be thankful he at least left the tomatoes on there.)

One poor pot got all its inhabitants totally snipped off! The poor tomato that had already gone through this once and was trying to recover, my nice basil plant and my ONLY blooming marigold that I had managed to grow from some very old seeds

And then he totally snippped off both my balsam flowers! This one especially had been growing beautifully! You can see the carnage littering the middle of the pot, that poor balsam.


That stinker sneaky snipper!

Now I have re-hidden the scissors and if I'm missing, you'll find me in the garden mourning.

Aphid Troubles

I've been pretty lucky so far to not have too many bug problems, but my little knee-high sweet peas on my deck have recently gotten this stubborn infestation of aphids!

 Here you can see the little buggers all over the tender tips of my pretty little sweet peas.

There are also these little tan-ish colored bugs that seem to hang out with the aphids. I don't know what they are, but they look kinda like aphids and they don't wash off when I hose off the plants, I have to pick them off by hand.






So after many attempts to hose off the stinkers every day (supposed to be one way you can get rid of them) and them coming back every day I have decided I need to up my attack. I did a little quick research, and found out from the website garden.getridofthings.com that you can use a homemade solution of 2 teaspoon mild dish soap with a bottle of lukewarm water to spray the plants, and it's supposed to wash off their waxy protective coating and cause dehydration. Sounds like a good next step. They had several other suggestions as well, one of which was to also put oil in the water/soap mix to clog their pores and suffocate them, but I think I'll start with the soap & water (since it warns not to spray the oil solution on hot days as it can damage the plant) and see how that goes. Hopefully I can get rid of these stinkers before they do any real damage!

Here Come the Beanies!

I finally spotted my first baby beans on my pole bean plants!

Wahoooo! Grow beanies, grow!

I also dug up my first garlic to use for dinner yesterday. It was still pretty little, but it was so fun to see how my one little clove I planted has turned into a beautiful little head of garlic!

The Grande Garden Toure Part 4

And now we come to the last part of our tour : All The Rest

As promised, here are the rest of the tomatoes!

This is the other side of my shed (the opposite side connects to the deck). Apparantly it used to be a dog kennel (hence all the little white doors in the side) and so there's a huge slab on concrete on this side of the shed that makes it get very warm here. Since my mom lives a little higher in altitude than I she complains she can never grow a good tomato, so this year she brought all her tomatoes here to see if we can get them to grow. She also had the smart idea to use field fencing to cage the tomatoes with which not only gives steller support, but also acts as a great inhibitor to my tomato-snipping/swiping 4 year old (that cute guy on the trike) and 2 year old (also cute but not pictured). So far all the plants are loaded with green tomatoes, and I've gotten two that have ripened without being pulled off! Already a sign that things will go better this year.

When I started to run out of room in my big veggie garden and still had plants to put somewhere, I realized I had to come up with an alternate spot. Luckily, the edge of the cement slab runs perpendicular to the shed, and this area gets full sun all day long. So I decided to dig up a section (it didn't end up being very big, that grass is stubborn stuff!) and put my cukes and mini pumpkin plants here. This was after I had discovered that pumpkins like to vine out, but before I discovered that they like to send out more roots along their vines. So the plan was to let the mini pumpkins vine out across the cement, but I don't know if they'll get mad at me for not being able to root. My four little cucumbers are not growing as well as I'd hoped (I did start them from seed) but they finally are starting to take off and I finally put up something for them to climb up on. I found this awesome netting at my local Ace which I put up for the cukes to grow on. I did find a decent sized cucumber on one of the plants - at least it would have been decent sized if the slugs hadn't eaten it *grrr*. I try to grow organically, but slug bait is the one essential in my garden.

This section is by far the saddest one yet. We have a nice circle brick flower bed around these two trees in the middle-ish of our yard, but the poor thing just has not been high on my gardening-priority list. Eventually I'd like this to be our strawberry patch, since one whole side of it gets sun all day long, but right now it's mostly a weed patch. This side does have four mint plants (mint does well in part shade) which I hope will take over this half and then the strawberries eventually the other half. I tried spreading poppy seeds on the strawberry half for this year, and I got tons of tiny pink ruffly poppies that popped up, but I think I didn't water it and they all kind of just look very sad right now (not too many made it to full maturity, and then they didn't bloom for very long). I'm not even showing you a picture of the other side for shame of how many thistle plants are growing there.

