Garden and Wildlife

I have to say, I have been pretty pleased with our garden results so far this year. Definitely some things that I need to do different next year (like plant the carrots further apart so I don't have to thin them to the point where we only have 5 left. haha) But over all, for planting kind of willy-nilly, its been very successful.

I recently picked some peas:

Which Mon Amour shelled for me. It takes a surprising number of pea pods to get a decent number of peas. We have just learned that you can actually eat the pods as well, who knew. So perhaps we will try that next time cause otherwise I don't think that our plants will yield enough peas to satisfy anyone.

Our cherry tomato plant which lives on our porch is also doing great. Lots of green tomatoes and about 4 or 5 have turned red and been eaten so far.

And, on a sort of garden related note, I spotted this little creature in our front flower bed the other day. Isn't it cute? There is nothing to give it scale in the picture (sorry about that) but trust me, it was tiny.

And adorable.

How does the garden grow?

I am waaaay behind on posting. So much to post, so little time, so we are going to fly through the next bunch of posts...so you can expect two weeks of fairly brief, possibly picture heavy posts.

First, and update on the garden, in no particular order. (these pictures are probably a good 2 weeks old now....oops. haha).

Here is our raspberry plant.

It seems to have skipped the growing-in-size stage and gone right to making fruit. This seems odd to me, but we'll see how it turns out.


Our pepper plant.

We did not start this from a seed. So don't be impressed. So far, no flowers or peppers.


Our romaine:

Also not seed started. But it is growing well. Or rather 3 of the 4 plants are growing well, the 4th is just kind of staying the same size. I don't know why this is, so I tend to water it more than the other three, but it doesn't help. My only theory is that I am over compensating for is slow growth by watering it too much. Maybe I am drowning it.


This is brocoli, I think.

I have never grown broccoli and am excited to see if it turns out.

A tomato plant (not seed started)

Already blooming - yay!

Here is the garden as a whole.

The previous owners were intense gardeners which is why we have such a sweet garden area. I confess I did nothing with it last year. But being 7+ month pregnant during gardening season kind of killed my motivation. This year, I have no such excuse, hence, the plants.

Our pea plants:

These are growing like crazy! I am very excited about them.

We also have some bean plants (not growing much at all...weird) and some carrots (I failed and spacing the seeds properly, so we may end up with only 5 carrots once I finish thinning them out. Ooops. Oh well, its my first try at carrots).

Hopefully I will update again soon...since this update is already out of date :-)

Cherry Tomatoes

In some non-house news. Last week sometime, I planted a whole bunch of seeds (some of which I had bought, some were left at the house by the previous owners - random-house-buying-bonus).

The very first thing to come up was the cherry tomatoes. Which is fabulous cause they are one of the things I am most looking forward to!

Here is the little cherry tomato sprout. It is growing crazy-fast. No more than 4 hours before this photo was taken, there was nothing visible above the dirt. Honestly, nothing at all, I had checked.

Since they sprouted, they have been going at about the same rate. Perhaps I shall plant these outside this weekend...

Garden Success

Now that my garden is pretty dead looking, I figured I should blog about a gardening success, to counter my many gardening failures.

As I mentioned in a previous post, our watermelon plant produced 3 watermelons. One rotted on the vine. And one we cut one open way too early. So in order to prevent that happening again, we left the other one on the vine until the vine was literally dead. By that time we knew there was not much more growing that it could do. It was time to cut it open. So we picked it and brought it inside.

The outside looked nice.


We cut it open, and, tada!

Legitimate watermelon! Yay!

It was quite tasty, though really really seedy.

One good one after 2 spoiled ones is not too bad I suppose.

Caterpillar Problem

We have serious caterpillar problem.

I first noticed in when our last remaining sunflower plant looked like this:

I wasn't terribly sad. The sunflower was past its prime anyway.


But then we checked out watermelon and saw this:

They ate pretty much all the way though it. After our last watermelon failure, I was determined to get once decent watermelon out of the garden. Well, it won't be that one. We have one tiny one left. We shall see if it will survive and ripen before a frost hits.


