End of Month View: January 2011

I look out my window and the garden seems pretty bare - happily snoozing, tucked under a blanket of snow. (That blanket is supposed to turn into a very thick down comforter if the weather forecast is right and The Big Blizzard comes to visit my garden).
 
I get the Tornado tucked in for a nap and head outside.



Aha! There is a bit o'green out there! Thank the Lord for evergreens!

I do like getting up in the snowy mornings and seeing what visitors tried to sneak through overnight. I feel like I'm one-upping the deer, cats, rabbits, gophers, dufflepuds, unicorns, etc. etc.

"Haha! You think you're so invisible- you wait until cover of darkness to slink over to see what's in the all-you-can-eat garden buffet! Nothing but TWIGS for you!" 

Course, they get me back when the snow melts & the green buffet is back in full swing.

I couldn't find any icicles, but loved this bit of ice creeping along my edging stones.

 This butterfly bush leaf narrowly escaped from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

 

Lavender and catmint - they were so pretty and silvery gray!

 One of my cheap plant markers just waiting to get pounded with a REAL. BIG. snowball in the predicted blizzard. Heh, heh. :-)

Not the best photo, as you can't see all of the garden. But the first thing I want to do is save up some cash and buy some TREES. I hate that our house feels like it was dropped out of the sky into a field. Whenever we get neighbors, I don't want to feel like I am on display when I'm out in my garden.

Other than that, I need to think of something else to plant as a focal point - possibly an evergreen - and figure out something to cover up that sewer cap. I'm thinking about braving the hypertufa world for that, but we'll see. Oh, and getting some trellising for up against the house so I can grow upwards.

I was outside all of 10 minutes when I heard the Professor start crying for his pureed peas. Mmmm.

Thanks to the Patient Gardener for letting me join in the end of the month review! It was wonderful to have an excuse to get outside and putter around (er... freeze) in my garden!

Dirt Cheap: Plant Markers

It's that time of year for wintersowing...my favorite dirt cheap gardening activity of all!

And since a seed packet's price is roughly equivalent to the change I can find at any given time in my couch, I wintersow LOTS of seeds. Not to mention that I seem to get sucked into seed swaps. (without much resistance on my part, I admit!) So when I am sowing 50+ jugs of seeds, I need a foolproof way to remember what is planted in each jug.

Enter the plant marker, a mini blind in its former life.

I bought a mini blind that had seen better days at Goodwill (on 50% off day, of course). You can find these nearly every time you step foot into a thrift store - usually for under a dollar.

Here's how to get hundreds of plant markers for a buck:

1. Cut off the strings that hold the slats together. You'll have lots of long loose slats (A).
2. Cut one of the long slats into several small sections - about 4 inches long (B).
3. Cut each of these sections in half lengthwise (C).
4. I like to slice the ends off diagonally to make it a little easier to push in the dirt, but you don't have to.
5. Write down your plant name/info with a pencil on the plant marker.

Baby poppies - see my plant marker on the left?

For some reason, writing with a pencil (instead of a pen) makes the marker last forever.

Ok, so maybe not forever, but at least several years. I usually stick the little marker into the dirt next to my seedlings when I plant them out in the garden. (If it's not written down, I'm not held liable to remember it.) I've only been using these mini-blinds-turned-plant-id-tags for 3 years, but the ones that have been outside for 3 years look as good as the ones I just made yesterday.

Only slightly dirtier.

Wordless Wednesday

Before & After - Hanni's Cottage Garden

I get to be the first installment of Before & After, so welcome to my cottage garden! My cottage garden is only one year old...so take this as a before and a "one year" after. I'm always garden-dreaming so I'm sure I won't ever get to the point where I think the garden is "finished."

But that's the joy in gardening, right? There's always something to be working on!

This is April 2010... we had just moved in the fall & I was madly transplanting that October. Thankfully, the new owner of our previous home didn't want ANY of the flowers & so I was able to dig up most of my perennials. I did leave a few there though...my elderly neighbor always came by & told me how much she enjoyed seeing the bright colors from her window. So I wanted to leave some for her. :)

Pretty bare bones, though! You can see all my wintersowing milk jugs in the background.

And here is the same view in September 2010. My brother came and painted the fence,  we put down some mulch in the pathway, and things are filling out. I'll have to wait a couple of seasons to get the cottage-garden- stuffed-to-the-brim look, but that's okay. I planted some climbing roses along the fence...can't wait to see those take off!

This is the view from the other side. I'd like to get some trellising along the house and get some plants growing vertically this year.  And I'm brainstorming ways to cover up that sewer cap - yuck yuck. I'm also thinking about moving the maiden grass and using something else as the focal point. It works great in the fall, but not so much when it's short in the spring.

And there you have it! Thanks for wandering down my (short) little garden path with me. 

The Gift of Winter

I am thankful for winter.

To be sure, I count all the days until spring. (57 days to go!)
I lament daylight savings time. (Dusk at 4:30 is worth a mournful cry!)
It takes twice as long to get out the door. (Ever buckled in a 20 lb snowsuit-laden wiggling child?)
It takes four times as long to actually get anywhere. (Twice as long to get IN the car, twice as long to drive in the snow!)

But if God didn't give us winter, I wouldn't appreciate the gift of spring nearly half as much.

My Budding Gardener

It’s become something of a New Year tradition for me to plant paperwhites, since that’s how I became a first time gardener.

Now of course, they start showing up in the stores before Christmas. If you want to pay $5-6 a box, go ahead and buy them. But if you wait a few weeks until the Christmas stuff is on clearance, you can usually snag them for 50-75% off. My local store had them on sale last week for $1.25.

I remembered I had some wheatgrass seed left over from another project, and I thought it would be pretty to have the paperwhites growing up out of that.  I found an unused basket, lined it with a plastic oven bag, and planted away.

 

I kept checking on the bulbs every few days, but there was nothing. No growth. No green. Just the bulbs. The wheatgrass started growing – I always think it is molding when it sprouts – but no paperwhites.

Last week at lunchtime I noticed one of the bulbs was tipped at an unusual angle – sideways.   

Now I know I didn’t plant it that way.

I questioningly looked over at the Tornado, innocently eating her bread & butter.She gave me a very serious nod, and an explanation: “Yes, Mama, I was pulling them out to help them to grow faster.” Naturally.

Mercy! ...well, it'll be a miracle if I have paperwhites this year, but my budding gardener and I will enjoy the wheatgrass anyway.

The Garden Bug Bit Me Here

I have a special fondness for the paperwhites that appear in the big box stores now.

 I received a box of these bulbs for Christmas several years ago, and wasn’t quite sure what to do with them, since I wasn’t much of a gardener.  Yes, I loved, loved, loved flowers, but growing them myself? Not so much. This was way out of my territory. 

Now my mom? She is an amazing gardener whose flower pots in the summer get so lush that you have to hack your way through them in order to find the deck chairs. In fact, when we first got married, she came over and showed me how to plant cosmos in the flowerboxes in front of our rental.

Before the cosmos were forgotten

I do believe I remembered to water the cosmos once or possibly twice that summer. 

Anyway, I figured that since I had received it as a gift, the paperwhites deserved my best shot and I followed the directions on the box. Thankfully, they were written in the style of “for non-gardeners who received these strange things as a gift.” It even said to put the pointy part of the bulb up. I put the pot on the windowsill in our laundry room.  

And you know what? They grew.  And kept growing. And grew some more.

 And then they flowered.

And I was hooked on gardening.