And last, but not least, my three young apple trees. These came with the house, and I am still learning exactly how to care for them. Only one produced last year, and its little green apples all got hard black spots on them. I was able to use quite a few of them still and made some very tasty applesauce. This year all three flowered, but the first one flowered too early (the one that had produced last year) and so all its buds died when we had another cold spell. The one in the middle has tons of beautiful looking green apples, and then the third flowered and started producing apples, and then suddenly half the tree died and the remaining apples have started getting dark black spots like the other tree's last year's crop. I really don't know what I am doing with these guys, but I hope to get them back on track and be able to use their yummy fruit (especially since my kids absolutely love apples). My hope is set right now on the middle tree.

And that concludes the Grande Toure of the Iggy Mama Garden!

The Grande Garden Toure Part 3

And now we find ourselves entering Part 3 of the Grande Garden Toure : The Deck

My deck is on the east side of my house, and is enclosed on two sides by my house, with a very large shed on most of the other side. As a result it gets very hot on sunny days (as well as sun pretty much all day long) and so it's a perfect spot to grow things! I'm very much a fan of pot-growing, since that's how I started into herbs as a teenager and it's so handy to have plants right there by the house (I actually use the herbs in cooking when they're close by!). Last year I just did several pots of tomatoes, which did really well except for the fact that my kids thought it was great fun to pick all the green tomatoes off, take one bite, and then toss them. I think I got one or two tomatoes last year that made it to actual edibility before the fall rains set in and all my tomatoes got blight.

So this year I still put some tomatoes on my deck, but my mom had the clever idea to use the other side of my shed to put several pots of tomatoes (pics of those guys to come). This relieved me of having to cram my deck with tomatoes, so I've been able to add some new things.

Here are two of my tomato plants. This is the first year putting pots on the right side of my doorway, since I wasn't sure they'd get quite enough sun here since it gets shade in the morning, but I thought I'd give it a shot. The one on the right I am attempting to grow with the single stalk method (which my farmer friend tried to explain to me this spring) where you only allow one main stem and it grows really tall and is supposed to produce more tomatoes. However, I'm not sure I am doing it right. It's growing tall, but not so hot on the tomatoes. I think I may be pinching off the wrong things. I need to talk to my friend again.

 On the left side of my back door I have five more pots. This year I also installed the two window boxes (I have two more to put up on the other side and just haven't done it yet. I am growing parsley in the right one and cilantro in the left. My parsley's doing good, but that stinker cilantro barely grew at all and just went straight to seed. Grr. I think I may have left it in it's little starter pots too long?
The three pots below against the house all do have tomatoes in them as well, but the two on the right are itty bitty because about a month after I planted them in the pots, my 4-year old son found a pair of scissors I had unwisely left laying around and snipped all but three of my tomato plants off right at the base. The ones to the right and the one in the corner were spared. Luckily, these two had enough of a stem left that they grew back (though I'm unsure of whether they'll actually get to giving any tomatoes). There is a little sprig of thyme growing in with the tomato in the corner. That whole pot originally was thyme, but this spring only a little bit of it had survived the winter. So I let that little bit grow (and I'm glad I did, it looks much happier now than it did this spring) and put a tomato in with it so as to not waste space.

 The first layer of my deck ends here, where I put two more large pots (originally tomatoes, but unfortunately these guys did not have any stem left at all and completely died after my son snipped them, so I pulled the tomatoes out and planted in each a quinoa, three clumps of sweet peas, and a balsam, all of which I had started in the house and needed somewhere to go. All of these have grown beautifully, especially the sweet peas (except for the aphids which have recently been trying to inhabit my sweet peas and I keep determinidly hosing them off - my next plan is to go out and spray the plants with soapy water since I finally got another spray bottle I can use). I am excited since this is my first try at growing quinoa, and since I was diagnosed with celiac this spring (which means I can't eat gluten - wheat, barley, rye, or malt, and maybe oats) I have discovered I love quinoa and hope it is as easy to grow as they say it is! The two little pots on the left are a couple of blueberry plants, which a friend most generously gave to me when they heard I had only one lonely little blueberry (which, by the way, DID produce a single blueberry but the birds got to it before I did *sigh*).

In the second level of my deck, I have found this odd little nook to be a great place to stash some extra plants. Right now it's got my nice sage plant which I started in my teenage years and still continues to grow wonderfully. Sage is one of my favorite herbs to use in cooking, so I love having the italian sage right next to my back door. Sage is one of those herbs I am rather obsessed with since it has so many different varieties, but since the regular italian sage is the best for cooking, that is the only one I am determined to keep close. That little green pot has nothing in it but weeds right now (I had put a little root in there I found in my flower bed, but it didn't grow). And then the other two pots on the left have mints - the light green is apple mint (the regular "plain" mint which is my favorite) and then some chocolate mint (a new discovery of mine last year). Mint is another herb I am obsessed with all its varieties. I would really like to get some peppermint (very useful herbally) and also some spearmint and some wintergreen mint eventually. The black pot to the right has a third blueberry plant, and the little black pot on the left (which I cut off in the picture) is what I think is a peony plant, given to me by a friend of a friend, but it really looks quite pathetic and my mom says peonies are rather particular about their growing conditions, so I may just abandon the poor thing (we'll see how it's doing next spring).

