Weekly update

4th of July already! (well, now the 6th) The garden is exploding with all the warm, finally dry, weather. The nasturtiums are still producing flowers like crazy. The butterfly bush is putting out pretty purple flowers. The beans have made it up to the bottom of their dream catcher, their pretty peachy blossoms are giving me a treat for the eyes while my tummy waits its turn! I have had plenty of mint for mojitos, basil for tomato sauce and oregano to start drying for the winter. And of course parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Sometimes I just can't resist pulling a few leaves off for a whiff of these lovely smells.

Herbs are a great thing for a city gardener, or anybody with limited time or space. With just a few pots on a window sill, in a window box or on a patio, a family could have enough herbs for pesto, mojitos, pizza sauce and garnishes all summer, and if done correctly, all winter too! Sage is a tender perennial and survives Philadelphia winters with just a little help, so I tend to plant it right in the garden. Most of the others are annuals, and so I plant them in pots and bring them in for the winter. When they start to look sad or extremely leggy, I add another seed or two to the pot so a baby plant can fill in behind it.

Finally, the squash have baby squash on them! There is one in a pot on the tiers that is about 4" long, throughout the rest of the garden they range from 2" to flowers. I am hoping to be eating those when I get back from New Hampshire!

Oh, and my lilies bloomed!

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.... just wanted to make sure the song was stuck in everybody's head!

Weekly update

A week without daily rain. Hallelujah! The garden suffered a little bit of yuck from the constantly moist soil, but I picked off bottom leaves and hopefully now that we are getting a little more sun, everything will stay healthy.

Little spots of color still abound in the garden from the nasturtiums, impatiens, begonias and petunias. I had to pull out a few nasturtiums though, I think these little guys are trying take over the world! The miniature rose has put out a few more blooms and the butterfly bush is budding. I love when flowers finally bloom!

The squash and cukes are starting to bloom too. Apparently squash have male and female flowers, I'm going to have to look in to how all this works, but only the females make veggies, which means the males turn into squash blossom fritters.... DINNER!

The ever changing nature of a garden is part of what makes it fascinating to me. It is ever changing from day to day, week to week and year to year. I just finished a book that talks about that and what kind of person it takes to be a gardener. Stay tuned for a review!

Weekly update

We are still getting so much rain that the garden isn't changing much week to week.
The nasturtiums are still going nuts, the beans are creeping their way up their trellis, the lettuce is keeping the squash and cucumbers company, and the little flowers in front are starting to look like real plants. The butterfly bush has a few buds on the tips, so I'm excited about that. I haven't quite figured out why the calla lilies haven't come up yet. I don't' know if the ground just got too soggy and they all rotted, or if it hasn't been warm enough long enough for them to come up. I hope they come up soon! If not I guess I'll have to find some other bulbs to put in the corner behind the bench. The buckets are off the "grass" and on the roof, so that opens things up a bit. Otherwise, we are all just waiting for the sunshine to arrive.

Weekly update

What a week (or two...) it has been! My parents and my brother were in town for a visit. We don't all get to see each other very often, and when we do, we do a lot of our visiting while fixing house parts. This trip included replacing the old, rusting sewer pipes that were making our basement very damp and a little smelly. We also installed an attic ladder that enables us to easily get to the roof. Before it involved hauling the big ladder from the basement and percariously balancing it on the edge of the roof hatch, now I just pull on a little handle and a ladder appears! The only issue I have found so far is that I have to cover the opening once I am up there because one of the kitties like to try and come up to visit. And now on to the garden.

We are still getting a lot of rain, which apparently is making up for our winter precipitation shortfall, but at least now, the days get to be 75-80 degrees instead of staying in the 60s. This has helped alot of stuff finally take hold. The beans and squash planted along the left fence are finally looking like plants. The beans are climbing up their "dreamcatcher" and I'm dreaming of fresh green beans! The flowers are taking hold too. The nasturtiums are going NUTS! There are spots of yellow, orange, coral and red all over the yard. A few of them were crowding each other, and my mom transplanted them in between other plants so they all have more space to fill out. One thing I did not know about nasturtiums is that they will climb. They are currently sharing the trellis on the right with the peas! They don't seems to be hurting each other though, so I figure I'll let them go. And speaking of peas. I picked a dozen pods! I have to make rice so I can use them in a pilaf since there really aren't enough for dinner yet.

