The one where she bored everyone to death with millions of pictures

"So...where do we go from here?"

Tonight, after it had rained for most of the day, I went out to the garden to see how things were doing. I was in heaven. 

Swiss chard, onions and peppers

My garden is flourishing!

Swiss Chard

I've spent many hours dreaming it up, creating the design, planning plant placement, building the actual garden, planting everything and tending to these plants. When I walk back there and see things thriving, I can't even explain how good that feels.

It really is one of my favorite places to be. Sometimes I just sit and stare, amazed. To me, it's just beautiful.

I think the combination of Opal Basil and the fine textured carrot foliage would be a gorgeous addition to a flower bed.

I've never really had much luck with peppers, but they are all growing well and I'm starting to see little peppers on them.

I have several different kinds of tomatoes and the mesh trellis supports have been great so far. I'm starting to see little tomatoes on a lot of them!

Never mind the toys, gotta keep the four year old entertained sometimes!

I have three different types of peas on the left side of the supports and three different types of cucumbers to the right. I had spinach in front of the peas but it started bolting so I pulled them out. I will probably either replant spinach or a different type of salad greens there. In front of the cucumbers I have baby romaine.

aww aren't they cute?

Do you by any chance remember that middle bed I wanted to have jack be little pumpkins and morning glories climbing up a teepee?

Okay so I obviously planted too much in this bed but I might be okay with that. They are climbing up the teepee and spilling over the edges. I love it! So far the morning glories are still trying to climb up through the pumpkins. Hopefully they'll be able to sneak through so there will be some blue blooms mixed in here and there. I think that would be so pretty with the pumpkin flowers!

These are boy flowers. You can tell because they don't have little baby pumpkin bumps.
They get to stay thin. Jerks...

Speaking of flowers...have you ever seen a potato flower? Well I haven't, at least not until today!

Okay so I know it's closed and sad looking, but I was pretty excited to see that this evening! I have never grown potatoes before so I didn't know what to expect. When I filled the bed they are in, I only filled it halfway to "make it easier for me to hill up"...right...

I've obviously underestimated these guys. Four and a half bales of straw have gone into this potato bed.

"Is that all you've got lady?"

...and they keep growing...and growing...and growing! Now I know that some of it is just the straw settling but wow! I am going to have to add some chicken wire around this bed to keep the straw from spilling out. I still think about how much it would suck if I were to dig down after all of this and not find any potatoes! I'm pretty sure I would cry. Yes. I would definitely cry. Hopefully, we will have lots of potatoes!

"Hey guys, how's it going?"

So, things are growing pretty well, besides the weeds we also have a few uninvited guests like this tomato plant that randomly sprouted here!

"oh come on I'm a pretty fun guy!"

"'fun guy?' For shame Jess, for shame""

...and these little guys that showed up in the bed with the peppers and onions! I'm thinking I'm going to have to take the straw mulch out of this bed. With a soil mixture of composted manure, peat moss and vermiculite I think it might be retaining more than enough moisture without the mulch. So far this summer I think I have had to water the garden maybe three times! 

So, that's where we're at right now. If you've made it this far, thank you so much for taking the time to look at all of these pictures! Next time I will try to remember to take my real camera out with me so you don't have to look at camera phone pictures!

Changes of perspective

   When we first bought this house, whenever I would see rabbits hopping around the yard I always thought they were so cute. I would just sit and watch them with a smile. Having lived in the city most of my life, the majority of the rabbits I had seen were in pet stores. Sure there were random wild rabbits out and about once in a while, but they just weren't something you would see on a regular basis. "How lucky we are!" I thought, "to be surrounded by so much nature!". Then I started gardening.

   It started with a few strawberry plants. They did okay at first, but soon I noticed that they were being chewed on. I saw a rabbit out there one day and looked to find all but one of my strawberry plants totally chewed down to the ground. This was no one's fault but my own of course. I should have covered them right away when I noticed that they were being chewed on. It was at this point though, that I decided that rabbits were jerks. Yes, I know they need to eat too and all of that jazz, but here's the deal: if I am spending the time, money and energy to try and grow food for my family and you take it upon yourself to destroy my work, I don't care how cute and fuzzy you are. You and I are no longer cool.

