May into June -- My Garden

Time to mosey on out to my raised beds with camera in hand to show you what has been happening in my little neck of the woods!

I started right off with my sage, planted last year and growing wonderfully in the rich soil.  They had blossomed once, and are starting to blossom again, so I'd have to trim those back.

Nice and trim!  Can't wait for fried sage leaves!!

I also weeded what I could in the pathway next to the sage.

In the sage bed, the garlic was growing nicely, and four tomato plants looked healthy and strong.  The two on the right are Summer Peach--yielding smaller yellow fruit that is fuzzy like a peach and sweet--and the two on the left are a new variety to me:  Kentucky Traveler.  I'll definitely let you know how these are!

In the back garden, I planted herbs (on the left, one lone tomato plant (given to me and I had nowhere to plant it), then green beans in the back.  The green bean section is a little more shaded (Jacob's tree grows off to the right of this photo), so hopefully they'll do okay there.  Chives also grow in that back right corner.

After noticing the bare spots in my mulched pathway above, I inspected and noted other areas which would need some more mulch.  Time to save some money and cover those areas.

The Alpine strawberry bed also hosts my two rhubarb plants, which I really need to harvest.  With me working four days a week now, I'll have to carve out some time to make both strawberry jam and cinnamon-rhubarb jam, two of my favorites.  Maybe this year, I'll make some strawberry-rhubarb jam, too!

The middle bed hosts garlic (bottom left), tomatoes (middle), then peas and carrots (back).  I planted the peas late, so hopefully they won't mind a little heat as they come up, and hopefully I'll have a harvest to speak of.

Finally, my front bed is definitely a strawberry bed.  They keep shooting out and taking over the walkway, and I let them, harvest the plants, then pull them back.  This year (since I'm posting this a few weeks after these photos were taken), we had Strawberry Mayhem for two weeks, and now (mid-June) I'm back to picking not quite a quart every three days or so.  That'll quickly wind down--but those Alpine strawberries are in full swing and will yield berries all summer long!  They're very small berries, but I've been collecting them, rinsing and freezing them, and I already have enough for a double recipe of strawberry muffins.

Here's proof that I can get my guys to come help in the garden when needed!

My "overhead" view of the garden--which, when we finally take the pool down, I will no longer be able to do as I have year after year.  Boo.

With weeding pretty much every other day, you can build up a pretty good pile.  My guys finally loaded this all up into a yard waste back for curbside pickup.  It's still a pretty photo, though, huh?  I think so, anyway.

That's the tour!  As soon as I hit Publish on this post, I'm back out to the garden to feed the tomatoes and give everything a nice drink of water.  See you soon!


Back to life,
Christine

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Early May -- Assessing My Gardens

May 4.

It has warmed up nicely here--not too warm, but warm enough for the dandelions to pop up everywhere (yeah, that's my back yard above...).  While Fernando started mowing the back yard...

I went to check on what plants have been growing in early spring--rhubarb, garlic, and strawberries.  I started with my rhubarb, because there were strange stalks I had never seen before growing out of the one large plant!

My rhubarb plant had actually flowered!  I cut them off at the stems so I could still harvest the rhubarb.  Yum!

I'm always late to the game when it comes to chives.  I always forget to use them in salads, burgers, and other dishes, and they end up budding and flowering by the time I finally remember.  See?

I just hack them down and wait for them to regrow.  Next I checked on the strawberries.  Amazing--there were blossoms everywhere!  I'm hoping for a huge strawberry harvest this year!

The front yard garden gets an assessment too, since I've got some herbs growing there.  I'm not much of a flower gardener; my philosophy is that if I can't kill it and it's halfway pretty, it gets planted in my flower gardens somewhere.

Here is my brick garden, as I call it, with flowers and herbs.  That huge bushy thing in the front is oregano, growing like a weed--which is good, in this case!

Another angle.

My English thyme (below, left side) also came in like gangbusters!  I love running my hands through the plant, then sniffing my hands.  I'm sure people walking and driving by wonder what I'm doing.  But I don't care.  Next to the thyme below is a green leafy lettuce-looking plant called French sorrel.  Yes, the English and French are coexisting nicely.  I found a recipe for sorrel soup which I can't wait to try.  Also, sorrel has a lemony flavor with a little tartness and it's really good chopped up in a raw garden salad or on top of fish.

English thyme.

My last stop is my front porch garden, with its little blue brunnera (Siberian bugloss) and the multi-colored coral bells (I think I have five varieties in there!).  The woodland hydrangea bush anchors this garden (that taller bush in the back), and there's also some astilbe still hidden there, along with a few hosta plants that keep coming back even though I've dug them up a few times.  Ha!

It's always nice to make a pre-planting trip around my gardens.  It gives me an idea of how things stand and what space will be available for this year's plants.  Now it's off to plan my veggie garden!


Back to life,
Christine

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Another To Do in My Garden

A day or two after I planted this year's vegetable garden, one or two garden chores remained.  The first one involved my squash plants.

To ward off vine borers, which bore into the squash vine and lay their eggs, which hatch into insidious squash-nutrient-sucking little devils and kill the plant, I use short tomato cages covered with cheesecloth.  Since I have both acorn and butternut (six plants altogether as opposed to only three last year), and since the three shortened tomato cages were mysteriously misplaced, I had Jacob cut three regular cages down, and used both tops and bottoms as the frame.

Hey, while I'm typing about squash here, I learned something after the fact that will be useful to you!  Acorn squash is a summer squash, and butternut squash is a winter squash--meaning, acorns will be harvested late summer, while butternuts will be harvested probably some time in October (here in Chicagoland).  They should also not be planted next to each other, since the busy bees will cross-pollinate them.  So I may end up with some kind of hybrid squash when it comes to eating these.  I'll let you know.

Jacob cut the cages off as in the above image, so that I could use the top part as another cage.  That way, we cut only three and got six cages out of it.  After they were cut, we pushed them down into the soil around the squash plants, and cut and draped cheesecloth over each cage/plant.

We staked the cheesecloth with landscape pins--the same pins that are used to hold the landscape fabric down in our mulched walkways.  Get 'em at any hardware store.  They're awesome.

No vine borers welcome.

It is important to note that as soon as you see blossoms on your plants, to remove the cheesecloth!  Otherwise, the bees won't be able to get in to pollinate the blossoms, and you will end up with no squash.  The plants will be tripled/quadrupled in size, and be hardier and sturdier against pests at that time.  I love giving them this good start in their growing lives.

Oh, so here are my strawberry plants!  There are blossoms everywhere, and I took this picture just for fun.  Because I was there.  With my camera.

On to the second chore--weeding.  Even though we had properly crafted mulched walkways in our garden last year, weeds can grow in the mulch--it's organic matter, after all, and it does get wet.  The good thing, though, is that the weeds' roots have nowhere to go, so they're shallow and easy to pull, especially after a rain to loosen things up.

Before:

After:

Nice and easy!  Weeding all the walkways took about five minutes.  Once a week or so, I have to weed a little, but it usually consists of pulling a weed or two here and there, as I'm working in the garden and spot them.  It's so much easier than before!

Pile of weeds waiting for the yard waste bag.

Here's my standard After overview picture:

So, that's just two little jobs that needed doing after Planting Day.  The fun has officially begun!  A summer garden always has stuff happening, even from day to day!!


Back to life,
Christine

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