Yesterday I hobbled around the garden and looked at all the growth, everything looks so awesome!  The potatoes grow so fast it's amazing and the cabbages are filling out, the cucumbers are covered in flowers, the broccoli is about 2" tall and needs thinned, the tomatoes are all finally getting covered with little fruits. It's so awesome to watch!  We got an awesome harvest today, a zucchini, 3 tomatoes, lots of purple beans and yellow wax beans and some pepporcini's and hot peppers.  We will post pictures later.

Just did a quick walkabout in the garden, and we have TOMATOES!!! They are tiny and green but I grew them from little babies!!! Are newly planted bush peas and broccli are looking good as are all the peppers in their yellow containers. So far we have had a harvest of beans, zuchinni, a few tomatoes of the SSCC freebies, blueberries, and tons of herbs. For a year that struggled I would say we have done fantastic!

Things are growing like crazy right now - that means all of the blackberries and knotweed are trying to encroach on everything too.  *sigh*  It's frustrating to be on crutches and not be able to work in the garden.  Tomorrow I'm going to try some weeding around the roses and strawberries because I think I can sit on the ground with my leg out and do that, I might even try some weeding in the raised beds if they need it since I can probably do that from a camp chair.  

I'm excited for some planned improvements next year but I think all of our projects this year are on hold until I get better. It's a lot of work doing all of this on your own and Jen has been doing an amazing job of taking care of things on her own - I am way impressed and feel very lucky to have a gardening partner :) 

 Things I am excited to help with is learning to can pickles when our cucumbers grown and make plum jam when the plums are ripe.  I'm also going to work on building a tall frame to grow the sugar snap peas on next year and build some potato bins.  Not sure how much building can be done with limited mobility but I'm sure I can figure it out.  2 other small things I want is to find a semi-permanent location for my duck kiddie-pool and possibly plant a few water plants in it and make a fountain with the big blue pot.  Not essential but fun to do. 

My new blueberries are looking fantastic and I'm glad to see they are growing in their pots well since they won't be going into the ground until this fall I think they doubled in size since I got them.

pictures

10 million pictures are never fun to upload and the FB links aren't always a good plan so here's Picasa links for all the pics since 2009 for anyone who likes to look at pictures.

2009:

2009

2010 Spring Break gardening:

SpringbreakGardening

April 2010:

April 2010

Random gardening since 2009:

Gardening

2010 tomato bed project:

tomato bed 2010

potting table project:

potting table

July 2010 slideshow

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Get your own

Little yellow rose is still hanging on, I don't know if its going to make it another year...












Here is a new rose, smells wonderful and the colour is very nice, I don't want to plant this guy until he is done flowering.


















Some lilies from our flower bed out front, I missed out on bringing them in last year; a mistake I won't make again. They have an intoxicating aroma and I have one bunch in the living room and another in Lacy's room.








Three pots of the venus flytrap stayed inside in their terraruim while another smaller pot went outside to join my two pitcher plants. We are going to have quite the carnivorous bog, but that is a plan for another day.










Here are the three bromeliad pups with the venus flytrap in the background and some african violets. All the indoor plants are doing very well.











I just picked up this hydrangea at Trader Joe's its not too big right now but hopefully will be a ten foot bush eventually. When he came home he was a light blue colour but with the acidity of the mulch, added coffee grounds, and planting him near an evergreen bush its turning a very nice shade of violet.






The climbing lily starts out with the yellow framing around the red petals and then they mature to a deep bright red without any yellow at all. They are gorgeous! But not 6' tall :(










This is one of the free tomatoes from SSCC. I believe this one is for making paste.

















Yay more zucchinis! The zucchini plant is huge this year.












We now have beans, this one here is a yellow wax bean. Pretty tasty!


















and some purple bush beans again this year - they are so pretty!
















The grapes on the fence are doing really well too, Lacy is excited to eat them!

















Look! The cabbage is finally starting to get a head on it. The spider living in the middle must be doing it's job to keep the cabbage moth larvae away.











These are some type of giant 'crazy' squash that I got from Jarett's (the NGP) mom. We're not sure what type they are but apparently they are large and have green flesh. The leaves are easily twice the size of the other squash.
















Our potatoes are growing really fast! As soon as they get another 4" tall or so we will add more dirt and unroll the bags a bit. We think this will be in about 2 more days. We are thinking of building a frame around the bags so that they don't fall over when fully unrolled and so that we can add another bag on top if they keep growing up. We might have a LOT of potatoes this winter!














This is another tomato bed it hasn't filled out entirely yet, it's 6 free tomatoes from SSCC and the front row I grew from seed.







The raised beds look awesome!












These are some of the peppers from SSCC, that we got for free to add to our container garden.













Our container pepper garden including the banana and bell peppers that I grew from seed. I have planted a few peppers in the ground just for comparison and its nice to know that my instincts were right, they are doing much better in the containers.














