My dwarf cherry set a lot of fruit. Now i need to seal up the door to its cage so the chipmunks don’t take them all.
I harvested a bowl of blueberries today. Yum!
In my zone 7/8 area, after a winter of crazy snowfalls and the atmospheric river events in November, almost all Yucca, New Zealand flax (phormium), and fuschia have completely died off, everywhere.
We had great parsley this year growing from the compost bin. Another one is growing by the house. Our parsley goes to seed. My wife collects the seeds and replants next year.
Just getting snow peas from the new patch of garden, should be harvestable in a day or two. Got two zucchini and two eight ball squash already. Onions are doing great, have thinned them when I need scallions. The acorn squash I bought and the volunteer butternut squash are coming along nicely, and I saw my first tomato, a small one but it will grow. Lots of blossoms.
The beans are growing like crazy but not blossoms yet. The eggplant, which I finally found, is doing nicely, with a few blossoms, and we used our second round of red leaf lettuce last nice for beef in a leaf, which is stir fried beef and angel hair in a sauce which you eat wrapped in large lettuce leafs.
Looking forward to my first BLT.
I may have crossed the threshold of Eggplant Insanity, with 36 plants, representing about a dozen varieties, now in the ground. Even allowing for potential casualties, that’s a lot of eggplant to eat, freeze and stage duels with.*
On the ornamental side, I probably need to stop planting crepe myrtles. But I couldn’t resist a 50% off bargain at the Rural King yesterday for the dwarf variety “Pocomoke”.
*only feasible with the long Japanese varieties, which I also find the most useful in cooking.
We don’t garden. We are lucky to have any type of ‘lawn’ at all up in the Rockies. Dandelions have made their way in though.
When I first saw one in the yard decades ago, my thought was, well, it’s green anyway.
Bad idea. I’ve been spraying them with 30% concentrated vinegar. Grass is doing pretty good though. It’s not something that can be mowed. Which pleases me.
Dandelions are pretty in bloom. Why kill them if you aren’t trying to grow something else?
They take over completely, and get as big as a small bush. They push out mountain wild flowers.
I think dandelions are considered an invasive species at this elevation.
I think they’re considered so at every elevation …
Heh. Yeah.
They were not in my ‘yard’ until a few years after I got here. I’m the invasive species up here.
Had amazing weather this weekend. Had the money to buy a bunch of mesh and 3/4" PVC pipe and connectors to build my enclosures to keep the damned squirrels from digging in my pots. Built two 2’x4’x2’ frames, cut the mesh to size for each side, and zip tied everything together. All my pots fit under them perfectly, and I can easily increase the height when the need comes just with cinder blocks.
Got three different types of tomatoes growing, a red pepper plant that’s got a teeny tiny fruit on it right now, and a honeydew seedling that’s totally turned into an 8" vine after all the rain we’ve gotten recently. My herb pots are also mostly doing well. The chives are very skinny but numerous, and the basil, oregano, coriander, dill, and thyme are all growing quite well. Still all fairly tiny but they are growing. Had the mint in the same pot as the basil and the mint has never come up, which is a little odd since I thought the mint was supposed to be the plant that took over.
The squirrels dug up all of our lettuce seeds so we had to redo those. The company we bought the seeds from threw in a freebie packet of komatsuna that we planted and that’s been doing very well.
I’ve got scads of thyme, sage, and chives. Basil and dill are not doing that well - I’m getting ready to plant a new Aerogarden inside so I’ll just grow those in there. They seem to do better inside.
Tomatoes are starting to ripen and we’ve eaten about a half dozen. There’s a half dozen more sitting on the counter. I’ve picked about a dozen of the cayenne peppers, as they’ve all turned red; those will go in the freezer until I need them. Have lots of jalapenos too, but I am going to wait to pick those until they change color - I’ve got plenty of green ones in the freezer from last season, and the red/orange color gives a nice pop to a lot of dishes.
I had some fire blight on the apple tree i grafted from one my husband’s uncle grew from seed. I think i got it all out, but I’m still a little anxious.
I have so many tomatoes, just none are yet ripe.
I have so much squash, I’m contemplating doing a ding-dong-ditch on some of my neighbors.
The potatoes are turning brown and drying up, so I think I’ll have a crop of those next weekend.
The rabbits ate my entire cilantro plant overnight.
Good grief. Please don’t tell mine that the stuff is edible; it’s one of the things I haven’t yet had to worry about getting grazed.
There was probably one twitchy rabbit who complained that the plant tasted “soapy”.
Rabbits love themselves some cilantro.
The dill has gone insane - it reseeded basically one entire 3’ by 6’ raised bed. It’s enough for a pickle factory! I may be East European, but I’m not THAT East European!
The peas are not liking the few days we’ve had in the upper 90s. I don’t know how much of a harvest we are going to get before they go kaput. The tomatoes and a couple of the eggplants are starting to flower, and there’s one green fruit on one of the eggplants (Turkish Orange - so it’s not remotely close to ripe). A couple of the peppers seem to be failing to thrive, but I always overplant, so it’s not the end of the world. The strawberries didn’t do super well this year, but the raspberries are going like gangbusters - no ripe fruit yet, but give it a couple of weeks, and we’ll be harvesting a pint or two a day, eating most of them before they make it out of the backyard!
The neighbors’ grapevine along the ugly-ass chain link fence - they tried to kill it a couple of years ago, but Mother Nature had other ideas. It’s now covering half the fence, which is just fine by me, even though I still have a gallon bag of frozen grape leaves from last year. We should break out the little grape-rolling gadget that I got from eBay one of these days.
Meanwhile, the front and side yards that I sowed with bags of mixed zone-appropriate wildflower seeds in fall 2020? This is the first year the perennials have come in, and we now have a crazy hippie wildflower meadow all around the house, with some of them 6 - 8’ high. I love it, but I think our next-door neighbors who plant nothing but hostas are giving us the side-eye. Oh well, too bad! I am still waiting for the sunflowers to come up - I hope they aren’t duds. And the lemon balm and mint have gone bonkers, too - I have given away several large planters of mint, but there’s plenty to go around. Mojitos for everyone!
I hope the cucumbers fare better than last year - I didn’t keep them watered well enough, so it was largely a bust. But on Friday our irrigation hardware should arrive, and this weekend’s project, weather permitting, is to install an irrigation system! Wish us luck.
You will find out why it’s commonly known as an irritation system.
Also, probably, why my list of tools to take to the field when setting up irrigation ends with “Patience. It will be needed.”
It should be worth it, though.