A Case for compost

Last spring I emptied my composter into my freshly-designed rock garden. After two years of adding grass, leaves & food waste and one year of stewing, I only got a few handfuls of compost. Guess which side got the compost?

I dumped topsoil on top of the compost and on the right side. I planted the impatiens in May and this is what I have five months later--a beautiful, but lopsided, annual bed of flowers.

Unfortunately, I will now have to wait another year or two for this summer's batch of compost to stew. Perhaps I'll have award-winning tomatoes next year.

Autumn

Although it is not officially autumn, the season changes for me as soon as the Girl goes back to school. It's been raining for two days and I am absolutely not inspired to do any sort of garden work at all, although I have all sorts of plans:

a) pick the last tomatoes

b) transplant (ugly) hostas from the sunny front of the house to the shady back garden.

c) transplant lilies from the shade to the sun

d) pick the two ripe blackberries

e) start a cherry tree in a pot. This is my daughter's idea. She thinks we will actually get cherries some day. Oh, the optimism--it's not catchy just yet.

f) get a full time job so that I can hire someone else to take care of my yard. I like mowing, really, I do. Sort of. When the weather is just right and the grass is dry and I have no other plans.

These are not necessarily going to get done. If it rains for two days on ripe tomatoes, will they rot? I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure they won't get any riper.

Berries--or not

I had beautiful green berries on my blueberry bushes on day & the next day -- nothing! Who eats green berries??? I put netting around the blackberry bush. I also put some rodent repellant. I hope that works.
Rain would probably improve my garden. My father has been getting broccoli since the end of June, I think. I got nothin'.
I would like to laud the benefits of compost, however. I have one of those tumblers, which, if you want compost, you have to stop using and let it sit for a year. I put it in the rock bed before I put the topsoil. I didn't have enough for the whole bed, but the flowers that were planted over the compost are much fuller than the flowers that just had topsoil. Compost for all!!

damn critters....

Years ago, I used to make fun of my grandfather (but never to his face. He was not that sort of man) because he put nets all over his berry bushes. I figured that how many could they take? There's always enough to share.

But when I have just invested lots of money on berry bushes, I want to protect my harvest....so I took extra netting from my father's house and wrapped up my bushes. Either the critters will consider it a challenge and eat the rest of them (and get a belly ache b/c they aren't even blue yet) or I will wake up tomorrow to find trapped birds and chipmunks.

On the plus side, I already ate three cherry tomatoes.

ARGH!!!!

Fantastic detailed post about my garden and the stupid blogger/computer made it go away without posting. Frustrated!!!! May possibly take it out on various inanimate objects later.

yucky yellow leaves

It was fated to happen. Thing were going too well: little buds on the flowers, green berries ripening slowly, green tomatoes.....now my cherry tomato plant's leaves are turning yellow with brown spots. My father (who does have a green thumb) said, "It's nothing, just pull the leaves off, unless they have any bit of green at all, then leave them on."
Yeah, but they eventually have turned yellow as well. From what I remember about botany, the plants need their leaves to collect the nutrition from the sun. Pulling off the leaves would be like pulling off my hair or something.

I mowed the lawn yesterday. Normally this is not a problem, but I think I knocked the blade down (I don't know how, but I heard a clunk when I was putting it away on Monday) and I cut the grass too short so now it's turning brown. I thought the grass was one thing I could grow....(my husband seems to think the grass was turning brown anyway and it has nothing to do with my crew cut.)

tiny tomatoes

See what benign neglect can do? First, it makes me forget I even have a blog about gardening; second, the next time I look, I see the beginnings of my harvest.
I have two very small green cherry tomatoes
I have buds for future tomatoes (both cherry-size & regular)
I have green blueberries--lots of them.
I have buds for sugar snap peas.
We ate lettuce from the garden this weekend.
How's that for a black thumb?

Waiting.....

So I think this is why I don't really do well at gardening. So much time is spent waiting for things to grow. And while I'm waiting, I can weed out all the stuff I don't want to grow. Why is it so easy to grow weeds and so difficult to grow thyme?

