What Did You Do In The Garden?

[bobm]

For years I always wanted a white garden, never got around to it yet !!!

Don't you have a WHITE garden every winter ???

 

[catjac1975]

For years I always wanted a white garden, never got around to it yet !!!

It is great fun and beautiful. You go to the garden center and buy one of everything white. I grow datura. What a grand flower as a center piece. Running out of room for more daylilies I filled it with all colors so I no longer have an official white garden. I do have a white daylily bed filled with around 40 different white and near white daylilies that I have bred over the years. A sight to behold.

 

[ninnymary]

I think white gardens have a simplistic elegance to them. I love to see white impatients in blackish victorian looking containers.

Mary

 

[flowerbug]

getting the last of the buckets of ashes turned in so we can return the buckets to the guy who burns wood for heat all winter.

the edge where i put down some gravel that had a lot of dirt in it so i could eventually come back and screen/rinse it off. well, we'd put some purple irises along there and so it never did get screened. the past several days Mom has been taking out the irises and Hens and Chicks that are in there so i can finally get it screened. she finished removing the irises, but it will be a while before i can screen all that... eventually i also move the pathway so this area becomes garden space.

i screened about 10ft this morning. break time now. not sure i'll do more later or not. i'd leave it in place but having the crushed limestone in a garden makes it pretty hard to shovel, rake, hoe, or scrape and i end up picking the limestone out one bit at a time anyways. getting the bigger pieces screened out at least i can then do other things to it much more easily (including weeding that whole edge!)...

 

[Gardening with Rabbits]

I really am amazed at my garden this year. I have not really been able to do much out there. I planted, and I kept it weeded until the plants got bigger, and now it is a jungle, but I have been freezing a lot of beans, tomatoes and peppers. It took 2 hours to chop the last bunch of peppers I brought in and I saw more out there today. I will be freezing collards, kale, green beans, tomatoes for the next 2 days.

 

[flowerbug]

I really am amazed at my garden this year. I have not really been able to do much out there. I planted, and I kept it weeded until the plants got bigger, and now it is a jungle, but I have been freezing a lot of beans, tomatoes and peppers. It took 2 hours to chop the last bunch of peppers I brought in and I saw more out there today. I will be freezing collards, kale, green beans, tomatoes for the next 2 days.

that's about how a lot of my bean gardens go until i start harvesting them. there's a gap in between when the plants get big enough and when i harvest where they're big enough to suppress most of the weeds (but not everything). i'd much rather have everything mulched but we never have enough material for doing that in all the gardens.

Mom picked the last of the tomatoes this morning so we'll have to get those put up sometime over the next few days. and another BLT...

to me weeds are a good sign your soil is fertile and wants to grow things. they're harvesting free energy for you and when chopped and fed to the worms (eventually or however) all that energy comes back around again via your soil community. i find that line of thinking very comforting and encouraging instead of frustrating...

 

[Gardening with Rabbits]

to me weeds are a good sign your soil is fertile and wants to grow things. they're harvesting free energy for you and when chopped and fed to the worms (eventually or however) all that energy comes back around again via your soil community. i find that line of thinking very comforting and encouraging instead of frustrating...

This year I had put the cow manure down in the spring instead of fall. It was 2 years old, but my plants were having trouble early. The kale and collards looked pale and my bush beans, but I made a second planting of bush beans and the color was so different, such dark green and the collards and kale have darkened. I think it took awhile to be able to get the nitrogen. The weeds that grew on the sides of this manure pile were so dark and green, which I think is wheat, and I pulled that all summer for the rabbits, best weeds they ever had.

 

[seedcorn]

Cow manure has a high fiber content. The bacteria digesting the fiber will tie up any available nitrogen. Then slow release.

 

[digitS']

I'm becoming a little concerned about the amount of coyote evidence I'm finding in the big veggie garden.

One little pile with lots of serviceberry seeds in it. And, there were many tracks on a wet, outside path. That's how it started out.

About 5 piles of poop later, this morning I found a fresh pile exactly on top the most recent ... makes me wonder if there are 2 coyotes, competing for the territory and using sign very strategically placed.

Dad told me years ago that a coyote will eat sweet corn. I haven't seen any of my garden produce loss that I might blame on a coyote. However yesterday, I noticed one ear in the neighbor's corn rows pulled down and eaten. This morning, that ear was gone!

This happened last year, also. I can't imagine a colon, skunk or rabbit carrying away a corncob. Don't know why a coyote would bother to do that but canines have their quirky behavior.

Anyway, the 1 or 2 acre annual weed patch on the far side of the garden is drying out and beginning to fall down. If I pay close attention when driving up, I just might catch sight of a coyote visitor. He's welcome to all the voles, marmots and rabbits but ... He had better not think that he is in competition with the gardener for the garden!

Steve

 

[catjac1975]

I'm becoming a little concerned about the amount of coyote evidence I'm finding in the big veggie garden.

One little pile with lots of serviceberry seeds in it. And, there were many tracks on a wet, outside path. That's how it started out.

About 5 piles of poop later, this morning I found a fresh pile exactly on top the most recent ... makes me wonder if there are 2 coyotes, competing for the territory and using sign very strategically placed.

Dad told me years ago that a coyote will eat sweet corn. I haven't seen any of my garden produce loss that I might blame on a coyote. However yesterday, I noticed one ear in the neighbor's corn rows pulled down and eaten. This morning, that ear was gone!

This happened last year, also. I can't imagine a colon, skunk or rabbit carrying away a corncob. Don't know why a coyote would bother to do that but canines have their quirky behavior.

Anyway, the 1 or 2 acre annual weed patch on the far side of the garden is drying out and beginning to fall down. If I pay close attention when driving up, I just might catch sight of a coyote visitor. He's welcome to all the voles, marmots and rabbits but ... He had better not think that he is in competition with the gardener for the garden!

Steve

What is a colon.