Having eaten most of the yummy watermelon, the caterpillars have moved on to the tomatoes:

These tomatoes look like they come straight out of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Its almost cute. But mostly its just sad. *

*Note: Not all the tomatoes have been ruined. In fact I currently have more tomatoes than I know what to do with! Yay!

Crop Failures: Part 3

My third crop failure is due in equal parts to my own impatience the general difficulty of this crop. You see, watermelon, it seems, is very very difficult to pikc at the appropriate time.

Even the Farmer's Almanac admits that it is a guessing game. There are some signs, but really, who can really tell?

We can't apparently. We read all about the signs. Applied them to our watermelon and determined it was time to pick it....and share it with some friends.

Well, our friends hopefully got a good chuckle out of it - cause they sure didn't get any watermelon:

Still pink. And actually the picture gives it even more color than it actually has. Haha.
It smelled really good. And the pink parts weren't half bad.
But it definitely wasn't ripe.

We have one other significant watermelon on the vine. We are going to wait a LONG time before picking that one.

Then, I have been informed (2nd hand, though from a real legitimate watermelon farmer) that you can cut open the watermelon a little bit while still on the vine, and if it is not ripe - just duct tape it back together and let it keep growing. Sounds like a reasonable idea to me!

Crop Failures: Part 2

My second crop failure: Tomatoes.

How can you mess up tomatoes?
Well, in my defense, I don't think it was my fault and so far, only 1 of the 25 tomatoes on my plants has failed.

Look at it - it looks so nice.

Until you flip it over.

That's some kind of weird mold / rot that has attacked the bottom of the tomato.
At first I was optimistic - I would just cut it out. Tragically, the rot went ALL THE WAY THROUGH! Yikes. I didn't even want to touch it after that.

So I threw it away. Back to the store bought tomatoes I had on hand.

But, like I said, there are 25 ish tomatoes on my plants, just waiting to turn red. It is just a matter of time (hopefully) before we get a good one.

Crop Failures: Part 1

Let me preface this mini series with a perky disclaimer: I do not consider my garden to be a failure. I have had a delightful time planting it and watching it grow. I have no regrets. Nor am I depressed by my failures.

At the same time, however, I recognize that I am not a farmer. I just live on a far.
I have minimal gardening talents, and am still honing my gardening skills.

As a result, not everything went as planned in the garden. Like when the lettuce started sprouting flowers. Yeah, I didn't expect that. I kind of thought we would eat it all before that happened. But, we really didn't eat as much of it as I thought we would. But, ultimately I would consider this one to be a farming success because I gathered seeds from these flowers, and now I have seeds for next year. That's 20 less cents worth of seeds for the garden budget next year. haha


Anyway - down to business. My first gardening failure:
My Sunflowers

First the good news -
I didn't expect these to grow at all, but they did. Yay!
In fact, they got HUGE! That one really big one must be close to 18" across. Yikes!
They were really pretty looking
I got some sweet pictures out of these flowers.

Now the bad news -
I was hoping to collect some seeds from these sweet flowers. I read a few websites about when and how to dry and harvest sunflower seeds. I was totally prepped. On the day that I cleared out the garden I cut the flowers off like I was supposed to. And while I was preparing to hang them somewhere to dry, I noticed they looked kind of funny. Kind of not like sunflower seeds. Perhaps I just do not know what they should have looked like - I haven't seen a genuine sunflower close up in a long time. Then I noticed that one of them had bugs in it. Like all over the place in it. And another one had weird rotting brown spots on the back.

So, in summary, I have no idea if I could actually succeed in drying these and getting seeds out of them. But the bugs and the rot and the all around heaviness of the flower heads, has led me to the decision to not bother trying.

Thanks for a lovely summer, Sunflowers, but its dumpster time.

Clearing Out

This weekend, I decided it was time to clear out some of the stuff in the garden that was past its prime. This is what it looked like beforehand:

Mostly what needed to go were the large, drooping sunflowers, and the lettuce which I had let go so long had started blooming.

