End of Month View: May 2011

Happy almost June!

 It's time for my End of the Month garden tour hosted by the Patient Gardener.

Isn't it nice to look out the window and see real-true-live green? And not the kind that you have to smoosh your face in the dirt to say, "Oh yeah, there IS a little bit of green there!"

I'm pleased with the way things are beginning to fill out in their second year here. It is such a terribly satisfying feeling to envision something and see it come to fruition...of course, I'm nowhere near "fruition" yet, but I am seeing progress.

I had a bird feeder mounted up on the fence post, but the woodpeckers absolutely demolished it. 

Bye bye birdies! 

Doesn't appear to be much happening in the veg garden, but I've been putting in my time here.

Everything is put in, and there are delicious little seedlings coming up. The frontmost section to the left is the Tornado's own garden, and she helped plant it herself. And is very adamant about letting you know it.

Happy little lettuces who are not liking the 90 degree weather that jumped upon us this week.

Not so happy little gardener who saw that the deer discovered the veggie garden two nights ago. Let the Battle of the Deer begin. (Who am I kidding here? We all know I'm the underdog.)

So even if the likeliness of victory with the deer is slim, I have a better chance against the Battle of the Death Garden.  I need to research what is going on with the lower leaves of these peppers. I assume it's an insect of some sort, and I need to look up how to combat it.

Peppers are, unfortunately, my Nemesis Plant. Every gardener has one or two. 

The only successful pepper I have grown in the past 5 years was buried under a cherry tomato plant.

I didn't even know it was there until I ripped out the tomato at the end of the season, and voila! A pepper.

Go figure. ;)

Here's to healthy, happy, & hearty peppers to you all!

Friday Meltdown

I've been in the garden approximately once this week.

It's been a looonnng week.

Complete with full-blown Sharing Wars, meltdowns in the grocery store, refusals to nap, the Professor's Mama Warpath. Oh, and did I mention the high-pitched constant commentary from the Tornado? I actually stopped and counted this afternoon how many times she repeated the same thing. 

"This is Lime's high chair. This-is-Lime's-high-chair! This is Lime's high chair. This is Lime's high chair.

"This. is. Lime's. HIGH CHAIR!"

(Be thankful I stopped typing after only five renditions. The true number is much higher.)

At any rate, I'm hopeful to get back in the garden next week and have some Gardenese to blog about.
So for the weekend, enjoy a few photos from my one and only trek in the garden. :)

Thankful Wednesday

I am overwhelmed today by the extravagance of God.
 At how very much He loves us and gives us more blessings that we can imagine.

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights,
who does not change like shifting shadows. (James 1:17)

And the splendor of this iris is only half the beauty; its perfume is divine!
And I mean that literally. :)

Dirt Cheap: Invisible Trellis

Did you ever hear a nearby boom of thunder, see the navy blue sky, and rush outside...all the while hollering to your Better Half, "Close the window while I shove the morning glories out of the way?"

Maybe that just happens in our family.

Last year we really couldn't close the kitchen window without another person standing outside and shoving armfuls of morning glories out of the way. The remedy certainly isn't in planting less morning glories, but in finding a better place to plant them. 

Meet the Invisible Trellis.

 

Really...you have to squint. It nearly IS invisible. 

How to make your Very Own Invisible Trellis:

 You need three ingredients: Fishing line, eye hooks, and landscape staples.

1. Screw the eye hook into the flashing? (my construction terms are limited at best) underneath the gutter. I just looked for a place where I saw other screws, so I knew it was safe to put a hole there. You may need to pre-drill a hole in order to screw the eye hook in.

I would NOT recommend putting a hole in the actual gutter though. :)

2. Add as many more eye hooks as you desire, spaced well apart. I ended up doing 5 hooks, spaced about a foot apart. You can do more or less, depending on how large you want the trellis.

3. Thread a very-very-very long piece of fishing line through a hook. Make sure the line is long enough to reach the ground, with several extra inches to tie & tighten. Repeat with the next hook.

4. Tie the ends of the fishing line to a landscape staple. This would be a good time to incorporate any fancy knots you may know. Or just tie a regular knot several times over. Snip off any extra line AFTER you have securely tied it down.

5. Push the landscape staple into the ground.  Make sure the line is nice and taut, without any slack. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until each line is secure.

