Garden Fuss

If you saw my previous post today you know that I was preparing to do battle with some little nibblers. The reason why I have so many so early this year is because it has been an unseasonably warm winter and transition into spring. With the warmth there has been an abundance of rain which slugs love. Add to this my planting their favorite snacks and you have a recipe for disaster. As  you will see from the pics I try to be as "green" as possible. Re-purposing old plastic Easter eggs and citrus pith/peels I started planning my gastropod assassination attempts. I started with taping over the holes in the bottom of the plastic Easter eggs, I then proceeded to grease the inside tops of the eggs with shortening to make them even more slippery. With the eggs prepped post shopping trip to the local nursery and the local liquor store it was time to set my traps. Let me pause for a moment to tell you I hate to have to kill bugs and I am tr...

Yes you read it correctly the war has begun and I am taking no prisoners.  Well, scratch that I will take prisoners directly to the nearest lake or river and water-board them to catch someones dinner. I'm talking Walleye, Bass, Catfish! What ever is in the mood for fresh caught slug or grasshopper meat? It is on!!!! [fyi... I really don't like fish either only fishing] This morning I went out after Neeming the whole garden yesterday and noticed even more damage. Not just damage, but the entire loss of my Ruby Wallace Old Time White Cucumber that I received from Baker Creek Heirloom as part of the Grow It Forward Heirloom Seed Contest . I am so heated right now because what I thought was possibly one last remaining cucumber sprout to "make it" through some kind of bug/ultra sun attack has passed on with its brethren. So I am now debating on either starting again by directly sowing seed in a well guarded and watched pot; or buying something new and already well into ...

3rd and 4th graders can be pretty busy little people. But chaperoning them in a  torrential  down pour over a couple nights can be down right nerve wrecking to the faint of heart. LOL Anyway, I made it through this adventure only to return to a different kind of adventure at home. First off I was more than thrilled to see that the vegetable garden was still intact after I heard of the storms in the city and all the hail.  As soon as I walked into the back-yard my neighbor says "Hey Tina look at your beautiful rose bushes". [ It's taken me 5 years to get more than one bloom on either of the two rose bushes ] The vibrant and abundant red blooms are so amazing! My constant doting with fertilizer, bug spray, water, pruning, picking off critters, and constantly threatening/talking to the things has finally yielded great results. I could have been happy all day about just the blooms on the rose bushes. However, I continued to the veggie garden where I noticed some chew marks...

What a difference a nice warm week can make. Last Sunday we had an amazing Iris bloom after 3 years of waiting. This morning I headed out to see if aything was happening yet with the peonies my mother in-law gave me a couple years ago. I was nervous that I'd get lots of buds that were duds because out of 8 plants I ended up with only 1 or two blooms on 3 plants. So far every plant this year has swollen buds with a little color coming through. The plant I'm highlighting this morning is going to be a stunner if it keeps blooming all the way. 
For perrenial plants that can last 100+ years I'm hoping they last at the least 40+ years like their parent plants at my in-laws. I can recall each of my grandmothers having at least one Peony plant. However, my great grandmother did the most with her Peonies. They lined both sides of the walk way and I couldn't get enough of the rose scent and counting all the ants. *NOTE* Ants love Peonies! I find that the peonies seem to draw the...

2012 Full  Veg & Herb Garden View Well I can't say that I don't know where the time goes when it comes to posting updates. Because you fellow gardeners can attest to how quickly one task turns into yet another task and pretty soon planting turns into trellising, weeding, mulching, watering, and so on and so forth.  Today has been a great day in the garden. Especially since I've finally gone to the doc to get meds for my seasonal allergies and mild asthma that went super crazy starting 3 weeks ago... I won't talk too much about that but I can say that a case of the bad coughs resulted in a horrible groin pull/hernia deal... Try gardening with that... ***OUCHY***  2012 Full  Veg & Herb Garden View too Anyway enough of that icky stuff and back to yapping about all the wonderful help I received from the DH, and even the daughter who has been M.I.A. as far as gardenign this year goes. The first thing I did today was to pick up the last of the summer ve...

