We Really Should Be Writing This Stuff Down...

So says my better half.

Of course, that was why I started this journal...

Anyway. I'm going to try and play a bit of catch-up.

Here is the massive bed of potatoes, looking toward the porch.

I've never grown potatoes before. There don't seem to be any spuds visable, and they seem happy, but we wonder if they need more dirt?

And here are some shots I took from the porch, through the screen, a week or more ago.

 I love my hydrangea. It is a very vibrant pink right now, and there is more of it now than when the photo was taken. I do think they started out pink last year as well and turned blue as the summer wore on.

We also decided to move the round table to the space where the red bench is in this photo, and we like it better. The view is lovelier unless you happen to be the unlucky one stuck at the seat facing the fence!

Here is a shot from this morning, and you can see how different things look now.

This weekend, we finally got around to corralling the run away tomatoes, cucumbers, and winter squashes. Paul and his favorite 15 month old assistant drove to Tractor Supply first thing Saturday and bought a couple of cattle panels and some fencing stakes.

It only took a few minutes to provide some vertical structure to contain the sprawling squash plants. It is hard to see in the picture, but if you look closely, you can see there are three panel pieces in this  bed. Two make a V to support the spaghetti squash. They were already massive and too unwieldy to try and train very differently from the direction they were headed, but the V shape keeps them off the ground and tidy. They've already grown up and over the edge since Saturday!

There is also a panel perpendicular to the V, and there are cucumbers growing on it vertically.

The sun dial came with the house but was a little lost out back in the shade, so we gave it a new home.

Then Paul found enough long pieces of scrap wood to rip down for staking tomatoes. I used a technique I saw from an old issue of Martha Stewart where you use 5 stakes per plant and then wrap the string in a star pattern.

My first marigold blossoms are peaking out!

Our stakes were a little wobbly, so they ended up shaped a bit like a teepee. I think that once the plants relax and are accustomed to their loss of freedom they won't look so much like "little fat ladies in tight dresses" to quote my dearest. Their wobbliness and varying heights make them a little less Martha Stewart like, but we do like the look of the staking.



Paul hung the baby swing in the magnolia low enough that the baby can crawl in and out on his own. It also means that the swing hits the ground if a bigger boy sits in it and doesn't over stress the branch.

We had originally wanted to construct wooden cages to match our obelisks, but ran out of time. Now we are thinking that next year, if we don't use the string again, we might try a method where you suspend cattle panels horizontally and add layers as the tomatoes grow. One thing we've reconsidered is storage during winter, and stakes or panels will be easier to store than wooden cages. We might also just invest in some heftier hardwood for making beefier stakes.

We put in some late cucumbers (in the bed under the weeping cherry that I managed not to photograph) and finally got the watermelon patch out and planted. I don't know if you can tell, but this is sort of around back of the porch from the more formal part of the garden.

Here you can see where the boys started this morning laying out more cardboard to be covered by the (new) massive pile of woodchips currently in the driveway. It is really a mess of weeds back here, and we hope to control them with the woodchips and better utilize this space next year, perhaps moving some of the more unwieldy crops (like the winter squash) from the front?

Just up and to the left and out of view in the above picture is where the garlic is. There wasn't any where else for it to go when I planted it in the Fall and all this was a nebulous dream, but it doesn't get enough sun at all. Would that cause this?

It was looking so happy in spite of the lack of sun, and now it sort of went pfft. Maybe it needs more water? Another feeding? Or maybe its just too shady?

In the foreground of that same picture, you can just see the start of an unfunctioning water feature we inherited.

We aren't sure what to do with this place, but remember that toad we wanted?

I think he's got his work cut out for him. In addition to the slugs I spoke of, we also have earwigs.

And caterpillars.

Not sure who it is who's done the most damage to these cabbages and broccoli, I think it has been a group effort, but when we first harvested the broccoli, I made my beloved pick off the caterpillars. And were not talking half a dozen. Paul picked no less than 40 caterpillars off the first two heads we harvested. YUCK! We DID manage to clean it off and eat it, but we're not sure it was worth it, and  I'm a little skittish about collecting all the new stuff. A dear friend said that she just stopped growing it for that reason. We're going to try again for a Fall crop and see if there are fewer icky invaders than in the Spring/Summer.

Speaking of caterpillars and hopefully butterflies, this bush is a butterfly magnet.