This would be a great technique to use on the side of a porch. You could put the staples into pots and grow a climbing annual up the lines to create a quick privacy screen.  Or even grow a veggie like pole beans!

 Hopefully my invisible trellis will slow down our pre-thunderstorm window-closing rampages. :)

Manna Plants

When the Israelites saw it [manna], they said to each other, “What is it?”
For they did not know what it was. (Exodus 16:15)

Meet my manna plants.

Every time I glance at my "manna plants", I think, "What IS it?"

 I'm counting on your gardening knowledge here, O reader, to help me out.

Meet the first culprit. I bought this so-called "Snowball Bush" at a garage sale a few years back. I thought I was buying a Chinese Snowball Bush similar to the photo below.

(Source)

The odd thing? The woman who sold it to me pointed to a big snowball bush behind her...which was beautiful...and said she dug up an offshoot from that bush. Hmmmm.

A closer look at the leaves. My best guess is some kind of lacecap hydrangea or possibly a viburnum. At any rate, it looks to be beautiful, but the not knowing is making me a little insane.

 I have a sinking feeling that there's a high probability Manna Plant #2 is a weed. 

It drafted itself into my garden. One day it was not there, the next day it was. But it was so pretty I couldn't bear to pull it out and I actually transplanted the thing. 

My gut feeling is that it's red valerian.

I haven't the foggiest idea what red valerian looks like.

But this sure resembles what I would imagine red valerian to be.

Maybe I've subconsciously cataloged red valerian in my brain.

Faithful readers, what is your collective wisdom here?

Vegetable Garden Path Mulch

I was pretty unhappy when construction began on the lot next door. I knew it would happen eventually, but I was hoping it wouldn't be for a few more years yet. You know, until I could get some big trees! :)

Well, I found the silver lining. It's called the dumpster.

Look at all that beautiful cardboard. Big sheets of those suckers, too.

I hauled myself up to the top and was astonished to find that most of what was in there was not actual construction materials. Clothes, loads of old office supplies, a Christmas tree. Really??? You hold onto your Christmas tree until May until you can find a dumpster to abandon it in? Why not just keep the thing until next December and throw a Charlie Brown themed party?

Therefore, I wasn't able to get my little grubby hands on as much of that beautiful cardboard as I'd anticipated, but I still grabbed a nice stack. Plus a lovely bit of flexible piping that I have great plans for! 

I'm (in the process) of ripping the cardboard into the width of my garden paths and then laying several inches of straw on top.

There's a story with the straw too. My lone-in-real-life gardening friend tipped me off for a place to buy straw at a ridiculously cheap price. Of course I go the next day.

My eyes were deceitful and thought what was one bale of straw was really two. I can't pass it up since it was such a fabulous price...so I ended up with twice as much straw as I'd planned on buying!

Since I'm now a straw millionaire equivalent, I'm planning on using the straw to mulch my vegetables too. Not sure how that will all work out, but I'll give it an experiment! The cardboard and straw combo on the paths should help inhibit the weeds. Weeding the paths is much worse that weeding around the veggies.

What kind of mulch do you use in your veg gardens?
 Have you used straw before? (no straw horror stories, please!) :)

Before & After: Veggiegobbler's Aussie Garden

I have a special bloggy place in my heart for veggiegobbler. 

She was the very first one who clicked on the little "Follow" button to the right and followed Sweet Bean Gardening! I actually gave a shout and may have done a wee dance. :)

So when she emailed me to let me know about her Before & After, I was super-de-duper excited to show it off. She actually has a more detailed post on her veggiegobbler blog, but she was gracious enough to let me ask her a few more questions about it. And I love her attitude toward her garden:

"I was tempted to save my before and after shots until Spring or Summer when the garden is looking its best. To at least photograph it when the sun was shining, after the grass had been freshly whipper-snippered and after a bit of a weed and tidy up. But I haven't. You know I'm impatient and lazy so I did none of those things. I decided to show it warts and weeds and all and on a grey day. So here's a little tour of my imperfect, messy but transforming garden."

1. How on earth did you begin? What did you tackle first?

My dad came over one day when I was breastfeeding my first born and said he thought it'd cheer me up if we began to work on the garden. (I reckon I was surrounded by rubble inside and out!) He started to make a border with bricks around an existing concrete path and surrounding the established lemon and avocado trees. Monkey Man came home and immediately said the border was very "suburban" and that I'd never manage to keep the cooch grass out but I've proved him wrong. 

