Category Archives: Garden

My garden grew like mad while we were out of town. When we left, the lettuces were just getting big enough to start eating. Two weeks later, the front garden has a thick carpet of lettuce that’s shading out all the weeds that were sprouting in that area. Something in the mesclun mix is bolting, so we’ve been eating a lot of it. *google* That would be the mizuna mustard. The arugula also looks close to flowering so we’ve been eating that too.

The fennel and dill have sprouted. They were slower than everything else, but now they’re everywhere. Though the ones in pots are fighting against the squirrels who keep digging. My plan was to plant some for me and some for the swallowtail caterpillars, so I hope the squirrels leave enough.

One of the red tomato plants has flowers already. And volunteer tomatoes are sprouting everywhere, from last year’s heirlooms I assume. I’m letting some live, though I doubt they’ll grow fast enough to make tomatoes. I need to rethink my compost strategy, since it apparently needs to rot longer and hotter to kill seeds. I’ve got a few volunteer squashes too. 

My daffodils are blooming, the bright yellow ones I planted last fall by the driveway and the pale ones by the hawthorn tree. Last fall I planted a bunch of blue bulbs by the hawthorn. Only a few of them came back this year. 

Tulips are getting ready to bloom, and the hostas are sending up green spikes that need to be caged in chicken wire before the rabbits find them.

On to vegetables. Everything is planted, though it’s early. Two weeks ago I put in peas, spinach, beets, mixed lettuces, fennel, and dill seeds. Everything’s up except the spinach and the peas in front (different kind of peas than in back, and of course I don’t remember which are which), and it looks like the fennel and dill didn’t sprout. But the whole garden is covered in little tiny green things that are probably weeds, so it’s hard to tell. My rhubarb is up, too. This year we get to eat a little bit of it.

Last week someone at work was selling tomato seedlings, and then when I went to buy pots to put them in, the store had their plants in…so now I’ve got orange and red bell peppers, Anaheim peppers, two different types of eggplant, and 5 different tomatoes – two small red types, a lemon drop (yellow), a black krim, and a green zebra. I like the names. I hope they’ll do better than last year’s tomatoes. I’ve put them all in pots on the opposite end of the yard from the vegetable bed, where I think there might be a little bit more sun.

In May I’ll investigate the state of the spinach, dill, and fennel and replant.

See what happens to you if you eat my crocuses?

Ok, actually I found it when I was raking out the front vegetable bed. Hoping it’ll work as a deterrent, I put it on the boulder next to my bulb garden, where the little devils left my crocus stems after their lunch.

My bulbs are sprouting, little green spikes that will be daffodils, lilies, and tulips soon. The less said about the crocuses the better; apparently they are a squirrel delicacy. I’ve put chicken wire back over the remaining bulbs.

I want to plant my vegetable garden. I planned it out yesterday. There’s a heavy emphasis on beets, since they did well last year, and on lettuce and spinach. I’m going to try chard again once it gets too hot for the spinach; with luck I’ll get more than one plant this year. And I might set aside some beets for roots, since maybe the reason mine didn’t make roots last year was that I kept eating their leaves. Greens seemed to be pretty happy in the back last year, despite all the shade.

I’m going to try eggplant for the third time, in a third location. It doesn’t seem to be a big fan of lack of sun.

There will be extra fennel for the swallowtail caterpillars, since I feel bad picking them off, but I would also like to eat fennel myself.

I have one small parsley that survived the winter. Both my chive plants have resprouted, which impresses me since they were in pots, not in the ground. I’ve seen no sign of my rhubarb yet, though, which worries me.

Now it just has to stop raining for long enough for the dirt to dry out a bit, and then I can dig in the compost and start planting.

I was starting to feel itchy about not having dirt to play in, wanting to see something green and growing instead of all this snow.

So, houseplants. It’s been a week and I haven’t killed them yet. I tend to overwater (not pictured is a very sad spider plant I brought home from work) so this time I’m aiming for something closer to neglect. I also got a pothos and a snake plant for work to keep my mystery plant company; they’re growing in our stairwells and (interior) breakrooms so I thought they’d be good in my windowless office. At home, these guys are in front of the north window.

And ok, one of them is not green, but it’s striped and looks very cool. I’m looking forward to it and the pothos making vines to dangle in front of the books.

I picked parsley and the tiny volunteer chard this morning, digging them out from under the snow. Unless the parsley keeps growing, the garden is now entirely done for the season.

Better late than never was also the motto of the Nebraska wedding tomato I bought from someone at work. After barely growing all summer, it took off like mad in September and produced lots of green tomatoes that never had a chance to get ripe. Good job, plant.