The Grande Garden Toure Part 2

So here we continue our toure of the Grande Iggy Mama Garden:

Part 2: The Flower Bed

Here is my one large flower bed the longways view. I am somewhat embarrassed to give this part of the tour, since it is quite weedy at the moment since most of my attentions have been going to the food plants. But nonetheless, here it is. When we first moved in, those bricks were out twice as far, making the bed quite deep. I had to move the bricks in towards the fence since I really had no idea what to do with that deep of a space, and there was no way I'd be able to keep up with that much weeding. It's still a fairly deep flower bed so that I have to step in it to weed, but it's a nice size. Most of this was weeds when I first acquired it, but there were several calla lillies survived through the jungle of weeds that seem quite healthy. The rest of the plants have mostly been split from my mom's garden last summer, with some more added this year. I have put several herbs in my flower bed, since I am big on herbs and I love the idea of intermixing usable plants in with decorative ones. "Edible Lanscaping" I think they call it. I'd like to do more of that in the future.

 Here we are starting on the right side of my flower bed. I have several flowers split from my mom's extensive garden, including dahlias that were planted this year. I actually don't know most of their names, and they all seem to be blooming at different times. I think the white ones are flox, and there is also a pink flox later on.
This year I also added a little blueberry plant (after which I found out you are supposed to have more than one) which is hiding to the left of that tall dahlia in the back next to the wall. I also put my golden sage (right in front of the dahlia) into the ground this year (it has previously been in a pot for years, but I needed its pot for tomatoes this year and decided it had earned an upgrade).

And here is the next part, you can see the pink flox and then my pretty white daisies (I think they are shastas) plus I have sevearl lavender plants and just recently got a tri-color sage that I planted in place of a very sad peony plant that came with the house and had never bloomed (and always wilted away looking very pathetic by the end of the year). I do also have some mint in the back, which this year has gotten extrememly tall and lanky! Many of my flowers have started to droop over, so next year I will definitely need those plant grates you put above them before they grow to support them as they get big.

In front of my shasta daisies is the first of the calla lillies. It is one of the smaller plants, due to the fact that last spring we did not know it was there and pulled it when we did the massive weeding, but this year it grew back beautifully and even has several nice flowers. It has several little side shoots it keep sending off as well (or they are remnant bulbs left from the first weeding). As you can see, this is where I originally put my raspberry plants. Last year this was also where I had my veggies, only a couple zucchini, beans, and a cucumber plant (I did try a cantalope just for fun, but the slugs ate it right up). The raspberries produced beautifully this year for only being in their second year, and are busy sending off lots of little starts which I am constantly having to pull up. I did plant my purple sage in front of the raspberries, as well as several dahlias, but this fall I will be relocating the purple sage and next year I plan on letting the raspberries claim that whole chunk of the flower bed. (The poor dahlias in front of the raspberries keep getting trod on by my kids since I wasn't smart enough to leave walking space around the raspberry plant.)

Right after the raspberries there is another nice calla lilly (on the right, part cut off in the pic), and then I put my big spicy oregeno plant in here (I needed its pot for my tomatoes too). This is where the plants get very sparse, since last year this is where my flower bed pretty much ended, and also becuase this half gets quite a big of shade from the big pine tree next to this end and so I have still been discovering shade-loving plants to put here. I do hope to put some more hydrangeas in here, since I love those. I plan on trying to see if I can get some starts from my other hydrangea plant, tho I may just end up buying actual plants next spring. There's another calla lilly on the left, which is not quite as healthy looing since it has just recently been relieved of the smothering morning glories which were suffocating this half of the flower bed (see my Garden Warfare post). And then that tall skinny thing in the middle is I believe pigweed. Yes, it's a weed, but I was so intrigued by how similar to amaranth and quinoa it looked as a seedling I decided to let it grow and see what happened. I'm hoping it at least gets some pretty flowers or something, as right now it looks somewhat pathetic (I'm sure the morning glories didn't help) tho I may end up just pulling it out.