 Then I dug a little patch for a fernery outside the window. You can see this in the first of the after pics. I really just did little patches at a time starting with those closest to my view from the window. (I spent a lot of time breastfeeding on the couch looking out) without too much idea of the long term goal. My interest in veggies started about four years ago with one small patch (now I have 8 spots dedicated to veggies and herbs - with plans for more). 

2. How much time elapsed from your before pics to your after pics? 
About 7 years

3. What is your favorite part of the garden now?

My favourite spot is on a wooden bench in front of a veggie patch. (You can just see the bench in the 2nd after photo - in front of the flag). It's sunny and despite my pale complexion I do love to have a bit of a sit in the sun. I can watch and chat with the kids jump about on the trampoline and watch the chooks. From here I can also see all the bits that need work and make plans for the veggies.

4. What future plans do you have for your garden?

Convince Monkey Man to clear up a big pile of rubble beside the trampoline and plant a narrow garden there along the neighbour's brick wall. I'm planning to espalier some fruit trees up the wall.

*****

I feel like I've just taken an exotic vacation! :)
I love the little patio & pathway, and especially all of the plants which would never ever even think of surviving here in chilly Indiana. Thank you SO much veggiegobbler, for sharing your lovely, growing garden! Be sure to check out her blog for more garden goodness and some yum delish garden recipes.

And as always, if you have a Before & After you want to share...just contact me and I'd love to brag on it!

Monday Cacophony

Somehow on Mondays, all the thoughts I didn't think about over the weekend suddenly vie for my brain space. I've started and restarted this blog post nearly 10 times in my mind, and I'm getting nothing logical. 

So I'm just going to type out the randomness and see what happens.

1.  How on earth do you keep the blogs you read straight? I'm usually overly organized, but I've got some blogs bookmarked, some on Blotanical, some on Google, some in the deep recesses of my memory...you get the idea. 

2. Woke up this morning and was very pleased to find a new hoya leaf. This plant is a cutting from my great-grandmother's hoya...I very nearly killed it, but this is the first sign of growth in over a year.

3. The dirty clothes in the laundry room are nearly ready to rise up in revolt and stage a revolution. I'm just going to stay out of the there until the political situation cools down.

4. The indoor plants must be getting jealous of the outdoor plants, because they are all going downhill. Look at this pitiful thing!

5. I need to take some time and find out how to get my photos uniformly sized when I post them. I want to find a way to do it automatically so I don't have to edit each one. And I'm grieved to find out that I can't get Blogger to thread comments. Or do any number of cool comment functions.

6. I've been in a yellow mood recently, and have been adding lots of yellow in my house. Was finally able to find a couple spare minutes to paint this dandelion (which has been on my to-do list for over a week now!)

7.  There is no chocolate in the house.

8. Tree swallows are now the third resident in the bluebird house. Which is better than the house sparrows that were there previously, I suppose. But I miss seeing the bluebirds.

 

9. I went to an awesome plant swap this weekend with my friend Darcy...we were late, so it was a bit crazy, but I have a whole load of free plants! Plus the skies opened and poured on us - my stroller will probably never be the same again.

10.  It's probably my own fault that I'm not thinking clearly today. I stayed up much too late finishing a book (which wasn't worth staying up late for anyway), but I have a bad habit of just wanting to finish the book already because I go to bed.

Mercy. I'm off to see if I can remedy #7. (That's the chocolate one!)

Bloom Day: May 2011

Happy Garden Blogger's Bloom Day!

Nothing like a 20 degree temperature drop to jolt you out of your sunny May reveries. I bundled up in the
lit-er-ally freezing rain today to bring you these purple gems:

Bearded iris passalong beauties...

Happy little allium. I'd love to get some of the really giant ones! 

I picked up this annual at a very sweet Amish greenhouse this past week. I can't remember what it is, but it pretty much jumped off the shelf and into my wagon.

My lone blue flax is nothing like the fields of blue I remember seeing in Saskatchewan, but I grew this one from seed and am thrilled to see it bloom.

And the never-ending chives. I've yet to actually eat one, though!

Happy Blooms Day to you, too! :)