Welcome new blog follower! Marie

Welcome to our new blog follower Marie. Feel free to just read or post whatever you'd like to this blog. It was originally started when some of us at church wanted to discuss garden successes and problems, get help when possible and share photos of projects and our gardens. Here is another of my odd garden photos - I call it green eggs and ham. All the green in these scrambled eggs are herbs and veggies (spinach, basil, thyme, greek oregano, and green onions) from the garden and it was a very yummy breakfast!!!  

Church garden

Here is a picture of Carrie revitalizing the small garden bed by the front door of church. She did a really good job adding the purple and yellow pansies and planting the two shrubs I brought. Hope they bloom, they are star jasmine and african lily. The picture was taken Oct 23rd.

Summer dreamin'

So, here are some more photos from summer I wanted to share - the giant rutabaga that ended up in a nice stew (they cook like potatoes when you peel and cube them up); the three varieties of beets planted - chiogga (the ringed ones), Bull's Blood (the really dark ones), and yellow (I think the white one is a chiogga that didn't get it's rings right); and the Easter Lily from this years display at church - blooming again in October, their regular blooming time.

Keeping Track

This year I was thinking of how to keep track of which flowers and other perennials were planted where at our new house. I have been making crude maps of beds in my 6"x9" spiral garden notebook for at least 5 years in one book. This year I added a new method to the old - I took pictures of the dahlia areas when the plants were about 3 feet tall. I didn't know in most cases which tubers ended up where because when they were dug, washed, dried, split, then moved, they got all mixed up. Totally maddening as I wanted to "compose" color schemes in the garden beds. You know, yellows and oranges together, purples, pinks and whites placed together because they go together well. Also, some were planted quite late - June to early July - and the summer wasn't very sunny this year which dahlias need, so they didn't bloom as fast or have enough time to bloom as they would have in a normal year. When I took the pictures, most weren't blooming yet. I printed these pix out on regular printer paper to save the cost of photo paper and to be able to write on them. Then when the plants bloomed, I noted on the print what each was (if I knew from having planted before), or just described by color and size of the flower. I am hoping to find out real names for my unknown dahlias so I took pictures of the flowers when they did bloom, to check against catalogs or the internet.

Summer is GONE!!

Well, with the snow outside, I suppose I should quit being in denial that the garden is done for the year. Saturday night my dahlias bit it hard, they are crispy brown and pretty ugly. I just hope the snow is a sufficient blanket to insulate the tubers. I didn't have time to dig or throw some leaves or something on them yet. Luckily I cut the last good blooms on Saturday afternoon to be able to take one more bouquet to church. The Karma Choc dahlia lasted the longest and best, with the plant that kept its largest flowers at the end. Don't know if I posted a picture of it yet but here it is. Some of my other dahlias flowers kept getting smaller as the colder weather crept up.
Also I was surprised to see a couple new dahlias (I got some "potluck" tubers from the friend of Roger's). Here they are too: a beautiful medium orange with red streaks in the petals and a multicolored orange one I believe is called Candlelight. I took these pictures back when I was happy there would be a few more warmish days and nights - Sept and Oct.

Tomato Blight

Ack! Last Sunday my tomatoes looked so promising! By Friday they looked like we'd had a hard frost, and the fruit was split like I watered too much! After talking to Verdelle and Anna, it sounds like everyone has this problem. I suspect the warm, humid weather we've been having was paradise for blight. The nearly 2" of rain the other week is probably what split the fruit. I guess we'll salvage what we can.

Surprise from the compost pile

Yesterday while it was sunny, I went to check on the potato vines I saw in the compost pile all summer. We have a large two compartment compost bin and two potatoes grew at the center divider, with very lush growth (why wouldn't they, being in the compost pile!). So, here is the results of digging down quite a ways. All these from just two plants! We figured about 20 lbs. total. Yummy! There was one more plant along the back side but there were only 6 smallish ones there.

Report from the Sun!

So the last two days were a bit sunny and expecting more sun on the weekend. I hope so!! Still have green tomatoes and dahlias with buds only - !! Here are a few pictures of my sunflowers this year (Autumn Red, Sunflower 3 Bees, Skyflower 1, 10 feet up, and the tall one is Skyflower 1) and a new dahlia flower color (for me). Roger has a friend that grows them also and I asked him to beg for any tubers he might want to give away. We got 11, some the same as before, this one, so far, is new to this yard.

Updates to previous posts

So, I said I'd ripped out the old pea vines - and just let them lay by the raised bed (can we say, lazy enough to let them lay). Yesterday when I went to pick some green beans in another bed, I spotted some green in the old nasty looking pile of the pea vines. Guess what? The green is new peas shooting up! Must have been some pods with old enough seeds inside. Kinda late, but I am going to let them try - never know, might get a pea or two to eat before the freeze.
Also, I had mentioned that my little trees were now safe from deer - wrong!! One must have walked through a very thick planting of several tomatoes and totally munched off one of the paperbark birches. Very wierd though, as nothing else was trampled or eaten. I'm sure I didn't eat it, but it surely is only a thin stick now, about 1 foot tall. The others are ok and I added some twine around the tomatoes to help keep other munchers out.

