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!

Recession Garden?

I always perk up a little bit when I see mainstream media covering gardening news. I think in my heart, I still want to fit in on the playground, so it makes me feel better when I see that other folks are also starting to get back into gardening. So when I saw CNN covering the savings that a new gardener can expect from a new plot, I was heartened, and then disheartened. Disheartened because the article mentioned that not all new gardeners are going to save money because they simply don't know what to plant and when and how to do it for the cheapest possible.

So I thought I'd help with that a little. My favorite online places for gardening info and how to tips are rather varied, but there are a few that stand out.

GardenWeb Forums are fabulous for asking questions, searching for other questions, and generally gaining knowledge from a huge community of avid gardeners. It's like having a whole virtual neighborhood of gardeners at your fingertips.

National Gardening Association has tons of how to, getting started, find your zone, figure out what to plant when information. Not just food information either, there's lots of good info for the other parts of your yard here.

Vegetable Gardener is a new favorite for me. Timely posts, lots of how to tips, and all from people who have used all of those techniques in their own yards and gardens.

So are you planting your own Recession Garden this year? (Victory Garden? Vegetable Garden? Kitchen Garden? Just plain Garden?)