Good things are happening in the garden!
Very exciting to know this will be a bowl of breakfast goodness!
AAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH! The bad news is I lost a couple of strawberries. The good news is that the Snowflakes love slugs. Mr. Slug, you have met your match. Hey girrrrlllllls, it’s snack time!!!
Darn it! (I was thinking worse but this is a family blog!)
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I spotted these in my strawberry tub and I’m not quite sure what this means. They started out as strawberries, but something odd happened along the way. Any ideas?
This is supposed to be a strawberry!
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Right now I’m in the middle of a project that is taking up most of my time, but I try to spend a half hour in the yard a day. Watering seems to be taking up most of that time right now. I’m trying to keep my salad crops from wilting up. I have also noticed that my strawberries need a regular drink or the berries aren’t as tasty as they should be. I’ve got at least six different kinds of strawberries planted right now and I’d like to be able to notice the subtle differences in them, but I haven’t been tending to my crop as carefully as I should and they have all suffered a little bit.
It’s always a tricky balance with the watering. We all tend to overwater most things in our garden. A little drought strife isn’t necessarily a bad thing on a lot of plants. I planted aloes to cut down on water usage over a spot where I had freesias growing, knowing that I was probably going to lose a lot of the spring bulbs, but SURPRISE! The bulbs all came up like gangbusters so now I’ve got the best of both worlds in that strip.
Obviously, don’t completely dry things out, but a little sagging isn’t a bad thing. Here’s a sage in a pot that looks a little droopy. I need to plant it but, like a domino effect, I’ve got two other jobs that have to happen before I can get this plant in the ground.
Sorry Mexican Sage, but you’ll be fine. I’m just toughening you up.
You'll be fine.
On the harvesting side of things, I was able to snag a bunch of pole beans. We’re having those for dinner tonight! Bon appetit!
Fresh from the Garden!
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My friend, John, lives on a busy street and doesn’t have a ton of yard to garden, but he makes the most with what he has. This entire patch of strawberries started with only six plants! In a year he has multiplied his crop by ten-fold! That’s a LOT of strawberries. There is still some lettuce interspersed throughout from his last year’s garden, which is a bonus.
I love his sign!
Isn’t this SO much better than grass?!
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Yesterday was a short stint in the garden, but I packed a lot of jobs into a short period of time out there. I am cleaning up out there, so I had to be a little ruthless about what I saved and what got pitched (gasp!). Really, it’s okay to pitch things occasionally such as all those little sedum leaves that broke off when I dropped a plant many months back. I’ve been saving them, checking occasionally to see if roots or tiny buds are forming. Some look promising so I planted them in six-packs for planting projects later on.
Succulents I started in six-pack planters many months ago have grown to a nice size so I consolidated some of them into pots with other established succulents of the same variety, filling them in for a better look.
Time to plant more seeds so I laid out plastic six-packs filled with seed starting potting mix. I’m still seeding spinach, lettuce, arugula, and snow peas. Last week I started up more sunflowers, cilantro and basil. While the seeds are getting started, I’ve been cleaning up the garden, trimming out old sweet peas vines, cutting lots of little bouquets of sweet peas and nasturtiums, and weeding, weeding, weeding!
I checked on the ‘kids’,and they are thriving, and making castings by the bucketful for me now. Good teamwork, gang. I’m so proud of you. Really! 
On the harvesting front, I have been snacking on strawberries, blueberries and a couple of apples. I say snacking because fruit is ripening in onesies and twosies; not a large bounty, but so delicious!
Here’s an article from a couple of weeks ago from the SD Union Tribune, Sowing Success to finish things off.
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Mi Esposo stepped up and put in another couple of hours for me in the yard on Sunday. First, he weeded in the backyard, which is awful work because the weeds poke up between the bricks, and it is very labor intensive. If it was left up to me, we’d have a sort-of faux lawn back there because I would never get around to weeding. I have other things to do, such as wandering around the front yard with my coffee, talking to fellow gardeners, looking at seed catalogs, watching the birds at the bird feeder, wondering what I could plant if I had an acre, wondering what else I could plant vertically, wonder if I should move this plant over there, or that plant over here – well, the list never ends, but it IS important stuff to think about….if you are me!
Mi Esposo, on the other hand, is a man of action. “Let’s get the job done”, “We’re burning daylight”, and “Earth to Lessy” are some of his classic lines because usually I’m multi-tasking badly (for a sampling, read above!) and he’s standing around waiting for me to stop coming up with new ideas for garden projects. Anyway, he accomplished some big projects on Sunday, my favorite being the Strawberry Wall.
Basically he created a terraced wall on top of a raised bed that, historically, hasn’t been a very productive plot. I HAVE been having good luck with the few strawberries I had planted there already, so I decided to go with success and add to the strawberry crop. The strawberry pots I had in another part of the garden weren’t growing well, I think because the terra cotta gets too hot, so I moved those plants into the new section.
Voila! Project completed.
We’re off to a good start thanks to Mi Esposo!
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