  Then we have spiders. I don't love spiders. I don't even kind of like spiders. I'll let a daddy long leg hang out and kill any random crawlies that sneak into my house for a while, but other than that if there is a spider in my house, I'm looking for a shoe. If the spider is big enough, I'm looking for my husband. I know, I'm a wimp. I'm okay with it. Well, I guess I was okay with it until this big mama decided to make herself right at home in the borage I'd planted in my veggie garden.

"Hey, what's up? Got any steak?"

  Remember that whole thing about me growing up in the city? Up until this point, I had never randomly come across a spider like this. Being 98% sure that if I were to try and squish it with something it would probably just take it away from me and beat me with it, I went to find my husband. After poking it with a stick a few times, (really why do they do that?) he asked me if I wanted him to kill it. While inside my head I'm thinking "YES KILL IT TWICE! KILL IT LOTS! KILL IT WITH FIRE! KILL IT UNTIL IT'S ALL KINDS OF DEAD!!!!" I actually hear myself say "no, just leave it..." 

"No?!?!?" My husband and the voice inside my head ask in unison. "just leave it?!?!?"

As I stared at it's web, full of mosquitoes and other bugs I told him to leave it be.

  From that day on, my garden routine was a little different. Every day I walked out to the garden with goosebumps. My very first task was always to find the spider. It never left the borage, so it was always pretty easy to locate. Once I knew where it was, I was able to work in the garden without being too worried about randomly stumbling upon it. It's like we had an agreement. I stayed away from it, and it stayed in the borage and killed bugs. Did it kill enough bugs to make up for how much it freaked me out? Probably not, but who knows. I didn't have any problems with bugs in that garden, but I don't know how much the spider had to do with it. 

  I often tell people that gardening keeps me sane. At the end of the day, some time alone to clear my head in the garden works wonders. Now that I think about how much gardening has changed the way I think about things, I'm not so sure if "sane" is the word I should be using!

To my sweetie, Thanks for all the support(s)?

Last year was the first year I actually had a garden. I have this problem when it comes to trying things. I didn't want it to just be your average run of the mill garden. I wanted it to be beautiful and functional and I wanted to place things based on what I'd learned about companion planting. I spent hours researching and planning. I had random notes all over the place. My husband was convinced that he would wake up one morning to find me standing in the living room still awake from the night before obsessively writing things like "carrots are good for tomatoes, but tomatoes can stunt carrot's growth", "peppers like onions" and "borage is wonderful!" all over the walls! I was that obsessed.

Eventually I figured out where I wanted to plant everything. I was so excited! I had placed the veggies and included a few flowers that were good companions. It was going to be beautiful! 

July 2010

At first, things were looking pretty good. The tomatoes and peppers I had started inside from seed when it was still snowing outside were thriving in their new homes. The seeds I had planted were starting to grow and so was my head. I was feeling pretty awesome. I'd grown a tomato plant or a couple pepper plants here or there but I had never planned out an entire garden bed. I was feeling like I was a pretty awesome gardener! What I didn't realize was, with all of that planning and researching I had forgotten a very basic, very important thing.

Determinate

Indeterminate

While my determinate tomatoes would remain bushy and only end up growing a certain size before they stopped, the indeterminate tomatoes were vine like and would just keep growing. Tomato cages, while fine for determinate types of tomatoes, just weren't going to work for the indeterminate type and I had caged them all. Eventually they grew up and over the cages, falling over the sides and tipping some of them over. My husband ended up having to attach wire to the cages and to the sides of the garden bed to keep the cages upright. By August my beautiful perfectly planned garden looked like this:

They took over everything! I ended up with tons of tomatoes and lots of basil but not much more than that. Most of the pepper plants were crushed by the tomato plants and the ones that weren't didn't receive nearly enough sun. The alyssum I thought was so pretty along the front of the bed just got in the way of the onions and was eventually ripped out. 

So this year I am trying something different. This year, we're going up!

Thanks to my super awesome husband for building these!

One would think that I would steer clear of indeterminate types after last year's disaster but oh no, that's not how I operate. This year I'm only using indeterminate types of tomatoes! The supports on the beds to the left in the picture above are all for tomatoes. The ones on the right side are for cucumbers and peas. If all goes well, they will be full of plants and it will look almost like an enclosed garden and less like a garden with soccer nets around it! We'll see how things go this year. I can't wait!

Guess what time it is!

