Anticipation Is a New Vegetable

Having never grown Kohlrabi before, I have been carefully watching its habits. 9 to a square for the square foot method seems to be adequate so far. And can you see it, there among the leaves?


The beginnings of a bulb of Kohlrabi!

I have no idea what it will taste like or how much longer before I'll be able to find out, but it is eating me up with anticipation (no pun intended). What a strange little alien looking plant.

Magic Peas

Planted on St. Patrick's day, I've been impatient for peas. in the past few days I have been rewarded with lovely white flowers that look like ladies in white bonnets glancing shyly over their shoulders. I can just imagine how pleased they must be to see a gentleman bee come a courtin'.

In the evening, when the light hits a pea pod in just the right way, it glows. I shall always think of peas as being magic because of this beautiful trick of the light.

Square Foot Salad

Salad lettuces, spinach interspersed, chard, kale, collards, peas, carrots, kohlrabi (never tried this before, I'm SO excited!), nasturtiums, a few beets, even some red cups full of slug bait! My favorite is a mixed green salad fresh from this bed with a little vinegar and olive oil, it just tastes like spring.

Cool season crops seem to grow so fast, this is only a week later!

Kohlrabi, Ruby Chard and Spinach

Tasty Lettuces and Nasturtiums

Frugal Cutworm Collars

You loving raise plants from seed. Or you buy them at a healthy stage from a nursery and bring them home and lovingly plant them. Either way, they are your little vegetative babies. So imagine your surprise when one morning you go out to survey your growing yummy goodness and you see one of your little darlings cut down! Chomped down is more like it. Cutworms are nasty little buggers that seem to delight in cutting down healthy little seedlings before their stems are thick and strong. They delight in making a meal not out of the leaves and flowers, just the stem. Just cutting down the whole plant. If you find such damage in your garden, pull away the first half inch or so of mulch and dirt in a 3 to 6 inch radius around your casualty. You'll probably find the culprit, snoozing off his stem feast. Squash him, otherwise you'll have another casualty the next morning.

To combat cutworms before they start their lumberjack ways, I use cutworm collars. Some folks like to use yogurt cups and cut the bottoms off to make a ring of plastic protection around the plants, others buy the fancy ones from garden supply stores. I've had good luck so far with something a little more prevalent and a little more lazy. I present the humble toilet paper roll.


I know what you're thinking: it looks awfully ghetto. However, I don't have to cut the bottom off of anything, I simply gently ease the roll around the seedling and press it into the soil about an inch. The beauty in my mind is that the rolls can be composted once they've served their cutworm protecting purpose. And I figure I KNOW I'll use, er, the other stuff that comes on a roll, so after saving them up all winter long, I have an abundant supply.

Raised Beds Revealed!

Ba bu bu BUM!!!! All of my cowboy's hard work is now planted!
Aren't they lovely?


The wood ones are last season's handiwork. The Trex ones are this season's addition to our garden space. All finished, filled with topsoil, mulched, planted, and trellised. He is such a dear, the only parts I had to be responsible for were the mulching and planting. We put up the U-posts and netting together, which made the whole process go much more smoothly.

Wildflower Alley

Wildflower Alley Update from this past week.

Daisy's and Wallflower (at least I'm pretty sure that the orange is wallflower)


Blue Flax is the feathery blue in the foreground. Can you imagine that in ancient times people made linen out of that? I sincerely hope it grows larger in Mesopotamia! The pink and red are (I think) Sweet William.


Dame's Rocket is just stunning, especially with the orange wallflowers underneath. I secretly love it when folks drive around the corner and slow down to see these flowers.

I've actually had a love affair with Dame's Rocket for a few years and never knew it. This lovely showy flower grows wild next to a creek along my drive to work. Every spring for the past 3 years, I've driven by them and thought "one of these days I should figure out what those are so I can plant them in my garden." I was absolutely thrilled when they started shooting up this spring!

Bean Monsters

These little guys are so much fun. One day you've got a nice, quiet bed of mulch.
The next, you've got little mounds of mulch that looks like small underground monsters pushing up from the depths.

And then you've got beans!

If you're away for more than a few days, you miss all the action. I love how violently they emerge from the earth. Break free, little beans, break free!

Blackberry Winter = FROST!

Seriously!? Frost is in the forecast? What kind of crazy spring is this? So much for Mother's day being our last day of frost in this part of VA. To deal with this blackberry winter (that's what my grandmother always called it when we got a late cold snap while the blackberries are blooming), I've covered my little seedlings in the garden with newspaper. They're calling for frost again tonight, so I'll take pictures of my little hobo garden. One or two sheets of newspaper lightly draped directly over the plants is enough to protect them for just a night. If we were going to have long term (a week or more) cold, I might invest in some floating row covers, but for just a night or two, I can get away with newspaper.

Garden frost protection falls into two categories: those that can be left on during the day and those that need to be removed. And those categories change as the daytime temperatures rise.
Those that can be left on include:

• Milk cartons with their bottoms cut off and their lids left off. This is great for a few prized tender plants in the garden (Basil, Eggplant, Peppers to name a few). But if your daytime temps are going to be above about 70, you should remove these to keep your plants from baking.
• Floating Row Covers. Some folks leave these on their crops all summer to prevent pest damage too.
• Water Walls. These little guys go around each individual plant and can stay there all season if you wish, but most folks remove them. The cheap way to do this is to fill multiple water bottles and surround the plant with them. Again, only cheap if you've just got a few plants. I've got 24 peppers and 38 tomatoes.... not an option for me.
  

Those that need to be removed: Basically anything that can cover the plant and keep the frost from forming directly on the leaves but that won't allow sun and air to the plant for days on end.

