Brooklyn Horror

I have just a few ornamental plants in the garden for color, but this is one of my favorites.

It's a coleus called "Brooklyn Horror". I've got it in a hanging basket with some trailing petunias and Goldilocks.  The contrasting foliage colors look fantastic!

Beans are fun!

They take forever to come up, but boy are they fun to watch!  Their thick beanstalks and huge leaves, even as they are just coming up out of the ground are so amazing!

I read on a gardening website to expect 2,400 beans for every 1 1/2 square feet of planted bean rows.  I'm starting to think maybe it was a mistake to plant 60 bean plants....

Hope my friends, co-workers and neighbors won't mind taking some off my hands later this summer!

My pollinators are stupid

These honeybees can't get enough of the pictures of flowers on the bags of dirt! Won't touch the flowers 2 feet away.

Cantaloupe: Round 2

After the squirrel squishing of my last cantaloupe seedlings, I'm trying it again!

But a couple of days later, he's already chewed off the first set of leaves.  Doesn't seem to fancy the second set, though.  We'll see if this plant makes it!

Pea Shoots

Off to a late start due to a lack of planting space, the peas are now coming up in our new raised beds, built by my husband, Evan. Sauteed pea shoots are one of my favorite dishes at our local Chinese restaurant, but I'll resist eating them!

They send out delicate little tendrils that wave in the wind until they find something to grab onto.  

 I have to keep an eye on them daily, though, or they easily grab onto their neighbors instead of climbing the trelis.  Once they wrap themselves around another plant several times, there's no separating the two without hurting someone!

First harvest

Today we harvested our first crop!  Lettuce, cress, arugula and herbs which I mixed in with some peas, feta, olives, cucumber and avocado for lunch.  We dressed it with Sotiris's olive oil from Kalamata--grown in his own backyard!  It was so fresh, the leaves still tasted like plants--almost a little gamey--nothing like the salad we get from the store.  We were so excited to sit out in our garden enjoying its bounty!

Happy cucumber

After a couple of days coming home too late from work to check on the garden, I stepped out on Saturday to a gorgeous blooming cucumber!  The plant has 6 beautiful yellow blossoms and you can already see the tiny cucumbers forming at their bases.  The plant is still quite small, so I can't imagine how it will be able to bear the weight of the fruit unless it matures pretty quickly! 

Tomato seedlings are like kittens

Not realizing how successful my tomato seeds would be, I planted two whole packages of seeds. I figured less than half of them would come up, but ended up with a 99% success rate!  Now I have all these lovely little seedlings, but only room for 6 tomato plants in my garden.  I can't bear to throw away the plants that didn't make it into my planters, so I'm still caring for the extra seedlings until I can find good homes for them.  I feel like I have kittens to give away!  If you have a sunny spot on your patio or yard (and you live nearby) let me know!

Mouse melon fails to thrive

I was so excited about my mouse melon and special-ordered seeds from a garden catalog.  I sowed them indoors about 3 weeks ago, but only three of the 9 seeds I planted came up. 

These tiny seedlings are supposed to be ready to go out this week, but they look so delicate and fragile, I don't have the courage to put them out--especially not with a rogue squirrel about!

Strawberries

The squirrel got to most of the strawberries on the upper deck, but the Sequoias on the lower deck are doing pretty well considering they went through a pretty heavy windstorm last week and lost many of their leaves.  My husband tried his first homegrown strawberry this week and reported that it was the most delicious strawberry he had ever eaten. 

I'm happy to report that my special-ordered woodland strawberry (frais de bois), which spent the better part of last month on the brink of death, has finally decided it is happy enough to bloom!

I'm not expecting high yield from these guys this summer, but it would be nice to try one or two of the purportedly intense-flavored strawberries, which are hard to find even at specialty stores in this country.

Squirrel attack

Caught a squirrel red-handed this morning crushing my tiny cantaloupe seedling while munching on the petunias I planted in the container for color.  Upon inspecting other areas of the garden for further damage, I discovered that he had also snipped off nearly every strawberry on the upper deck and had made a mess of several containers.

This squirrel views any open patch of dirt as a sign that buried treasure lies just beneath.  Short of covering every container with a wire cage, I'm not sure what I can do to keep him out. He touches my tomatoes, though, and he's dead.

34 degrees and holding

May 8 and last night the temperature dropped down to 34 degrees!  Stupidly, I moved all my seedlings outside this past weekend thinking there would be no way we could have a cold snap this late in the season.  Fortunately, all of the plants came through with no sign of damage.

Minnesota Midget

I chose this bush-variety of cantaloupe in hopes that it would be small enough to grow in a container and without taking over my whole backyard.  It was very satisfying to grow from seed, springing up strong and tall in just a week.

I'll try transplanting a couple of them outside this week and see what they do.  Some cold weather coming, though, and I doubt they are frost tolerant.

Herbs

I tried to start my herbs indoors in March, thinking that I'd be able to transplant them outside when the warm weather arrived.  I use herbs in great quantities during the summer, and it would be great if I could snip them off as I need them instead of buying them from the store.  After two months, however, the ones I started indoors would really only work as micro-greens in a cooking application! 

No matter--I went to the store and bought mature plants instead.  I now have a great variety of herbs scattered across the garden.  I'm using them ornamentally--fitting them into just about every open little space in the garden.







Here are a few of my favorites:

Have you ever seen basil like this?  I'm not sure if the variety is "spicy globe" or "pistou" (I found it unlabeled at a garden store), but it has tiny fragrant leaves and grows in a tidy-looking globe shape.

Parsley. I use this almost nightly in my cooking.

A pansy peeking over a variegated sage.

You can never have too much dill.

Creeping thyme--a good ground cover, I hope this guy will fill in the spaces at the edges of my raised beds.