So, armed with a pair of these:

aka the rusty-est, most antiquated garden clippers you have ever seen, that my landlady very benevolently let me borrow after showing me her favorite pair of to-die-for garden clippers (not pictured)

They did the trick - and after removing this large pile of plant-ness...

This is what the garden looks like now:

You can actually see our watermelon!
What's left?
Well, the wildflowers are still going to town.
We have a few more sunflowers.
We have a huge watermelon plant currently growing 2 watermelons
A teeny tiny cucumber plant with lots of flowers (its so small, but it is trying very hard to produce a good crop)
And 10 tomato plants, which at last count, had about 25 green tomatoes on them. One day they will actually turn red.
Oh, and some basil and some oregano. They are still going strong.

First Fruits

Things are starting to bloom like crazy in the garden. Looks like we will actually get some yummy food out of it - yay!

My many tomato plants are going to town!

But I kind of expected that.



However, pessimist that I be, I did not expect this:

Its a watermelon. And its about the size of a golf ball so far.
I have never grown watermelon before, which for some reason I assumed meant that they were difficult to grow. But it turns out they are not.

There's actually a bunch of these little fellas. One slightly larger one is hiding under the sunflowers.

And a whole bunch of itsy bitsy tiny ones are just beginning to sprout. You can see the little flowers giving way to the tiny bead-sized watermelons.

Won't be long before we will actually be eating some of this stuff!

Bee Naps

This still boggles my mind...

Can you see them all around the edge in this picture? There is an almost complete circle of bees around the edge of this flower.

See?

They stick their heads into the plan and just sit there. Napping I assumed. Kind of like the flies, and the cows, and everything else around here that naps.

I have always known bees sleep in flowers. But I still find it most fascinating.

Here is a little video of the ones who aren't sleepy yet.

Blooming

It didn't take long to go from this....

....to this.


And now the bees have a fun place to sleep.

Garden: About to Burst

Our garden is looking much betterI've gotten out most of the weeds, and have put in a few new plants. Currently we have some wildflowers, some basil, some thyme, some lettuce, a tomato plant and a watermelon plant.

Oh, and those huge things - those are sunflowers. Right now they are huge. I can't wait until they burst forth with flowers.

Here is the sunflower....about to burst!

Weeds

Before leaving for vacation, I knew that I would need to prep the garden so that it would not completely go to waster while I was away (weeds grow ridiculously fast around these parts).

So the weekend before we left, I recruited the help of a friend, and we pulled up a lot of weeds.

My friend was a very enthusiastic weed puller. She was hugely helpful!

When all was said and done, the garden looked fabulous.

No weeds, a few cute lettuce sprouts, the beginnings of some sunflower plants, and even some mulch around the most troublesome edges. Beautiful.


We came home to this:

This kind of garden prompts questions like "Why are you growing sunflowers and lettuce in the middle of your lawn?"
Good question.
The simple answer: a vacation, pure laziness and some very hardy grass/lettuce/sunflowers.

I have weeded since we got back, but I fear there is much more work to be done if I actually want to harvest anything significant this year.

Two ways to garden

I have recently learned, that there are two ways to garden.

There is the traditional, hard work, shovel method which is used by most every-day kind of vegetable gardeners.

In this method, you spend a couple hours, working incredibly hard, developing a few minor blisters, and ultimately you have turned over a tiny patch of still clumpy dirt.



Or, the new method which have just learned, is the Legitimate Farming Method. In which the farmer backs a huge tractor up next to your house, lowers his massive tiller-tractor-attachment, and in less than 30 seconds, and without breaking a sweat, you have this:



A beautiful, decent sized patch of fresh turned up dirt, ready for planting vegetables in.
Yay!


Sorry for the absence of a picture of the tractor....seeing as how there were real farmers around (i.e the one driving the tractor, and his wife who was supervising the operation) I didn't really want to reveal my true city-girl-tourist-in-awe-of-farm-ways nature by running inside and grabbing my camera. That would have been embarrassing. And besides, there wasn't time, it all happened so fast.

In summary, I highly recommend using the Legitimate Farming Method whenever possible.

If only I had been allowed to use the Legitimate Farming Method for my other yard work, like pruning and mulching...
but more on that later.