Gardenage! We have achieved Gardenage!

Well am I ever happy this evening!! At long last we have started our garden!

It happened like this, you see. I went to the pots on the front porch to get sage and French tarragon on Sunday afternoon, and could not for the life of me FIND my French tarragon! This, my dears, is a disaster of EPIC proportions; I waited almost a year to get that plant, and I clearly remembered bringing it home and I was preeetttttty certain I planted it *doubtful look* well I must have planted it, right? Because it wasn't still in its pot, so it must have been planted....

.........but I. Couldn't. Find. It.

EPIC proportions. It kept me awake, fretting, for part of Sunday night. I mean, it's not like one can just zip out and get a new plant whenever. The season will end soon, the hardware store will sell out, and THEN where will I be? And you can't grow French tarragon from seed, because it's sterile; you have to buy the plants from a nursery. And it's already mid-May.

Did I mention the season will end soon, and the hardware store will be out of plants?

You might remember that we don't have a car. There aren't any nurseries on the bus route.

It was my only chance.

So Monday afternoon there I was, groceries bagged and in my Old Lady Shopping Cart (I love that thing!!), and I mosied on from the grocery store to the hardware store and riiight into the plant section. Now ya gotta know the plants are outside, and so here I am pushing my Old Lady Shopping Cart half-full of groceries (including perishable cheese, ooops, lol) in and out of every aisle of plants even though I KNEW where the herbs would be, just dreaming my way through the garden.

It was doggoned hard to walk away from a plant called Two-Row Stonecrop, a kind of Sedum. You see, I was wearing a green shirt and pink sweat jacket (with sequins, no less!)... and the Stonecrop was green with pink edges! The pink almost matched my sweat jacket!

Oh well, I was good, I walked away. Eventually, after much dreaming through aisles, I came to the herbs. Aaaaack!! They didn't have it!! But then I found the last two plants tucked away on the back side of the rack (see I told you they were gonna run out!!)...... and son of a gun, French tarragon doesn't look like I thought it did! It IS on my porch, snugged up against the lavender plant!

So I had been to the grocery store, right? And Gryph LOVES bell peppers, had asked specifically for yellow and red bell peppers, and I went to the produce section to buy some-------------and they were $3! *faints dead away* Can you imagine, $3 for ONE bell pepper??!!!!

And there, right across from the herb rack, are--ta daa!--bell pepper plants.

Well, you know what happened next. I pushed that Old Lady Shopping Cart home with four bell pepper plants, one each of yellow, orange, red, and (of all lovely things!) lilac. And two eggplant plants. AND four strawberry plants, because they were half-price.... all of them perched on top of my groceries. *cheesy grin*

The flower pots on the front porch are already full, yanno, and there are still three tomato plants left to pot up. What was I going to DO with four bell peppers, two eggplants, and four strawberries?!

So the back yard is newly fenced this weekend, and it's a giant thrill to the dogs to be allowed to run free. After I got the groceries put up I took them out and hooked up our new hose so I could water the rose bush and the mock orange... the BARE ground under the rose bush....

Here's the thing. No matter how disabled a gardener might be, if you hand her too many plants she is GOING to find a place to dig.

Here is the beginning of our garden. The rose bush is on the right. Monday evening I watered the ground (thoroughly, I thought), started weeding, and then dug four holes and planted the strawberries. That's when I discovered that all that water I poured onto the ground only penetrated half an inch, and also when I discovered that my soil--that I thought was the nicest in the yard!-- is hard clay! How the plants are rooting through it is beyond me, but root they do, ailanthus (I call it stink tree, lol), dandelion, grass and even a few violets.

Today I made a HUGE discovery. Gryph likes to dig!! Wooohooo! This very sore gardener was thrilled to turn the chore over! That's what you see in the above photo, the area that Gryph worked on, pulling weeds and tree roots, digging out grass, and then using the Garden Claw to loosen up that hard clay soil. I had watered again last night and then this morning too, and Gryph kept the hose available.

You can't see it, but there's much more than strawberries, eggplants, and peppers planted in that garden. I also planted seeds: Grandpa Ott morning glory, Tendergreen Burpless cucumber, Bloomsdale long-standing spinach, early white Vienna kohlrabi, melting sugar snow peas, and Oregon sugar pod snap peas. Then I watered everything in, really thoroughly. If any of them come up, I'll be thrilled, and if they all come up, well, they'll look like a little jungle and maybe the squirrels will leave them alone.