Some dahlias are blooming!

beautiful! and I hope more bloom! The dark one is Karma Choco, the other is Nijinski. Love them both. I have many plants with buds that need some sun to open up. The last pic is a tea party Doris Mech invited me and Nancy Lemke to in her garden 1 1/2 weeks ago - the last HOT Sunday

English Gardens - Regents Park

And finally, a formal garden... a park, actually, just a block from our hotel. It was raining, but that didn't make the plantings less beautiful.

Sissinghurst Castle Gardens - The Flowers

It looks like a castle, but it is just the gardener's quarters. The castle is long gone. Vita Sackville-West, a famous author, lived here a century ago and restored the gardens. My photos don't do it justice.

An English Garden - Sissinghurst Vegetables

Sissinghurst Castle Gardens is mostly a flower garden. But they have an on-site cafe that serves vegetables from their own kitchen garden, and lamb and poultry from neighboring farms. It was quite an excellent lunch!

An English Garden

I was thinking back on my trip to England last year and thought I'd share a couple garden pictures. This one is a tiny garden behind the home of one of our walking-tour guides in a little town called Grantham.

This has been quite a summer! Too cold to start, then to hot to go outside - sheesh! My dahlias are confused, the ones I didn't dig and divide are about 3 1/2 feet tall with some flowers. This is a pretty decent size. The ones we dug and cut up to share, some are only about 2 feet tall, some with buds, others still, hopefully, contemplating putting out some flowers. Then I have a few that were planted really late, like in mid July, that I am praying will grow big enough to have at least one flower.
In mid July, I used light deer fencing to enclose some tender new white paper bark birch trees cuz a couple had their tops nibbled off by my cute four-footed friends. Happy to report no further destruction there. There is also some dahlias inside that fence of the late planted kind. Deer don't like dahlias anyway.
So, encouraged by this, we built more fence in hopes of deterring deer from the blueberries and raspberries. We used both heavy and light so-called "deer fencing". This was a couple weeks ago, and last night there must have been a midnight snack attack, part of the light fencing was ripped and lots of blueberries missing. All we can do is wait for the green ones to ripen ~~~ as for the raspberries, they seem to eat a lot of leaves on the new shoots. Kinda wierd to me, there are prickles on the bottoms of the leaves - can't be comfortable to eat, must be very tasty I guess.
Last week I pulled the old pea vines, so done and ugly, and threw them into the compost pile. My grandson Colin helped me plant more pea seeds - hope is eternal you know!! Leftover seeds, just might sprout.
Alexa, cute Wabbits! We have wild ones here too, but as long as we have been gardening here, they have never eaten anything (knock on my hard head as if it were wood) that we could tell out of our veggie gardens. Our kitty caught one a couple weeks ago and brought it home proudly - it was bigger than her head.
The following posts show some pix.

Garden in progress 2

More pictures of garden things (may or may not be in order per pictures): red cabbage progress, gladiolas, morning glory (wild and annoying, but pretty), and chocolate nicotiana .

Garden in progress

Here are some pictures of things in my garden presently (may or may not be in order of pictures):

Purple poppy, sweet 100 tomatoes getting ready to get ripe, the newest visitor, greek oregano, basil (planted 3 times in whole barrel, this is all that has come up), see tiny ones on the right - hopefully will grow up like the ones on the left.

Wabbits

A few years ago a cougar came by and ate my cat. Sometimes I wish it would come back and snack on rabbits. Some evenings there are a dozen rabbits around my garden. I've fenced the things they might eat, so they just stare longingly at the lettuce growing in the raised bed (that is fenced, too, even though I don't think they can get up there). They are cute though, and although they are afraid of me, they aren't afraid of the car. Go figure. I've thought about catching them and getting them fixed, then turning them loose again.

My Back Yard

It is so peaceful here! I wonder if I'll ever be able to leave this place.

Enjoying What I Have

When I see gardens like Joy's, with the lovely flowers, and see the gorgeous bouquets that people bring to work and church, I wish I could manage to keep flowers alive. I don't have the discipline though. However, I was at Northwest Trek over the holiday weekend, reveling in the natural beauty of evergreens, ferns, huckleberries, and all. Then I realized: I have this in my very own back yard! In fact, I think we'll dig up the grass and split some ferns and make it even more northwest native! The grass doesn't grow well under the trees anyway. I'll need a jackhammer to dig the dirt though, it is incredibly compacted. Gee, maybe that's part of the reason the grass doesn't grow. Thank goodness for a power line right-of-way for the vegetables.

Cow Bunk/Raised Bed

Here is the "cow bunk" all painted, protected from slugs with copper tape, loaded and ready for plants. There are three jalapeno plants at the far end. I guess the "cow bunk" is better known as a manger to real farmers, but that's what they called it at Del's Farm Supply. All 11 tomato plants are in, plus two red cabbages (thank you, Verdelle!) Now that the garden is tilled, does anyone know where to get corn plants? It's too late to start from seed.