In the bottom right corner you will notice all the buckets. They have tomatoes and peppers lovingly transplanted by my mom, waiting to be moved to the roof deck. While my mom was helping my dad install bathroom pipes (the other project this trip) my brother was up on the roof screwing down deck boards. He doesn't get to build a whole lot in his tiny apartment in Paris, so he wanted to use some tools and see a project finished while he was here. It looks great! I can't wait to get the plants up there. I have to wait until I get bird netting though. We put a bucket up as a test for where the bottom rail needed to be, and when we went up the next morning, the birds had clipped all but two leaves off. I hadn't planned on the deck this year, but now that we have done it, I am really excited to see how many tomatoes we will get. I need to rig up a way to get water up there easily, and a few other details, but there will be updates about those later.

The tiered corner is really filling in. The lettuce, cucumbers, herbs and flowers have made a nice surround for the birdbath. I haven't had much time to sit and watch for feathered visitors this past week, I'll have to make some this week!And finally, the lettuce. I have planted it in years past, but somehow it never seemed to work out. This year however, we have been eating almost as much salad as we can stand, and the lettuce just keeps coming! In the back bed it is filling in around the squash plants. I need to start a new run so that when this bolts we will still have lettuce. You will also note that the bok choi is gone. It was yummy! We had it stirfried with garlic and a little oil. Replacing it is Swiss chard which had been thined from one of the window boxes in the tiered corner. I will need to put some more bok choi nearer to the end of the summer when the flowers are starting to fade.

ba dee ba dee... ba dee ba dee... that's all folks!

Weekly update

So the grass was looking great... until I moved the chimnea that was covering the biggest bare spot. Oh well = (

I have pulled the bean cover back to make it more of a swooping bird protector rather than a whole protector. I may take it off all together and just leave the sideways tomato cages over to deter birds. The tray of pepper plants is hanging out in the middle of the bed between the squash/cucumber hills. I may need to transplant a few of the seedlings from the pots to the ground, for some reason the ground ones just aren't coming up. Of course I will carefully transplant the babies over, water them, they will take hold, and the seeds I planted earlier will finally decide to grow. Sigh.

In front, where the radishes used to be, the basil is hanging out, freshly potted into 4" pots, awaiting their permanent homes in Philly and Ohio.

Slowly but surely the yard is coming along.

The alley is coming along better.

If you can ignore my sloppy stack of wood in the back corner, and the pile of buckets waiting to become tomato and pepper pots. New to this collection are the flowers potted in any random pot I could find in the basement to cover the retaining wall. They have been there a few weeks now and are finally starting to fill in. The pots hanging from the fence were a whim. Big bare spot of fence that is the first thing you see when you come out of the house. BORING! So with some spare pots, a few wire coat hangers, a pair of tin snips and pliers, they were turned into these delightful hanging pots. Martha Stewart would be proud.

The peas and beans are making their way up the trellis, or as it was christened at the Memorial Day party, the"dream catcher."

The bin on the right has the peas that were started before the trellis was up. I added a few more seeds when I put the other bin's in. There is also a little lettuce in front of the peas. I fear that the depth of the bins is causing the lettuce to get shade longer than I intended, and therefore not grow as quickly. Next year I plan to fill the bins to the top, but my impatience got the best of me this year and I went ahead and planted before I got a second bag of potting soil. Either that, or the soil is not drying out as quickly as had hoped since the alley doesn't get full sun. I am thinking of wrapping the bins in black plastic to try to help the soil warm a little. Of course when it stays out of the 50s at night, it may warm up on its own. These peas haven't shown flowers yet, but the shelling peas have some good size pods. I have to keep an eye on them since I haven't grown them before and don't really know when they are ready to pick!
So far I have eaten lettuce, radishes, nasturtiums and bok choi. I have also picked several daisies, irises and roses. Pretty good harvest for only being the week after Memorial day!
I have to throw in a few more bean seeds so that there will be a staggered harvest. And I need to throw in some more lettuce and start spinach so we have greens all summer. So nice to know that my work in January, February and March is finally paying off!