When that plant started growing, it sprawled over the eggplant that didn’t do anything. I thought the eggplant had died until I took the tomato out. But it was still there, with its three leaves, wishing it had more sun.

Hot peppers, unlike eggplant and tomatoes, love me and want to show me how much by showering me with hundreds of peppers. We passed some on to neighbors and coworkers and still have huge bags in the freezer.

Did I ever post about the fennel? I kept picking big green, black, and yellow caterpillars off of it. Then I looked them up, discovered they were black swallowtails, and let them have the fennel. So pretty.

This fall (late Aug? Early Sept? This is why I’m supposed to update more often.), I planted more kale, cabbage, and beets. Most of them sprouted and then were dug up by squirrels. But the volunteer chard kept growing – it even came back after being chomped to the ground by a rabbit. That’s the plant I picked today. It’ll go in the turkey soup.

Next year:
* Plant beets again in back, because they grew well and made good greens, if not roots.
* Plant spinach in back (Ferry-Morse Teton hybrid did well).
* No green beans in back. Three beans a year isn’t worth it. Try them in the front again, also zucchini, even though neither sprouted there at all this year.
* We get to eat a little bit of the rhubarb I planted this year.
* Put in another rhubarb.
* Consider walking onions.
* See if the parsley comes back and if not, plant more.
* Try a fall garden again with extra squirrel deterrents.
* Put the tomatoes in pots by the driveway, there’s a bit more sun there.
* Put mint in the front flowerbed and encourage it to take over.
* Plant leafy fennel with the tomatoes to attract caterpillar-eating wasps (and black swallowtails), and plant some bulb fennel to eat.
* Try eggplant again (third time’s the charm?) over with the tomatoes.
* Moving the tomatoes will free up space in the front garden for native wildflowers and more bell peppers
* Only one hot pepper plant. Sorry, J.

The red fig heirloom tomato has two tiny green tomatoes on it, finally. Neither of the other two heirloom plants has flowered, and they’re all still pretty small, but I remain hopeful. The non-heirloom tomato is producing like mad. I see BLTs in the near future.

The hot peppers are doing well, too. I wish I liked them better since they seem to like me so much. We’ve got jalapenos, habeneros, and a plant that was labeled Thai pepper on which the peppers grow upright rather than hanging. My husband chopped some (jalapenos, I think) up for hot pepper oil this evening.

In the (shady) backyard, only two green beans came up, and the second batch of snow peas is growing slowly. The zucchini plants look fabulous, but they looked great last year too and didn’t give me any zucchini. (The green beans and zucchini I planted in the front garden, where there is plenty of sun, didn’t sprout. Weird.) The leeks continue their glacial journey towards leekdom. Only ten or so beets are left; the ones we’ve eaten have been tiny, but I’ve learned that I like beet greens.

I’ve become convinced that what we thought was a crabapple tree is an apple tree; they’re getting red blotches and I made a tasty cobbler with a bunch of fallen ones. They thump onto our new roof with alarming regularity.

In other news, I think I’ve worked out the major plot issues in the book I’m going to start writing next week. Maybe I won’t hit a point during the writing where I flail madly (ha!).

Last weekend I pulled all the onions and snow peas out of the back and planted more snow peas, plus green beans, zucchini, chard, and bok choy. The latter four also got planted in the front, since I wanted to use up all the seeds and they’ll probably appreciate having sunlight. Last year, the zucchini and green beans did not like the back yard, and the chard and bok choy died (or got eaten) soon after sprouting. Better luck this year.

The chard I planted a few weeks ago mostly didn’t sprout, and the patch that did doesn’t look very good. Hang in there, chard!

The three heirloom tomato plants are growing slowly; the one from Lowe’s is turning into a green-tomato-filled jungle. I’ve started picking jalapenos and will grab the first habanero soon; the jalapenos aren’t hot yet and the habanero probably won’t be either. The Thai pepper and the orange bell have flowers; the green bell also has a pepper or two.

We’ve also picked up a couple green apples (obvs. very small, given the comparison with the jalapenos):

Either they’re unusually tasty crabapples, or they’re some kind of non-crab apples (though still sour, see “green”). Either way, I’m not sure why the squirrels haven’t eaten them all like they did last year. Must be too busy digging up my chard seeds.

The garden has been doing much better this year than last year, even the things like lettuce where I just used last year’s seeds. There have been some problems: the rosemary died, and three tiny pepper plants got uprooted, but we’ve been eating a lot of salad greens.

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The back garden is very green:

That’s 5/18, 4/26, 4/8, and 3/20 (planting day). Look at all that lovely spinach!
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