Or not. I swear, one of these days I'm gonna get a t-shirt that says "Official Squirrel Hater." But in the meantome, I have plans!!



See the bamboo lined out to mark the shape of the eventual garden? That's native bamboo, by the way, from a friend down the street. It's also called rivercane. When you read about a canebreak, that's this stuff.



Here's another pic. You can see that this side of the back yard is really a work in progress, and what a lot of work it is!

And here is my hero, the Digger of Gardens and Vanquisher of Weeds, Gryph. She was actually sorry to stop digging for the day! Am I lucky, or what?!



So now, from That Garden in That Yard of That House, good night. May you sleep well and may your dreams bring you happiness and peace!

Cath

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day October

Better late than never! I took these pics yesterday, but didn't get to blog until now. Still, I was thinking of y'all, and I did remember the camera!

You might notice how empty my lil flowerpot garden looks without the squash and pumpkin vines. Over the two months that I was sick, the squash bugs just decimated the vines... evidently they are only drawn by the female flowers, so just as bloom reached its peak, the bugs descended. Aaaaack! Well, I know better for next year. I'll just have to concentrate on different crops.

Long after I thought the plants had given up, there's one last green bean. And then, amazingly enough, there are....

Bell peppers! I have five now (one fell off), but imagine my surprise when the plant basically languished all summer long, then caught a virus--looks like peach leaf curl, actually, lol--and THEN started setting peppers! It's cold now, so I doubt they'll ripen and they might not even get to full-size, but what the heck! They're peppers!

Here is my bloom for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day.

Yep! Indeed, that IS an eggplant blossom. What is WITH these plants? The sun has disappeared, lol! But I have three baby eggplants and, as of today, two blooms.

Combined with the peppers, this is more produce than I got all summer long. Who knew?!

Now is that a beautiful sight? The mint nearly died off completely; only one sad sprig was left. The weather cooled, it rained a couple times, and the mint started growing.... and then it leaned over and grew some more! I moved the pots one day and they snapped apart.

Huh? They weren't attached... then I realized the MINT had snapped apart, after it had colonized the adjacent pot. Now THAT'S the mint I know and love, lol!

Look at that basil!! It came back too, just like the mint, but without the colonizing tendencies. it hasn;6t had a chance to colonize anything--I've harvested it twice in the past couple weeks, and it's coming back yet again.

My wonderful brave portulaca though... well, let us kindly say it is reduced to sadness and comment no more.

*elaborate sigh upon its behalf*

The oregano and tarragon have been harvested again and again and they're still going strong, but the cosmos is another one of those which leave me scratching my head. Tis the only one that survived (I planted a dozen seeds), and it hasn't bloomed yet. Too bad the foliage isn't edible! If it were blooming, it would be wonderful; this is Cosmos sulphurea "Bright Lights" and it's easily one of my most favorite summer flowers.

The pansies are trying valiantly....

This is the original butternut squash pot and I guess that squash was REALLY greedy! Judging by the state of the pansies only a couple weeks after transplanting, there is next to no nitrogen left in that pot! I'll have to fertilize it once more, full strength this time (I had been going half-strength, not expecting more flowers on the veggies).

Here we have that amazing purple verbena, my other bloom for you. This is another plant that surprised the heck out of me. It will bloom a while longer, I think, since frost isn't predicted for a while yet.

These are the manager's strip gardens. I think the young tree in the first one might be a weed. Her gardens did nothing for most of the summer, also, so I'm thinking it must be our microclimate. This garden is almost completely in shade and I think she planted it well.

This garden has VERY little root room between the parking curb and the fence, and again, I think she planted it well... but even though it got almost as much sun as my flowerpot garden did, it also did nothing for a couple months after she first planted it this summer.

This is my neighbor's garden. She commandeered this little space between the driveway and the back fence, cleaned it up, weeded it out, and planted pansies and asters. Again, it is very slow to get started. There are a couple blooms on her pansies, though.

Walking through the neighborhood, I see that sticks are beginning to fall from the trees. It is so amazing that the trees just GIVE people sticks like that! Trees most definitely do not shed their young branches in the desert! Maybe it's because of the climate? Or because of the species... none of these trees grow in the southwest desert.

These brqanches demanded a pic. Can you see why?

Take a closer look....
LICHENS! Amazing, isn't it???
Now check this out... are they seedlings, growing in the pattern they fell?

