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.