There is another "weed" which I have become quite fond of and actually have been transplanting it throughout my garden this year which is in this pic but you can't see it because it also is quite sad looking due to those stinker morning glories. I don't know what it's called (I'll have to get a close up pic of it later) but it has very pretty slender leaves along a very tall stalk and gets these tiny pretty pink mini-snapdragon looking flowers in spikes at the top. It grows super tall, so I put it in the back, and I have it in several places. It's little seedlings pop up absolutely everywhere, so I know it's supposed to be a weed, but I do rather like it so I think I'll let it stay. There's a third "weed" I discovered last year that I also like, and it has just now started popping up all over my flower bed, so I'll have to get a pic of that too. It's a little one, that has dark slender leaves with a darker patch in the middle and gets very pretty tiny round pink blossoms in spikes. It must seed itself since it completely dies after the summer and doesn't grow back in exactly the same spot, so I just have to keep hoping it pops up every year. I may try to see if I can harvest seeds somehow from it this year. It does not transplant well (tried that last year) so I can't even move it around, just hope I like where it pops up. But it is a pretty little thing.

And last, but not least, the tail end of my flower bed where my biggest and most gorgeous calla lilly grows. There is a mystery yellow-green bush to the left that was here as well, which is actually a decent-looking little shrub (I'm very picky about shrubs) so I have left it. It trails off to one side and this year is looking much healthier since last year I didn't discover it until almost fall and it had been smothered by weeds all year. I do have another little hydrangea in the back here as well, but it's still really little, though it's doing much better this year than last. I also have a couple new calla lillies that have peachy-orange blossoms that my mom gave me this year that I put down here. One completely died, and one is barely hanging on, but I think the third may make it to next year. Hopefully they pull through, since I really like the calla lilly and it would be fun to have another color of one.

And there you have it. The Flower Bed! Many improvements are in store for this section (as everwhere of course). I'm hoping eventually this will be a very beautiful flower bed that I can show off to everyone that comes.

The Grande Garden Toure Part 1

So finally I have a chance to post the Grande Toure of my Garden (the extra "e"s make it look more fancey, don't you agree?). The one part I forgot to photograph is the pots on my deck, so we'll have to get those another day.

And here we go with Part 1: The Veggie Main

Here's the big view of my main veggie garden area. The original plan was to put all growboxes in, but after I discovered how much it was going to cost, I settled with the old fashioned rotatill and plant in rows.

I did get one "box" made with extra bricks that were on our property from previous owners' lanscaping - that's the one to the right that has those tall pole beans teepee style. I started out with lettuce and snap peas in that raised bed this spring, and tried to plant some bush beans in there but I put them out too early and the beans died. *cry* Then I added some carrots and more beans (which I thought were bush beans) in a pretty wavy line along the edge and tossed some marigold seads in between in what I thought was a clever and original design. Oh, and there are some asparagus right at the front end of the bed that were put in at the same time. Unfortunately for me, the carrots did not appreciate being transplanted so late, and the bush beans turned out to be pole beans, so my nice wave was quite disrupted, but it all works out in the end. Eventually I pulled out my lettuce (when I was sick of lettuce and it was starting to look seedy) and planted some impatiens there instead. The peas are due to be pulled out soon as well, which will be good since now the pole beans are trying to take over the whole bed!

Next I have my row of garlic and onions where I interplanted the rest of my beans (which I later found out are not suppose to be good to grow together). I had to string this fantastic web of twine around the pole beans (since I had thought they were bush beans and didn't have any fencing or what not to put up for them to grow on after I discovered they were in fact pole beans). It's not the best two hour I've ever spent, but at the time it was the best thing I could think of.

Right in the middle of my garden grows a big and beautiful hydrangea plant (behind the sunflower in the pic) (though it's mad at me this year and not giving me flowers because I trimmed it back earlier this spring rather than last fall). That is one of the few plants that was surviving when we bought this house, and I love hydrangeas so when we decided to tear up that area for a garden I couldn't bear to uproot my one prolific hydrangea. So we left it there, right smack in the middle.

Next comes my half row of carrots and then in the back on the other side of the hydrangea are my four zucchini plants (two green, two yellow). The carrots were an experiment where I simply tossed a bunch of seeds into the dirt in a big area and much to my surprise they ALL sprouted! My next mistake was waiting until they were bigger to pull out the weeds that were growing among them, because by then they were also big enough that trying to thin the carrots was much too tedious and frustrating. So I gave up and let them all grow in a giant patch. So far I dug up one corner just to see what was going on down there, and there are lots of short stumpy carrots that are all intertwined with the carrots around them. Oh well. Lesson learned: plant carrot seeds in thin rows, not in a patch.