Or is that branch resprouting? I couldn't tell!

Look at the trunk of the tree the branch fell from.

Moss, and mushrooms!!! OH, how I love Wichita!

My final pic... the mimosa tree at the back of the neighbor's yard. Those blossoms did what blossoms do. Look at all those pods!

What's blooming in your area right now?

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Hello! Today is Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, and since the gardener who hosts it is 0ne of the people who inspired me to start gardening again, I thought I would participate. Here is a link to her post. http://maydreamsgardens.blogspot.com/2008/06/garden-bloggers-bloom-day-june-2008.html

My garden is a baby garden right now, only days old. I concentrated on herbs since I am completely new to the Wichita, Kansas climate. I admit, the hailstorms day after day in June have kinda taken me aback and I hesitated to plant anything... but the flowers all around the apartment are doing fine despite the lashing gulley-washers and their bonus rounds of hailstones, so I gathered my courage and took a chance. This is my lil garden, perched on the grate that covers a basement window. The apartment manager had covered the grate with an unused area mat and offered me the space. It isn't pretty, but it will do!

My one and only actual flower was in with the half-price herbs at the grocery store; it has a lovely enticing scent and I'm wondering if it might be heliotrope. I love the deep purple. Each bloom is only about half the size of my baby fingernail; they grow in clusters like verbena--and yanno, it's been so many years since I gardened anywhere but the desert that it could be a verbena and I wouldn't know, lol...

Tis growing in a pot with Italian Parsley and Golden Marjoram. The parsley was mislabeled as triple-curled, but it's obviously flat-leaf.

In keeping with my only-the-best-will-do ethic (lol!) my new plant stand was fished off the top of the laundromat's dumpster. It was a newspaper and leaflet stand in its former incarnation. I cut off the cardboard box that made the top, dusted the stand off, and voila! A folding plant stand to hold my herbs! The pot on the top has Greek Oregano and French Tarragon--tarragon is one of the very few plants I ever pay full price for without complaining much--and I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but the oregano had already tried to bloom. I pinched the stems back---but hey, if I hadn't, I would have had Greek Oregano blooming for GBBDay, too. *grin* The pic looks a lil wonky cuz the camera tilted a lil... I have that problem with my hands, lol.... but also because the shelf is slanted towards the back of the frame, so the green pot is tilted backwards. Oh well, a definite slant makes for better drainage, right? And certainly herbs need good drainage. *crosses fingers and hopes on that one!*

The big pot has my spinach, Mesclun mix, and butternut squash seedlings. It's about a week and a half old, and the seedlings were up in four days. That surprised me!

The lil pots were the herb pots. I can never leave well enough alone *sheepish smile* I had leftover potting soil and so I planted more seeds--parsley, basil, basil, dill, and cilantro. Yes, when you have five pots and four packets of seeds you end up with things like basil, basil. It works for me, anyhow. Hope you have the same good luck! *cheeky grin*

One of the things I didn't expect was the amount of shade this lil bitty garden is going to get. Squash was probably not the wisest choice. At the time, I didn't believe that anything on the south side of a building would be shady in the summer, but there ya have it... I'm TOTALLY directionally dyslexic and this is the north side of the property.

Not to mention the east side of the building.

*chagrined look* Ooops, lol... So, um, I'll keep ya posted on whether or not the morning sun is enough to grow real squash. Here I thought I had a southern location with a hive of wild bees only a hundred feet away... well, I have the wild bees, at least till honey starts dripping into the building's walls. (Sometimes apartment managers who are new don't reeeeally know as much as they think they do when they decide something is not a problem, eh?) Here's hoping the bees don't sting anyone; we have a couple tenants who are allergic. But in the meantime... well... I planted squash!

Here's the view from the back door of the apartment building, out to the side of the property behind us. The daylilies are so nice! I didn't even know they were there until yesterday, since the (huge) yard is kinda overgrown and the foliage didn't show. This is the same yard that had the clematis hidden beneath another vigorous vine--no idea what the bully is, something with five leaflets--and I'm not sure, but I think I might be the only one who saw it bloom a couple weeks ago. The first blossom was the size of my hand and deep purple; after that they were progressively smaller (the same color) and the secret show was over in less than a week. The roses have all gone by in this neighborhood now, and the irises as well; even the peonies are done... so it's daylily time. I love it!