I love this time of year because it seems like from the end of May up until now it has just been a waiting game. May is the busy month, especially this year as we were doing some renovations inside of the house and I decided I would go away for a week during the long weekend (great idea, Megan). June is usually rainy and miserable and nothing really seems to happen in the garden. Then a week of really hot weather and BOOM, it actually looks like a real garden.
I’m not hiding anything here – weeds & hoses everywhere are kind of my style.
All of this is really exciting, but I am ultimately a pessimist, so every time I see the garden all I can think about is all the shit that I need to get done. I had a lovely list for the July long weekend. How much of that actually got done? Well, just one thing. It was a big thing though, so I can’t be too hard on myself. Sod Mountain! That ugly, weedy pile of sod has been cleaned up (see previous post here). And I have actual raspberry plants! The raspberries were there before, you just couldn’t tell because they were surrounded by a 4 foot high pile of dirt and weeds.
I actually haven’t been spending a ton of time out in the garden the last couple of weeks aside from watering every day and it does show. Everything needs to be weeded, I have a mess of hoses lying around the yard, and my shed is a dumping ground for everything we don’t feel like dealing with. But the good news is that I have a stay-cation starting this week and I’ll have a ton of time to deal with all things unruly.
Neglect aside, the garden is actually looking quite lovely and I’ve already been taking notes for things I want to do next year – like make little chicken wire domes for my young squash plants, plant some privacy clematis along the fence we share with our neighbors, and build a privacy pergola on the raised part of our deck. I’ve also already picked out some new tomato varieties I want to grow and I haven’t even had a ripe tomato off of this year’s plants. Get ahead of myself much? I also have an ultimate plan for the front garden, which includes raised beds for growing more vegetables. But I think the front yard is going to take a few years to come into fruition – we’re very stubborn people and we don’t like to hire people to do things we could do ourselves, which unfortunately means we have to show some patience.
The first tomatoes on the tumbler tomatoes I started from seed. Things are a couple of weeks late this year – come on tomatoes!
The greenhouse has been a huge success this year and this is very exciting for me. It is the first full year with the greenhouse so everything has been an experiment. I’ve got some pickling cucumbers that are about a day away from being ready to eat, tons of hot peppers (looking forward to burning my face off with these), some eggplants which haven’t done too much yet and a watermelon that has just started making teeny tiny watermelons (SO CUTE).
Cucumber trying to escape out the vent.
On the ornamental side of things, lots of flowers have been showing their faces around these parts and there are a ton of bees as a result. My favorite has been the cat mint (I also love bringing it in the house and watching my cats go berserk) and the blue himalayan poppy (although mine was only blue in the first year it bloomed, now it’s pink/purple – very strange).
Blue himalayan poppy – not blue anymore.
I have a couple of plans for this week – weed the whole garden, wrangle up some of those hoses and finish putting together my bird feeder pole (see that random 4×4 post in the first picture – yeah, I have some plans for that). I don’t think I’m being too ambitious here, so hopefully a few of these chores can get done and some of my garden guilt can subside.
Secret Wool Society 