Weekly update

So, not much change from last week. The beans are starting to come up under their cover, as are the squash and cukes (the cukes more slowly than the squash, I may have to try some newer seeds) The flowers and lettuce are filling in nicely. I am getting full size lettuce leaves now and have had enough for several salads. The irises have nearly finished blooming = ( need to feed and divide them so they bloom more next year! There is a bright red mini rose open and many more buds forming. My blast with water seems to have dissuaded the aphids for now.
In some ways luckily, we have had dry weather lately. This meant that even with 15 people tromping in and out all day Sunday for the Memorial day picnic, the grass has survived, or at least what of it we have. Come late summer I am really going to work to loosen up the bare spots and get seed in so that the whole yard has grass next year.
On an unhappy note, the mulberries have begun. DUH DUH DUNNNNNN I found the first green berry hiding amongst the lettuce in the back. I am trying to make the best of it by reminding myself that Amy and I are going to collect the little suckers and try to make them into wine or jelly. It still means a few weeks of picking up buckets and buckets of little purple berries EVERY DAY and dying my hands a nasty purple blue color. I guess I need to invest in some disposable or washable gloves.
Maybe next week the squash and cukes will make a big enough show to appear from the weekly update view.

Weekly update

It has been an eventful week. I have been waiting to plant cucumbers, squash, beans and snap peas until the alley and fence were repaired. After 3 long mornings of hard work, several scrapes and scratches, and plenty of sore muscles, work is complete. I am sure that any but the least competent mason would laugh at my concrete work, but at least all of the fence supports are standing vertically of their own free will. The backyard even feels a little larger since the fence is not leaning over 2 or so feet. This project also gave me a reason to clean up the alley. Since previously the alley has only collected junk, I figure it is high time to put it to productive use. To this end I have cleared out the junk and replaced it with the compost bin, a trash can to collect rain, 4 large storage totes with holes drilled in the bottom to be used as planters for lettuce, peas and beans, and a few flowers. Lettuce, peas and some beans bolt in the heat of the summer, hopefully, since they do not get as much sun back in the alley, they will bolt more slowly. The peas will also provide a lovely view out of the kitchen window as the grow up the trellis. I am still working out how to attach hanging baskets or the like to provide places for flowers at window height. It doesn't look like much right now, but it is certainly a huge improvement over what was there, and it provides more square footage for growing stuff!

In straightening the fence we were also able to clean out all the ivy and morning glories that had previously tried to take over the wall. I hadn't realized how much space that had been taking up. The wall looks much better without all the greenery. The top of the retaining wall also gives me more space for the bean trellis- more about that later- and closer to the side door, a ledge to fill with flower pots.

From the regular view you can see that the radishes are going nuts and the fence is standing straight and tall. After all of our work we had managed to compact all the nice fluffy dirt that I have worked so hard to get that way. So I had to spend half an hour turning all the dirt over in preparation for planting squash, cucumbers and beans. The weather is supposed to be chilly the next few days though so they all have been covered with milk jug cloches (for most people, fancy glass jar things used as mini greenhouses). The lettuce has gotten to picking size and the flowers that were planted last week are starting to take hold and put on buds. You can't see them, but the irises apparently are a little confused... I said they were called "flags" for Flag day, which is June 14. Apparently my flags wanted to fly for Memorial Day. Several of the bearded irises are blooming and I watched one of the Dutch irises slowly opened while we were working on the fence, giving me an opportunity to watch magic unfold.

Weekly update

A little late this week....

So, my lettuce and radishes are going nuts. I am just about due to pick my first salad! The apple trees have filled out nicely, though I only had a few blossoms, so I probably won't get apples again this year. I really have to feed them better next year.

I put in some cucumber and squash seeds in the back bed and the tiered part. More will go in after we fix the fence this weekend.

There are buds on the irises and the butterfly bush is filling out better than it has in the past 3 years. All that cutting back really paid off!

You will also notice a few extra plants in the front bed on the left and a few extra pots to the lower right. These are flowers from the library's fundraising sale. You will notice that there are no actual flowers on them. That is because before I put them in their permanent homes I picked of the lower set of leaves and any buds that were more than half formed. The bottom leaves are the oldest and often will touch the soil when the plant is put into its new home. Since having leaves touch the dirt is a good way to allow fungus climb up onto the plant. Taking off the buds helps the plant focus on producing its root system rather than producing flowers. Some people take all flower buds off, but I am too impatient to wait so long to get flowers back! I got 2 4.5" pots- a daisy, but not a white and yellow Shasta daisy that most people would think of, a yellow/orange with a purple/blue center. A white geranium with yellow veining. And market packs (cardboard trays that have 6 or so plants each) of impatients, begonias, stocks and petunias. I thought about making everything all color coordinated.... then I gave up and picked whatever looked pretty! Some of them had to have the quality of surviving heat and full sun because I intend to put a few out in front of the house that gets a lot of hot afternoon sun.

So now we are just waiting for the squash and cukes to come up, the peas to flower, and the fence to be fixed so I can put the rest of the cukes, squash, peas and beans in.