On the bright side, I am seeing real blueberries on the blueberry bushes. Granted, they are still green and many of them have died before becoming berries, but it's encouraging. However, I haven't seen any blackberries. That would be a big disappointment to my daughter--if we didn't get blackberries.

Maybe I should have set up sun monitors before I planted things. Apparently impatiens don't like sun, but their bed gets a lot more sun than I thought. And the tomatoes--which I thought I planted in a very sunny spot--are getting a lot less than expected. So far I've only see 2 little buds on the cherry tomato plant.

Still...the waiting....

rain

After 6 days of rain, it finally stopped in the late afternoon of Friday. We actually saw sun at sunset. It was a little strange. My husband was in a rush to cut the grass when he got home from work, although my daughter wanted to impress him with the dinner she'd made. (It was still good, but he ate it cold.)

On Saturday, I checked on things, but they all seemed okay. I transplanted my Mother's Day begonia, but didn't water it because more rain was predicted. It didn't rain. At all. After the six days of rain, I didn't water anything because I figured that every thing is pretty much saturated. It didn't rain on Sunday either, although the ground was wet when I woke up.

My husband thinks the grass seed we planted is actually coming up after the two days of no rain, but I think he's deluding himself. That grass seed is so wet, it's probably moldy and attracting--whatever it is that mold attracts.

My father dropped off a few tomato plants. I didn't transplant them to my beautiful raised beds yet because ... because I don't know why but I just figure I shouldn't due to my bad luck with plants.

My neighbors still haven't mowed. With their 18" grass and dandelion-infested lawn, why do I bother to pull mine up? Hope and eternal optimism, despite the black thumb (and the fact that digging holes is something I can actually do).

Flowers

On Saturday, after moving the rest of the dirt to the bare patches in the lawn and seeding them with grass seed, we went to my daughter's school's lawn party. After watching her run through the jumpy house obstacle course 500 times (at least we bought the unlimited all-day pass), I bought some impatiens from the PTO to plant in my stone-walled bed.
They seemed really small (well, yeah, they're seedlings), so I bought 36 plants. (I'm trying to figure out just how many. .... do the math, 6 for $2. I spent $16---okay, I bought 48 plants). But, of course, you have to plant them 9" apart, therefore, I ended up with a bunch of extras. So I planted over the basil and the aster seeds that I had just planted on Friday. It's just more satisfying to see plants then wait for things to pop up.
I figured I can plant more basil & aster seeds elsewhere. But I can't because I spilled all the seeds on the way to the vegetable raised beds. Sigh.
Anyway, for the extra impatiens, I dug out some of the mulch in the front of the house (I don't think there is actually any dirt under there--I dug pretty deep and found no dirt, just mulch. It hasn't been mulched since we moved in three years ago, so, apparently mulch does not compost into dirt very quickly. Good to know).
Then--to the consternation of my husband--I started another project by digging out the grass around the the mailbox (disturbing a well-established ant hill, unfortunately) and planting the remainder of the impatiens.
However, I could have saved the trouble because my father came by 30 minutes later and would have been happy to take them off my hands. I should have saved some for him b/c he did bring me leftover lasagne from a wedding shower held at my parents' house that I probably should have attended but didn't really want to.
Since that planting spree, we've had four days of rain. I'm afraid to look because I suspect all the grass seed has washed away. Sun--just a day--would make such a difference to my mood and that of my plants!

A little bit about dirt

Dirt is heavy.
After I built the first raised bed and the stone garden, I went to a nursery to ask about dirt. I gave the dimensions and was told that I could spend $150 on bags or I could get a yard delivered for $70. (The bags totaled about half a yard). I didn't need that much, so I said no. I had to figure out what to do with the extra dirt. I built the second raised bed.
Today we had a yard of dirt delivered. It looked really small at first, but then I started moving it and the pile didn't really get any smaller. But the wheel barrow just kept getting heavier and heavier.
I kept knocking over parts of my beautiful stone wall, dumping the dirt. But it's better now.
I planted a few seeds. I transplanted a couple of seedlings. I like seedlings. They make me feel as if something is actually growing, although I really had nothing to do with it.
The best part of the yard right now is the lilacs are just about in bloom. I definitely had nothing to do with them. They bloom despite me and my black thumb--I call it benign neglect. Once everything is in that I want to be in, that's how I keep it going--or kill it.

