Garden Medley

And quite beautifully too. This is such a switch from last year when it was nothing but trouble. I’m really loving it.

That’s some of the squash we’ve picked already. We’ve also had some interesting varieties of lettuce, and the tomatoes are making excellent progress.

I think a lot of the difference is just a better soil balance. We made up some compost through the fall and winter, and the soil from last year had some time to break down a little too. All that seems to have combined for a much better garden this year.

Technorati Tags: gardening, produce

There’s a feeling I understand. I had it last year when my garden was a complete flop. But this year things have changed. My garden is flourishing. We’re seeing results already. Everything is coming up, umm, maybe not roses, we have lots of other plants growing, but coming up beautifully.

We’ve even picked our first squash of the year. It was delicious.

Sometimes things just aren’t right for your garden right away. I suspect last year’s failure was due to a combination of factors. Soil that wasn’t quite right. A heat wave we weren’t home for that killed a lot of our plants. Other factors that were beyond our control.

But that didn’t keep us from trying again. (more…)

I love it! My garden is off to a simply gorgeous start this year. The weather has been cool and sunny, and the plants have just really taken off.

I credit some of this to how my husband changed things around this year. Since this past winter we had a couple freezes kill off basically all the decorative plants in the yard (San Diego area – no one plants freeze resistant plants here!), he changed the containers around and now the plants start from containers, but can get their roots into the actual soil. The containers have a mesh at the bottom now, and are on top of where the decorative plants once grew.

The difference has been simply amazing. Everything just took off after we planted. Lost our seedlings to the last freeze, but when we bought young plants and put them in the ground – wow! Everything is growing beautifully.

I’ve been watching the bee situation in my area carefully, though. For those of you not familiar with it, there’s something called colony collapse disorder that has killed off about a quarter of all the commercial behives in the United States. Pretty scary stuff when you think about it, especially since no one knows the cause. It’s being worked on, and the problem is being narrowed down bit by bit.

Here are some more garden pictures. The tomatoes are looking especially promising this year.

Technorati Tags: gardening, my garden, garden growth

Sprouting seeds indoors is certainly working well this year. We’ve had quite a few sprout already. Just have to hope that none of them get gnawed by a mystery bug again this year. Last year we lost a few to that.

I’m just delighted to see things growing already. The weather here is riduculously warm just now, although if we’re lucky we’ll get some rain this weekend. But in the meantime I’m taking advantage of not needing to heat the room the seeds are in to warm the soil. Air temperatures in that room are at about 80 degrees during the day with the window open right now. It’s pretty nice. (more…)

I’ve been neglecting this site for a while now. Just kind of lost interest for a time while we weren’t actively gardening, especially after such a disappointing year.

It’s been an interesting winter. We’ve had freezing weather, which is highly unusual for our area. I’m talking half inch of ice on the kids’s sandbox, which we had filled with water once we realized how much freezing we were getting. It was pretty amazing. (more…)

I’m not Italian, but I am married to one. But even before then I was a major fan of cooking with garlic. I keep a lot of it in my kitchen and I think it’s the perfect thing to grow in my garden.

To get started just head out to the store and buy some heads of garlic. Break them up into individual cloves and plant. They’ll start sprouting in a few weeks. You can even plant garlic in the fall before the ground freezes (if you live in a place where that’s an issue) and it will grow for you come spring. (more…)

In his frustration with our recent failure of a garden, my husband is trying to figure out how to improve the soil for next year. His current idea, which we haven’t yet tried, is to save up veggie scraps and throw them in the blender with some water to pour into the planters.

I understand why he wants to do it – the nutrients should break down much easier in that form and improve the soil pretty quickly, but yuck! I’m trying not to think about what that could do to the blender, which we regularly use to make smoothies. (more…)

Just for fun (actually because it began to rot so soon), my husband took our uncut Halloween pumpkin to the back yard and cut the top off. He gave our daughter a choice – fill the top with a few seeds and some dirt or plant the seeds in the ground.

Of course she chose both. What did you expect? She’s 4! (more…)

Most people love butterflies. They’re brightly colored, beautiful and bring to mind pleasant childhood memories. And children love to chase butterflies.

However, many people have trouble attracting butterflies into their gardens. They may occasionally flutter by, but they won’t stay.

The trick to getting butterflies in your garden is to plant a garden that will attract them. You want plants that they will lay their eggs on and plants with nectar they love.

Which plants you use varies by the kind of butterfly you want. I’ve had success attracting Anise Swallowtails with my fennel bush. One year we had caterpillars all over it, which led to cocoons, and my daughter got to see the butterflies hatch from the cocoons. It was very exciting for her. (more…)

We decided to go ahead and pick the carrots from our garden. There was a pretty good number of them, but none grew terribly long. I think my husband is getting frustrated with our garden this year, since everything that looked to be growing well was more or less baked by the heat wave back in July.

All in all, though, the carrots did well. We grew some odd varieties, and in all honesty most of them made me not want to grow them again. Poor taste.

My daughter was quite excited about one carrot in particular that had grown out in three ways.

This has been a very frustrating year for vegetable gardening for us. We’ve had much more success in the past than we have had this year. I think the unusual heat wave did a lot of the plants in, even though we tried to keep them well watered.

We did leave a few carrots in the ground, just to see how they flower. I like the idea of letting the kids see the entire life cycle. I’m not sure that we’ll manage to keep them going long enough for that, as my understanding is that they flower in their second year, but only in some climates. I guess it will depend in part on how our winter goes.