YAY!!! salad this week!

Weekly update

So Sunday is upon us again. This Sunday is much prettier than last week. It is almost too hot though. 85 in April!!! It is supposed to get back to seasonal temperatures on Tuesday or Wednesday (60s) so it shouldn't do too much damage to my delicate lettuce and peas.




As you can see in the picture, I have uncovered the shaded pea/ lettuce patch. The bed in the back I fear will get scalded in the sun though so it still has its shades on. The raddishes are going nuts as is the lettuce in the pots on the tiered area. Still not seeing much action from the carrots (in the front row of the left side bed) but there are a few sprouts there and I did read that carrots can be picky, so that especially cold snap may have caused their finikiness. What grass there is is about due for a trim. I am kind of sorry now that I have been pulling up crab grass for the past 3 summers. Had I left it I might have some green out there.


This spell of warm weather is further egging on my green thumb and I am valiantly monitoring the plants in their greenhouse so they will be all ready to go out in a few weeks.

Weekly update

The second installment, a bit late, but better late than never! April showers are certainly making their appearance this year. It feels like it has been rainy more than sunny. This weekend was one of the sunny times, so we enjoyed a fire. Of course the previous few days of rain meant that we are back to having mud instead of grass. And since it was raining again today, it is kind of dark and dreary.


Not much has changed though. The lettuce and peas are still hiding under their blankets. The peas are getting bigger, and the leaves are starting to come out. The apple trees do have a few more leaves. You might even be able to see the radishes peeking through in the bottom left corner.
It is starting to green up, despite what it looks like! The mismatched chairs and the old tarp on the chimnea really add to the decor!
Stay tuned for next week's installment!

Weekly update

I probably should have started this series of the ever changing garden earlier since I have already done some work in the garden, but better late than never! I am usually pretty careful about keeping track of how long certain plants take to sprout, when I put plants in the ground, what kind of pest problems I deal with, what and when I feed the plants, etc. But this year I intend to include pictures in that collection. Somehow I have gone 3 years and can only find a handful of pictures from those previous gardens. So now I intend each Sunday morning to take a picture of the garden's progress. This week I will also include a picture from an earlier year, and some from earlier this year. Let's watch the garden grow!2007
This is the second summer. Notice the grass... that didn't last long. It seems we enjoy parties too much, parties that involve 10 or 15 people sitting around the chimnea, and it seems that parties always happen a week after a rain storm that leaves a large quantity of mud behind. I'm working to remedy this. Zoisa grass sod is one possibility. It is sturdy, very thick, and has an incredibly hardy root system. Also, notice the color of the dirt. It is kind of pale! We won't even discuss the fence...

Late February
On to this year. The garden in February is always so sad looking. This is before I started anything for the season. My flower boxes were chilling on top of my tomato beds, the birdbath is still flipped to prevent water from freezing in it and cracking, and the border is looking a little mushad. The fence is fixed though!

March
This is also earlier this year. I appoligize for the screen, I didn't want to go outside and step in the 6" of snow that we got in the beginning of MARCH!! ah, that season known as ALMOST spring! One day it is 60 and beautiful, the next there are 6" of snow.

April 12.
Now for the current yard. I think I have found my vantage point for these pictures, the back bedroom, precariously balancing the screen open so I can take a good picture. You will notice the two row garden and the cold frame (which doesn't have much in it because we will have to fix the retaining wall behind it in a few weeks and I didn't want to have to be stepping over plants, and it doesn't fit in the other bed) The white are row covers. You can buy half-hoops to hold them off the baby plants, I'm cheap so used my triangular tomato cages laying on their sides, my baby lettuce and pea plants (which finally sprouted) are hiding under them right now, it is Easter Sunday, and supposed to get to 31 degrees tonight. I have also finally really organized the mass of pots in the corner. In previous years I have stacked bricks, boards, rocks, crates and buckets underneath of pots to make all of them accessible, this often resulted in a strange balancing act that always looked a little thrown together. Most of those things are still in use this year, I was just much more careful about how I stacked them and connected the piles of bricks with leftover boards so they created a true set of tiers. In successive years this may morph into a built in flower bed made from stone and concrete with a water fall and pond (yes, a pond even in my postage stamp!). If I keep this up, the whole garden may change into a series of tiered gardens, making it a severly divided form of square foot gardening. Tiers are great because you don't have to rely on the height of plants in order to be able to see and access all plants.

Maybe next week we'll be able to see all the baby lettuce and peas!