Last fall I pickled beets and somehow lost track of the only 2 jars I made. Well as I went through the pantry to find new jars for the strawberry preserves I made last week low and behold I found them. Now that it's spring I had a dilemma because I couldn't think of the best way to approach them. I had only tried them in a corn salad or fresh.... What to do? *sigh* Well, if I may digress a little bit; I must attempt to make you fully understand the loathing I had for beets my whole life. [minus the last 3 years I've grown them fresh]
 My mother would open a can and heat the already cooked to death red icky root thingies. The smell alone had me praying there would be enough bread and water to be full for the rest of the night. There was no way they were goin down my throat let alone in my mouth period! Let me tell you, I became the master of the silent treatment and skipping meals. The only thing worse than the store bought aluminum canned beets was liver and ...

In three years after planting some Iris I was given I had not one bloom. I made the decision that I would no longer chastise myself for answering a freecycle or craigslist posting and driving almost an hour away for FREE flowers that wouldn't even bloom once. This year I would make the pain go away by saying to heck with the "supposed" Iris that would soon find a new home in the compost bin because they had to be duds. Well a strange thing caught my eye when I was cleaning up the flower beds. Dare I say that there was a budlike growth on one of the plants? Fine! I would let this supposed plant with his "bud"; stay for another week but his brethren (the other plants) would still have to be moved to another location to make room for anything else but straight green spikey leaves. As you can see from the pictures this bud did indeed turn into a bloom.  Today of all days too, and this bloom is ENORMOUS! I have not been so happy about one non gardening day bloom ...

What a beautiful day it was today. I made a not so small error walking way too much. Other than resting my now overly exerted body I am reminiscng about all I enjoyed today. Including being among people and creatures big and small. It was not overly warm out which made getting out of the house in shorts a comfortable experience for all of us to get some much needed exercise....
Just not that much exercise! Today I didn't accomplish much in the way of gardening and I am so fine with that. After shopping at the Friends School Plant Sale Friday AND picking up pre-ordered plants from another school fundraiser I have to say that I've had enough with digging and watering for a couple of days. Tomorrow is another day and there is plenty of work to be done inside and outside of the garden. These are some of the happy little critters I captured pics of along the way. If tomorrow is as nice as today who knows what else will come out to say *cheese*? 
Happy Planting

Wooden Posts with Strawberries & Mint Can we really move both of them?   Cocoa, Cypress, Straw and Hay.... Choose your mulch, gather your weeding tools, and proceed to spend the whole day in the garden.  I had pretty simple plans for the day when I first woke up. I planned on implementing a pretty simple mulching of the strawberry bed, and the vegetable garden. I am so sick of muddy paths already that a good "hay down" in the garden was necessary. However, when I took a look around I noticed that the scheme and flow of the berry garden was totally off.  After multiple breaks for water and resting a sore body; I actually got through the much too LONG tasks of  weeding, digging up, and separating the strawberry plants. This was after removing two super heavy and rotted wooden posts. Thank God I had help because there is no way I could have done this alone.  My helper keeping squirrels off their favorite posts Newly mulched Strawberry bed ...

In spite of this horrible cold I have trying to keep me down; I've managed to get into garden today. I must say I made a heck of a lot of progress. There were several plants to split and move including: hostas, dianthus, bugle weed, day lilies, black berry lilies, creeping phlox and ribbon grass . I even dug up some prolific plants to be moved to a new location that I believe are some type of Perennial Sunflower. The butterflies and birds seem to love these plants but they have grown out of their designated area well into the general lawn ( a.k.a.  the hubby's territory) . I have yet to decide where the stragglers should be placed so they are sitting in a large margarine tub until a new home can be found. As my plants grow and flourish from the care they receive I find that my friends and neighbors think I am becoming one of those "hippy flower chicks". I humbly accept and appreciate the moniker. I think we all have to be good stewards of the earth and I onl...