Oh yes, it's peony time!

Now, I will be running outside like a crazy person to cut all of the blooms because it's about to rain!

My first harvest of the year!

A strawberry. Just one! It's kind of funny being from Minnesota and watching people who live in warmer states post pictures online and talk about all of the things they have already harvested while my plants are still wimpy little guys. Even people in Minnesota who were able to get their cool weather crops in the ground at the appropriate time make me feel a little envious. While I did plant cool weather crops, I planted them a lot later than I would've liked to have planted them because my garden beds just weren't ready yet. While I'm hoping they do okay, I'm not going to get my hopes up. Maybe I can replant some of them in the fall and try again if they don't do well this time. Next year though? I'm on it! 

So here is my first harvest of the year. A strawberry! Yes, I know I probably could've given it another day but chances are, something else would've found it first. My husband said I should put it in the freezer so we can feed it to our family when times get tough. He is a smartass and I will not be sharing my one strawberry with him!

So here we are!

I talked a little about the front of my house a few days ago. I thought it would be fun to post another picture of what it looked like when we moved in and what it looks like now! I took the picture on the right just a couple days ago. This is just something you have to do when you are going to take on a big project. It's so fun being able to look at these pictures next to each other. I'm not even going to lie. I have looked at these pictures next to each other way too many times. It just feels good to know that I was able to accomplish a project like this by myself while simultaneously caring for, entertaining and occasionally being a jungle gym for my three year old!

Moral of the story? Landscaping rocks were invented by satan.

Do they sell "children with rocks" collars for plants?

"We feel so uncool right now."

Last week I planted my peppers and tomato plants. The next morning when I went to check on them, I  noticed that one of my tomato plants was gone and another was broken and bent over. I quickly realized how the one was broken when I saw a rock sitting next to it. The day before, my boys were "helping" me by throwing rocks onto the landscaping fabric. I remember noticing an "oh crap" look on the older one's face at one point but I thought it was just because a rock landed in the garden bed. I didn't realize it actually took out one of my tomato plants! Then I went to see what the deal was with the other one. I didn't have to do much investigating before finding a big fat cutworm. Not cool cutworm. Not cool.

Now the rest of the tomatoes and peppers have super fashionable cutworm collars! I imagine if they could talk they'd be telling me how uncool cutworm collars are and asking me why I'm always embarrassing them.  Then I'd make them feel like ungrateful jerks by telling them how I bet their dear friend Early Girl tomato wished she had a cutworm collar that fateful night.

So, besides replacing two tomato plants there is still a lot left to do here. I still need to build the supports for climbers and then fill in between the beds and the perimeter of the garden with rocks. I also need to figure out where I am going to plant my pumpkins and melons, and move some of my raspberries back here and plant them in hedgerows. I've really been thinking about planting a live fence around the veggie garden with espaliered fruit trees but I'm not sure they'll all get enough sun once I put the supports in for the climbers. Then of course there would be the whole deer issue...

You may think I'm crazy, but I think I'm just...well...crazy I guess...hmm...

Last year my husband offered to build raised beds for me for my veggie garden. Then he gave me graph paper and told me to draw him a picture of what I wanted. He soon regretted that decision!

This is actually the first year that I'll be able to use all of the garden beds, and I've got a plan!

I'm insane, I know but I am so excited!

and so it began...

A little over two years ago, my husband and I bought our first house. When we moved in, there was still snow on the ground and we had no idea what was lurking underneath. As it began to melt, the first thing I saw were hens and chicks. I had no idea what they were, but I thought they were pretty cool looking. I was so clueless that first year, I had one of my neighbors walk around the house with me and tell me which things were plants and which things were weeds!

This is what our house looked like that first summer. I didn't make many changes that summer. I was just trying to make sure I didn't end up killing anything! Last summer things changed. I decided the rocks had to go! I'd never planned out flower beds or anything before so it was definitely a challenge. Well, that and all of those rocks! I pulled out all of the rocks, divided and moved hostas, daylilies and hens and chicks and added lots of new things. By the end of the summer, my arms looked awesome and the front of the house looked like this:

Professional landscaper I am not, but man it feels like home! Now when I sit on my front step I look around at all of the work I've done and it makes me so proud. All of the memories of back aches seem to disappear. Now I see this instead of rocks...

...and I am so hooked!