Backyard Edibles

Veggie garden progress, and all of the other edible things currently growing in my back yard.

Raised beds are filling in fairly well.  They've suffered a bit from the wind, though.

First tomato flowers.

Sweet peas on the fence are doing nicely.

Green bean flowers.

Pepper flowers.

On the patio are strawberries and herbs.

Strawberry flower.

Rhubarb.

One of 5 pumpkin vines.  

Doesn't look like much yet, but that little twig is going to grow up to be a cherry tree!

Mint in between the hostas.

Basil bed in front of raspberry bed.

Hard to pick out from all the weeds, but there's two little blueberry bushes in the middle of the raspberry bed.

Playing With Fire

It may not look like much, but that cane-like object is my garden blowtorch.  Sam bought it for me for my birthday.  Almost 6 months later, I'm finally starting to use it.

It's not something I can use in my flower and vegetable beds--there's too many plants in too small a space.  But it's perfect for my big rock garden where I have a few plants I want with lots of space in between.  Weeding that area by hand last year took forever, and killed my back.  The blowtorch is time consuming too, but I can stand up to use it.  The area in the following pictures took me about half an hour to do.

 Wide shot of the whole area, before torching.

 Close-up of a cluster of dandelions, before torching.

 Wide shot, immediately after torching.

 Dandelions, immediately after torching.

 Wide shot, 3 days later.  You can clearly see the places I missed.

Dandelions, 3 days later.

Safety notes.  I keep the hose turned on the whole time I'm working with the blowtorch.  As soon as I'm done with an area, I hose the whole thing down, even if there are no signs of smoke/embers.  If I'm working close to the foundation of the house, I have the blowtorch in one hand and the hose in the other!  

Overall, I'm quite happy with my torch.  I've thoroughly done about a third of the rock garden, and also have 2-3 other places I want to use it.

Veggie Garden: Update 2

The garden is coming along nicely, and I'm definitely learning as I go!  One thing I'll definitely do differently next year is start my seeds earlier.  Especially the peppers.  The tomatoes were mostly ok, but the peppers took forever to sprout.  That meant they were still really small when I had to put them in the ground.  They seem to be doing alright so far, but they're still pretty fragile.

All of the seedlings just before the tomatoes and daisies went outside to start hardening off.

It may not look like much, but everything is planted!  In the beds are tomatoes, peppers (sweet and hot), green beans, and parsnips.  Along the fence are peas, and not pictured are pumpkins.

I'll update again in a month or so when things have filled out!

Spring Flowers?

Last year most of my spring bulbs did really well.  Crocuses, tulips and daffodils brightened up my front yard.  In the fall I planted a bunch more bulbs, this time in the lawn rather than in flower beds.  I gleefully entertained the vision of bright spring color chasing away the winter blahs.

It didn't happen.  As far as I can tell, none of the bulbs in the lawn came up.  Crocuses sprouted in the beds, but didn't bloom.  The tulips seem to be growing well and are starting to bloom, but it doesn't look like any of my daffodils have sprouted.  I have no idea what went wrong.  For now I'll just enjoy the flowers I have, and wait to see what happens next spring.

Veggie Garden, Update 1

Being pretty new to gardening, I'll take all the help I can get.  This year I'm using Smart Gardener to help me figure things out.  It's a free program that tells me when I need to do things.  I picked my seed varieties from their database (or close enough, they don't have everything), and input the size and orientation of my beds.  With that, they gave me a suggested planting map that I could play with until I had it the way I wanted it.  The garden map is also printable, which will be handy when I'm planting.  Now I get a weekly email reminding me of what I need to do in the garden--starting seeds, preparing soil, planting, etc. by variety.  I've now officially started all of the seeds that need to be started indoors!

More seeds were started after this picture was taken, all 3 trays are completely full now.

Yesterday Sam and I got the beds built.  We used 6 ft cedar fence pickets from Lowe's (and I've just realized I had a gift card I could have used...oops).  Cedar naturally resists rotting, so hopefully they'll last me a few years.  I have four beds, 6 ft by 3 ft and about 16 in high.  I still need to straighten, level, and fill them; but they're pretty much where I want them.

 Cedar fence pickets.

 Some cut in half to make the short ends.

Attaching corner brackets. 

Building the long sides. 

 One bed.

All four beds!

Today is a rainy dreary day, so no yard work for me!  Along with starting seeds, I also worked on making plant markers for the garden.  They're just wide craft sticks with paint pen, nothing fancy.  Paint pen should resist fading better than something like a Sharpie, so I should be able to read the labels all season.  On the back of each I wrote the number that corresponds to the planting map in normal ink, which will probably fade in the sun.

Red for tomatoes, green for peppers, blue for other.

Next update will probably be after I start planting.  Our last frost date is 2nd week of May, some things will get planted before that (peas, parsnips), but most will be after.

Spring!

Spring is here!  Officially, if not actually.  It's starting to feel more like spring, though, and today I had the windows open!  It was nice enough that I was able to let Richard play in the back yard for a couple of hours.

I was also able to get some of my seeds started today.  It may be two months before they're able to go into the ground, but it's a step in the right direction!  Sam is currently researching how best to build my raised beds.  In them I'll be planting tomatoes, peppers, green beans, and parsnips.

I have lots of gardening ambitions this year, not just the vegetable beds.  I still have a bunch of bulbs that didn't get planted last fall (thanks, early freeze!).  I may be able to get them in the ground in the next few days, since they only need to be a couple inches down.  Other plans include replants in the front flower bed, adding daylilies and azaleas to the rock garden, putting some blueberries in the raspberry bed, and whatever other random replants/crazy ideas I come up with!  Add in building a garden shed and rebuilding the front porch, and we've got a busy year ahead of us!

Laundry Room Improvements

A project I've been very excited about is fixing up my laundry room.  Other than fixing the wiring and throwing in some cheap shelves we already owned, we haven't done anything with it.  But, oh, I've plotted!

I spent some time last fall designing my dream shelves to hold all of our crafting junk.  I gave the design to Sam, who figured out how to make it practical.  As he built the shelves, I painted the wall they were going on.  Then the shelves were installed and painted.

They're not done yet, there's still touch-up and shelf painting, organizing, finishing touches, and a bunch more stuff to go in; but I'm very happy with how they look so far!

Wall taped off and spackled.

Painted wall.

Shelves with bonus Richard!