See the size of those tomato plants? Some of them are up to our waists. They all have flowers but none of the ones grown from seeds have fruits, yet.

With all the difficulties and so much work over the last couple weeks we haven't done much of a gardening update. So here are some pictures we took a few weeks ago, enjoy!



Totally completed chicken home with permanent door and everything.







Here is Lacy repotting her venus flytraps, turns out she had 13 little guys in that tiny little pot.












Here is our raised bed looking well, we have at least two cabbage heads and we decided to add some more beans and peas which may or may not produce this year. The tomatoes in the bed are also doing well.















Here is a nice picture of Lacy repotting her orchids, why isn't she using our potting bench?-I don't know!











Here is the end result of that climbing lilly we were waiting for. Its quite pretty but 8ft high it is not! More like 11 inches....

....yay? sunshine!

Wow.  to expand on my last post summer has arrived with a 20 degree jump in temperature overnight.  We've gone from mid 70's (or lower!) to mid 90's.  It is HOT!  The garden is loving it - the tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini have visibly grown over the last 2 days and I'm sure we will see even more growth in the rest of the garden.  Jen just planted more seeds yesterday: bush beans, summer squash, spaghetti squash and a crazy squash (Just what IS a crazy squash?!?).  Hopefully these will all come up soon.

The chicken run door is finally built - I borrowed a jigsaw and a speed square from the tool library and even made the awesome mitered corners on the door frame and made braces with other scrap wood so it would stay square then covered it with mesh and cross brace.  All that we need now is to buy the hinges. Funny thing about building is that when something is only a 1/4" off of square (say a doorjam) it makes a huge difference in building a door.  I cut our door a 1/2" narrower than the doorjam but since it didn't entirely work  apparently it would have been better if there was a 1" difference width wise.  Who knew it made such a difference?!?  oh well, the door still works and is nice and square - it just looks odd without a square door jam.  I think I put enough braces in that it won't warp with the sun too.  Once the door is installed the run will be complete!!!

Now that most of the major projects are done I'm already off to thinking about more projects: widen the tomato bed for next year?  plant a wisteria vine on the fence? clean out the basement and make space to hang the potatoes, onions and garlic I hope to have this fall?  dig out new flower beds along the front walk and fill with bulbs, daylilies, crocosmia and peonies?  Plant more blueberries and maybe an apple tree?

Not sure what all of that we will do, I've got the wisteria vine in a bucket of water to see if it will root, planning on cleaning out the basement this next week and I will be keeping my eyes open for blueberries on sale.  We've been talking about getting some baby ducks when they are available at the feed store so we'll have to find a place to put their pool.  We found several smaller varieties we liked online but we'll probably buy whatever we can get locally so we don't have to order them online.  I don't like the idea of ordering animals through the mail - it just seems cruel especially in our hot weather right now.

We will have to update with some new pictures tomorrow.  Oh - and in some other good news the hot weather is killing the aphids infecting the plum tree, hopefully it will recover soon.

Summer has arrived! Yay sunshine!

Newest Garden Pictures

She is carrying dirt for the potatoes, we are planting stuff at 9pm! Thats why its so dark.












All the wet cool weather caused some mold to show up on the zuchinni but its otherwise quite happy and is producing a lot of flowers.













A bunch of scraps of plants and weeds destined to be chicken feed.













My purple rose, it starts out pink and fades to a light dusty lavendar and smells wonderful.













Lacy planting the garlics.













One perfect radish. These guys went to seed before we could eat them, we kept hoping they would get bigger. Too bad they got all woody and were turned into chicken food.














Free garlic plants.














Burlap sacks filled with mulch dirt and potatoes.

lots of work going on...

We've been very busy in our garden, planting more (free!) tomatoes, peppers and garlic.  We dug out the Euphorbia stumps by the house and created another new tomato bed and removed the struggling sugar snap peas in favor of more tomato space.  I sure hope our summer weather gets here soon so we actually get tomatoes!!!

We've also acquired (free!) Crocosmia and Himalayan poppies and created a new flower bed and purchased a peach tree to put in it too, it looks fantastic right now!  Yesterday was "clean up the yard day" and Jarett, the NGP, even helped by hacking down the ever-encroaching Japanese Knotwood and replanting the Euphorbia stumps along the edge of the back yard.  If they live we will have a beautiful hedge there next summer.  Jen and I planted the new tomatoes, re-did the worm bin; putting it in a rubbermaid tub this time and generally cleaned things up everything looks awesome!

Things are finally starting to grow too; we have flowers on tomatillos, tomatoes, zucchini, and garlic.  We do have a horrible aphid infestation in the Italian plum tree we have to take care of but other than that things are looking good and the chickens are happy.

Here's Jen and our new flower bed - the peach tree is on the right corner.  I'm hoping it will double in size next year.