We don't know what it is. We thought it was terribly ugly when we first moved in last March, but in the summer it develops a lot of little pink blossoms that the butterflies and hummingbirds seem to love, so we didn't get rid of it. Before the fence was built, it sprawled over in front of the dining room windows, but it keeps mostly to itself now with the fence as support.

We also inherited some lovely roses in the front that were at their peak a few weeks ago (though, last year they kept coming back into November!) just after Paul built and installed the gate. The green does make a lovely backdrop! There to the left of the gate, I planted some Zinnias. There aren't as many coming in as were planted, but I'm hoping they will fill in later in the summer.

And just around the corner from the zinnias, you can see the patches of corn and rows of sunflowers coming in along the front of the fence. We eventually want to have blueberry bushes here, preferably a variety with red wood as a winter ornamental, but for now, we're hoping the sunflowers will offer late summer color and that the corn, in addition to a couple of meals (we plan to manually pollinate it just in case it isn't thick enough), will be seasonally attractive for Fall.

And back inside the fence, you can see that strawberry patch that was the first thing I posted about!We have cute little pansies and heads of romaine bordering in the block.

And we did manage to collect a few strawberries for eating in this first year. I did not pull off the blossoms as is done for a traditional patch since I did not want to encourage runner growth (the reason it is done). I want to keep the pretty formal design with bigger berries for eating rather than a filled in patch with high numbers. We'll see. It seems to work for Mel Bartholemew in his square foot gardens!

And here at the entrance, we have long beds with romaine, bachelors buttons, and cosmos.

I am so thrilled to find the first happy cosmos bloom peaking through. I've never grown them before, and I was nervous that I was going to name my blog for this favorite flower only to somehow fail at growing any!

Phew! That was a LOT of catching up! If you made it this far, you deserve a medal. Hopefully I can become more disciplined in blogging about little things along the way. Afterall, it is all those little joys that make gardening such a delightful journey, and I would like to take more time to revel in them!

 (I normally use Firefox, but for some reason, Blogger gives me fits with inserting pictures now. I try to write posts in Explorer, but some of the pictures don't appear in Firefox, though I have no idea why! So, if it looks like pictures are missing, you might try switching browsers.)

Elements of Garden Design

I'm a very visual kind of gal. I just love leafing through all the gardening books with beautiful pictures with tons of eye candy, and Pinterest as a means of collecting and organizing my ideas is just one of my favorite things EVER!

And yet, of all the books I read as I stumbled stepped into this massive gardening endeavor, my favorite has been one with only a handful of black and white sketches interspersed among a collection of engaging essays.

Elements of Garden Design is so very helpful, providing a structured way of pondering, planning, and implementing the ideas from those inspiring images.

Elements of Garden Design does what few gardening books do--it addresses the process of conceiving a whole garden, as opposed to a single element like color or a particular class of plant. Joe Eck explores the idea of a garden, and offers a practical approach to translating concepts such as "intention" and "harmony" into the solid forms of hedges and terraces, paths and rooms. Novice and experienced professional alike will find both food for thought and down-on-the-ground advice on such matters as creating child- and pet-friendly designs. 

Even though I didn't have this book from the outset of the planning process, I think the chapters in the first section of the book (Part I - Theory) will give me the necessary framework for organizing my thoughts as I attempt to record what happened in the months prior to this blog's inception (before it all escapes from my brain entirely).

They are as follows:

Intention
Site
Frame
Style
Structure
Rooms
Access
Harmony
Contrast
Scale
Symmetry
Shape
Repose
Time

Some of the elements further down on the list are still in the theoretical and experimental stages, but the first few are foundational and I believe will prove most helpful in beginning my history of the garden spaces. I hope, too, that sharing in this structured way will be helpful to others as they plan and ponder their own garden!

Snips, Snails, Slugs, and Snakes

Actually, what I want is TOADS. But I couldn't include that in the title because it doesn't begin with an "S."
Slugs are a menace. A yucky, yucky, yucky menace. There is some redeeming cuteness in that little shell house that snails carry about. But slugs? Zero cuteness, 100% trouble.

They have destroyed my spinach...

 ...devoured my parsley...

...dined on my cabbages and lettuces...

...dotted my potatoes...

and ravaged my radishes

And they are ugly, slimey, and give me the heebie-jeebies.

(no photo of slugs due to said heebie-jeebie-ness)

Now, my preferred solution would be a family of toads moving in. We even have a little (overgrown) pond like place that they might like to live. Not that they are like cutesy-wutsy little bunny-wunnies or anything, but relative to slugs, they could be called adorable. I can handle toads and frogs.