• Bed sheets - cover a lot of space quickly
• Newspaper
• Pots turned upside down over your plants
• Straw or other loose mulch

With any luck, these cold nights won't last long and my little plants will be just fine with a little protection.

Planting day!

Mother's day weekend turned into the garden weekend to beat all garden weekends. I planted in two days all of the following (a star means it's near a trellis for future support):

Tomatoes - 38 Total
7 Cherry:

• 1 Blondkopfchen* (Little Blond Girl)
• 2 Black Cherry*
• 1 Camp Joy*
• 1 Hawaiian Currant*
• 1 Gardener's Delight*
• 1 Ghost Cherry*

17 Paste

• 6 Roma
• 11 Early Annie (odd number, I know, but I sold more plants than I intended

14 Slicing

• 3 Mr. Stripey*
• 4 Mexico*
• 3 Cherokee Purple*
• 1 Brandywine*
• 3 Eva Purple Ball*

Lots of Beans

• October Beans (for beans and greens and cornbread, quite possibly the most perfect comfort food ever!) - 8 square feet
• Bush Beans - Early Contender - 8 square feet
• Pole Beans* - Kentucky Wonder - 10 linear feet, about perfect for fresh eating and some sharing
• Soybeans - Beer Friend (for edamame) - 18 seeds - these will be succession planted over then next 8 weeks so that we can have a tasty treat every few weeks this summer.

Squashes a plenty

• Cucumbers* - Burpless and White Pearl - 8 seeds - this will give us enough to share!
• Yellow Crookneck Squash* - 3
• Spaghetti Squash* - 3
• Pumpkin Lumina - 3 (I know, I'll kick myself later for not trellising these)
• Zuchinni - 2

Eggplant - Black Beauty - 2

And 24 Peppers

• 5 Jalepeno
• 5 Banana
• 7 Sweet Bell
• 7 Garden Salsa

I also replanted some volunteer Cilantro, a pot bound Thyme, and some hostas that a friend gave me. Oh, and Marigolds everywhere. Oh, and some sweet alyssium for a pop of color. Oh, and zinnias for more color. Oh, and the alpine strawberries that I started from seed. (I think that's everything.)

In the Front Yard, I also planted 80 Gladiolus, several handfulls of zinnia seeds near the house, and I made a little zinnia patch near some mailboxes that aren't ours.

Quite an exhausting weekend! Pictures of all of these will follow in the coming days. For now, my poor hands are a little chapped from playing in the dirt (I try to remember gloves, really I do.) And my hamstrings are definitely feeling toned after all of that squatting and standing! Gardening is my favorite work out.

Herb Garden

My cowboy has been hard at work!


It has been my dream since we moved in 2007 to have an herb garden close to the kitchen door. Here it is, less than 10 steps from the door in a small sunny spot that gets full sun about 7 hours a day! The old barn beams were sealed with a non-toxic bug proofer last fall and they've been sitting, weathering, waiting for warmer spring days and a thawed out ground. I love that the beams are large enough to sit on while harvesting seasonings, and that they will make such a lovely backdrop for all manner of leafy yummy goodness. He dug down to make sure that there was enough dirt around the beams to keep the bed in place and used a gargantuan drill bit to drill holes for rebar to further reinforce the beds. And now it is my job to plant it full of herbs! YAY!

Cheerfulness Under the Tree

My all time favorite bulb, cheerfulness.


I love the way it looks, smells, waves in the wind, everything about it! Really, this little flower reminds me of a spring break trip I took in high school to England (the one and only time I've been across the pond, so to speak). A friend and I were roaming the streets and stopped at a flower vendor. A lovely lady with a thick English accent told us that they all grew on her farm a few miles out of town and my friend and I just couldn't resist a 3 pound piece of English countryside. She chose red tulips and I chose cheerfulness. So here they are, my planted memory. I love the fact that the tulips and cheerfulness came up at the same time! What memories have you planted in your garden?

Damping Off!

The plague of every start from seed gardener has finally hit me. I've started seeds for 3 years now and never had this problem before, but this year, I've lost most of my lavender, thyme, and alpine strawberries to this awful fungus condition! Brought about by top water, not enough air movement, and slightly too cold temperatures in the basement. Damping off (insert link) is not just my problem, but washing seed trays (or egg cartons in my case) in hot soapy water every spring will help stave it off, as will consistent bottom watering instead of top watering with a mister. Now I've learned my lesson. Anyone else have this problem this cold spring?

Raised Beds

My cowboy has been hard at work!

I love craigslist! I found some Trex boards there last fall for less than half price from a fellow about 15 minutes away that had overbought for his porch. And now my hardworking cowboy has made them into more raised beds! For these, he is determined that they will be level, so the process is methodical and steady (just like my man). Check back after the rain stops for the unveiling of the raised beds so far!

Wildflower Alley

One of the first things we did in the Maple Tree Garden was kill grass. There's a section of right of way that has an awful hill to mow and it's outside the fence and right next to a road. So grass there is pretty much pointless. So we killed it, tilled it, and planted wildflowers. I think our neighbors thought we were nuts.... until they saw this


We had folks slowing down to look at the flowers, which is a really good thing because it's kind of a blind corner and lots of kids walk back there. We even had a few people come up to the front door and knock to tell us how pretty the flowers were. And this spring we were out there pulling up baby maple trees (story of my gardening life) and folks were stopping to ask if the flowers were coming back.

It looked a little hopeless and weedy in mid March

And then a little better in Early April

Mid April was filling in.

End of April it is looking much more like a flower garden.

The evolution of the wildflowers is so neat to me. I love how last year there were so many annuals (I'm actually going to reseed annuals this year. American Meadows has great seeds!) and this year the perennials are starting to show their combinations. If the rain will ever stop, I'd love to post another wildflower alley update, it has changed even more from that photo! Now doesn't that look better than grass?