Next comes my row with pumpkin plants on both ends and two squash plants in the middle (originally I thought I was planting a type of winter squash, but they ended up being white scallop squashed. I think the winter squash seeds were the ones that didn't really sprout. I put the pumpkins on the ends, thinking that would give them room to grow out, but I was expecting them to grow like zucchinis (which is the only squash I have ever grown) and didn't know that pumpkins vine out FOR MILES! And I couldn't let them grow out into the lawn, or I wouldn't be able to mow (that has near fatal consequenses for both my husband and I who are severely allergic to grass pollin/seeds) so I had them grow along the row, and they have looped back around, and I finally decided to let them now grow sideways through the corn which will be annoying to walk through but as of now they are taking over the whole three rows around them so that seemed like a better option. Next year I will have to figure out somewhere else to put them, I have yet to come up with a satisfactory solution.

The last two rows are corn, most of which I started inside so they are big and mostly tassled already with little baby corns growing on many of them. The local farms' corn isn't even that big, which is fun for me to see.

There is a little piddly row of raspberry transplants after the corn, which I put there this spring thinking that would be a better location than my original raspberry plants, but they have failed to thrive there and I realized that in fact that spot gets less sun than where I have my original plants, so they're getting pulled out this fall.

I also have a  potato grow box against my fence, where I planted tons of little potatos I had started in pots, mostly purple taro potatoes and a few golden potatoes, but after I put them in I think the stinkin' moles ate all but two plants, cuz only one grew after that and I dug up quite a bit of the grow box today and found nothing, not even rotting remnants of potatoes. *cry some more* At least I got one healthy looking survivor, I hope I get some good purple potatoes out of that guy.

I planted sunflowers at the head of most of the rows, and some snapdragons which I started from seed (and are FINALLY growing bigger than sprouts) around the sunflowers. The sunflowers are getting big now and I think they may pop open soon!

Garden Warfare

So today I waged Garden Warefare...

Enemy #1: The Morning Glory
Assisting the MG was the sticker plant (it's true name is yet to be unearthed)
And just plain getting in the way was the wild blackberries! (note I said "wild" and not "native")

The warefare was intense. The MGs had taken over half of my flowerbed with the sitcker plants right behind them (or more correctly, underneath them). Luckily it was the half that was less cultivated, but the few plants that were in there were completely drowned underneath those bugger vines. I ripped out huge swaths of plant matter, with all sorts of other weeds tangled all with the MGs. Unfortunately there was some friendlies that were damaged in the crude battle, but all remained mostly intact and are hopefully on their way to a speedy recovery now that the MGs are out of the way.

I myself have some war wounds (namely a sore right hand and scratches up my arms), but it was well worth the effort. The fence behind the flowerbed is actually visable now! And all my poor little flower shrubs now have some breathing room. It's still pretty crude looking, since I was going for mass removal instead of delicate extractions but the flower bed already looks much better than it did.

Next plan of action: slug poisoning.

The Fruits of My Labor

So here's the real reason I started my blog this year instead of waiting to start at the beginning next year. For dinner last night we had roasted garden veggies, and I was so happy with how I was able to use my garden goodies I was able to use that I just had to record my thoughts!

So here's the dish, after we had eaten most of it (And then I spread it around on the pan) I used zucchini and white scallop squash from my garden, plus cauliflower, beets, carrots, and scallions from the local farm. I had some yellow zucchini from my garden I could have put in there as well, but I felt like I was going to end up with too much food already (which I did, tho not as much as I thought). I flavored it with sage also from my garden and salt and tossed everything in olive oil. I roasted the veggies (carrots and beets first then added the rest) on my stoneware bar pan (it's itty bitty, and I crammed way too much on there, but miraculously it all still cooked).

My thoughts on this dish after eating it: I don't like beets. I never have been a huge fan of them at thanksgiving, but I was hoping they'd be better fresh but I just am still not a fan of their taste. The dish also could have used more flavor, I think some garlic would have been great (could have pulled that out my garden) and/or some rosemary and thyme (I have a little bit of thyme but that poor plant is struggling this year so I haven't been harvesting anything off of it). I did love how the squash tasted, not soggy like it tends to get if boiled or if sauteed too long, and the scallions and olive oil really gave the veggies a nice base flavor. I think I could have put more scallions in there, too. Definately a kind of dish I will be making again! It was so fun to use my yummy garden squash and add the farm veggies in there. And my two toddlers even ate most of it too!

This is what gardening is all about - getting to enjoy the fruits (quite literally) of all that hard work at the table!

It Starts

From my mother I get the gift of loving a garden. And now that I finally am able to have a real garden, I've dived right in. I learn something new all the time, and so I thought it would be fun to chronical my adventures as I grow through my garden! The growing season is half way over, but rather than wait until next year I decided to start here and now to journal what I learn.