Berries

Trying my hand at berries this year. I spent a lot of money on blueberry and black berry bushes. And you can't buy just one--blueberries need at least 2, preferably 3 different varieties to thrive and produce good berries. Although my favorites are wild blueberries, apparently you cannot actually buy wild blueberry bushes.

I wonder if I could transplant some.....but once you put them in your yard, do they become tame?

I dug a lot of holes this weekend. Rocks, rocks, rocks!!!!

A Floral Mystery

I was walking by my house yesterday and a flash of color caught my eye. I (we) have a tulip that I've never seen before. As black as my thumb is, I do know that tulips don't just appear from accidentally dropped pollen--someone has to plant a bulb. I don't recall planting a tulip bulb. We've lived here almost three years and I have never seen a tulip over there before.

Yes, it is on the side of the house I don't look at much (it's the north side), but it's between the rose bush and the lilac bush, so I think I would have noticed it. It's truly a mystery (and had I been at all religious, I might even say miraculous, but I won't).

Yesterday, I also completed my second raised bed (well, I guess it's my third, if we count the lovely rock construction). I built this one with wood I found in the garage. I suppose I should be concerned because I'm not sure if the wood is treated, but it didn't seem as if it were.

At my husband's suggestion, I made the corner pieces longer than the box so that I could sink them in the ground and give it a little support. I used to like digging holes, but trying to dig holes in just the right places--now that is a pain.

I've started pulling up some of the grass and stuff inside the boxes so that they'll be ready for dirt. But it's an emotional trauma now because we just planted the grass last summer, spending long hours watering and fertilizing (organic and child-safe only). It doesn't come up easily, despite its youth.

Eternal Optimist

About a month ago, I planted some bulbs--freesia and something else, but does it really matter? I've been faithfully watering them ("water frequently in spring" the directions said), but I've got NOTHING, NIL, NADA, ZERO. Not even one sprout. Okay, we may have had one very light & quick to melt snow storm since then, but the ground didn't freeze!

When I was pulling up some weeds, I did find a half-chewed bulb, so it's possible that they have all been eaten by chipmunks (although I saw no evidence of things being dug up). However, it's also possible that the quality of bulbs you buy from the PTO is questionable.

I will continue watering with hope and optimism.

The Lost Weekend

This past weekend was the most beautiful one so far this year--a great time to plant or putter or generally admire things dying in my garden.

Unfortunately, I had to spend Saturday driving to Connecticut for a niece's birthday and Sunday driving to Maine for a baby shower. Grrr to family obligations. Why couldn't it have rained?

Today I built a raised bed for something, but it looks very small. I think I will have to dig deep before I even put the dirt in. I also found a 1X12X12, so maybe I'll make a deeper raised bed tomorrow in the rain.

Building

I can kill hostas. Who kills hostas? My neighbor threw hers in the overgrown area behind her house and they just grew back. I tried to transplant mine and they died. Who can kill a hosta? A black thumb, that's who.

Despite the fact that I may not be able to grow things, I can definitely build them. Here is a 2' X 10' X 6" raised flower bed that I built yesterday. It's not big enough for a yard of dirt, but I don't have any other place for dirt. I might have to build more raised beds in which I can pretend to grow things so that I can get more dirt* for less money.

*the proper landscaping term would be "loam"

Spring--finally

April 27
After a very long winter (it seems), it's finally been warm enough to plant things. As usual, in spring, I have started out very enthusiastic with plans and seeds and dirty hands. However, I do so with some trepidation. My history with plants is not so good.

I don't understand why this should be--my father grows a great vegetable garden every year plus irises of all varieties. My mother tends to a houseful of plants. My sister can do both. But me, I'm lucky if I get grass (and usually it's in the flower bed, not necessarily where I want it.)

But every year without fail, I greet spring with seeds and dirt and many plans for this year's garden. And then, as a safety backup, I continue to join the local farm co-op, so that when things fail, I will still have a steady supply of fresh vegetables & fruit.