Trouble being, we have snakes. They eat toads and frogs.

This is from last year, pre-garden. Our first snake encounter in the new house, in the front flower bed of all places! But, they're still around. This is a garter, but just this week the 3.5 year old found a black one amongst the carrots he was examining!

Sigh.

How do I get rid of the snakes...so I can have toads...so they can help get rid of the slugs?

Mind boggling. Alas, for now, we're going to try cheap beer for baiting and drowning (the slugs). Didn't make it to the liquor store in time yesterday, but tonight's the night!
I'll keep you posted. Meanwhile, any advice or resources on manipulating the habitat in your garden to be pro-toad or in any other way anti-slug would be appreciated!

P.S. I apologize for the blurry photos. I think something was on the lense. However, done is better than perfect at this point in my life!

Many Hands...

Funny how Dad being home can make a day so very productive.

For one thing, he works hard and gets a lot done.

But on top of that, he has an uncanny ability to do it while keeping the baby occupied and happy.

Meanwhile, I was better able to manage my other little helpers.

This guy is planting nasturtium seeds (Dwarf Jewel Mix) in the border along the asparagus bed.

I'm not sure that the beds we got in will be quite enough for all we'd like to plant, and with all the capital we've thrown at this venture already, we can't really afford to spend extra money on containers. We have plenty of 5 gallon buckets, but I'm not a fan of the "look," so I tried to gussy them up a bit by adding some old burlap coffee sacks we have from a birthday party sack race a couple of years back. I just put them in and pulled them over the edge like an over-sized garbage bag. My not-quite-8-year-old drilled holes in the bottom for me, and here he is filling them (with quite the audience).

I haven't yet decided what to plant in them, but it will likely be the space-hogging zucchini and crookneck squashes. I think I'll need to tidy them up a bit with some cinching of twine or burlap strips.

I also got some help feeding what we'd already planted with some organic plant food (We just happened to have Plant Tone in the shed already). We hope to eventually buy all the ingredients to make our own fertilizer as per this method (yes, we are a bit backwards and behind on this front!). We are most intrigued by its promise to ensure trace minerals are being added to the soil. My helper was a little messy and got some of the fertilizer on the leaves, so he also helped water to rinse them all well.

I planted pole beans around a lovely trellis my husband built last weekend (pictures forthcoming). The plan is for it to be painted red, but we'll see if it gets painted before it is needed! Same for the one for the peas. Our peas were in late, but we're hopeful we'll get at least one meal's worth before summer hits full force. The weather is so crazy this year, who knows?

I hemmed and hawed and read about direct seeding hot weather plants. My trusty soil thermometer read 68, and while Mel kept telling me 70-75, the editors at Taunton assured me 65 was okay. In the end, I went with it since next Saturday is Amtrack Train Day, and my helpers will be otherwise occupied.

Parisian Pickling, National Pickling Approved, and Spaghetti Squash

I planted 8 cucumber plants alongside 4 spaghetti squash. Then, in another bed, I planted four cantaloupe, not muskmellon, and 4 winter squash plants. I'm so excited about the French melons. They seem so romantic and make me feel like it is going to be a real potager!

True cantaloupes Charentais and Noir des Carmes in a row with winter squashes Delicata and Waltham Butternut.

I've been saving my egg shells for months now. A couple of years ago, my tomatoes got blossom end rot caused by calcium deficiency. It was so very, very sad, I determined to take precautions against it (though mindful watering is the best prevention), and I put a lot of crushed egg shells in as I planted my tomatoes. After reading today that squash and melons can suffer the same fate, I figured that if it works for tomatoes, why not squash? I've never actually looked it up or seen it done, but I couldn't see how it would hurt, and I had PLENTY of egg shells!

One of my favorite gardening discoveries this year has been "winter sowing." I hope to be better prepared this winter to do more of it. It certainly is not the most aesthetic method, but it is effective. I have a bunch of half cut milk jugs lying about now that I've either planted things or the weather is warm  enough to leave the tops open, so with my uncertainty about the soil temp, I opted to use the leftover halves of my mini-greenhouses as cloches to help with germination on my squashes and cantaloupe. Isn't cloche just so much more lovely than "milk jug?"

Though, I'm afraid a plastic jug by any other name is still a plastic jug to the eye if not the ear.