Vampires Be Ware!

The soft-neck garlic harvest is in. I planted two cloves worth and got 46 cloves back! If only all my (nonexistent) investments were that good.

1. 

And the sunflowers are starting to do their thing too! Check it out.

Garden Update

I love this time of year in the garden. Most of the really hard work is done (I say that probably because I don't weed enough), and instead I get to visit the garden and see what surprises its holding for me each day. The spring crops are wrapping up, but the summer crops are just getting started. Here are a few photos of what's going on right now in the garden:



The perinial flower garden is coming to life. A month ago we totally thought this rose was dead, but as you can, we were wrong! Also, look how tall the Phlox are! They'll be blooming before I know it.



Speaking of blooming, the radishes that did absolutely terribly this year (not very big, kinda stunted, not really even edible) have bolted. I don't want to save the seeds--I'm blaming this crop failure on picking the wrong variety--but once I figured out they were no good I ignored them for too long and before I knew it, they did this. After I took this picture I pulled up all the radishes and replaced them with some herbs I've been meaning to plant. Also check out the beautiful lettuces in the front of the bed. I should have salad for a while!






Speaking of bolting, these are some mustard greens that magically planted themselves 40 feet away from where I grew them last year. We've eating a lot of these already, and they are one of my favorite things to grow. So, I'm letting them to go to seed on purpose!






I bought this Mortgage Lifter tomato plant at the garden center about three weeks ago. Shortly after I planted it, I noticed that IT ALREADY HAS A TOMATO ON IT! I'm not sure if this is a good sign or a bad one.






My sugar snap peas finally decided to climb the trellis I put up for them. They're blooming now and you can even see some tiny little baby seed pots on there. It will probably be impossible for me not to eat all of these tasties right off the vine!





We've been eating a lot of fresh greens and onions out of the garden over the past couple of weeks. Here's a big bowl of mustard greens along with some green onions and various herbs (dill, basil, thyme, chives) that all came from the garden.



And here's a shot of the absolutely fabulous quiche I made using the above ingredients. I must say, I'll be using Dill in ALL my quiches from now on! So good!




And, finally, one of my favorite things in the garden: Clematis. This is the second full growing season for these plants, and I'm so impressed with their size and how much they are blooming. This trellis and the Clematis is probably one of the best things I ever decided to do in my garden!



Ok, that's it. Hope you enjoyed it, and hope your garden is growing as well as mine!

2009 Garden Plan

I'm about the fall asleep, but I feel compelled to make a blog post, so this one is going to be short and sweet.

First, I want to say Hi to everyone I met at the Garden Bloggers Spring Fling here in Chicago last week. It was such a great weekend! While I didn't have spiffy business cards with my blog URL to give everyone, I hope that some of you will make it over here to the blog anyway, although I can tell you now that my blog posting history is a bit sparadic. I really enjoy blogging, but I also enjoy gardening and sometimes--ok, a LOT of times--I use all my energy in the garden and just don't have the will to blog afterward. I hope you will forgive me.

Also, I'd like to say THANK YOU to the Chicago bloggers who organized Spring Fling. You guys did a great job!

And now the "meat" of this post: As of this last weekend, I FINALLY have .. well.. I was about to say "ALL" but I think I'll error on the side of caution and say "MOST" of the veggie garden planted. This year I ordered so many seeds, I definitely had to write things down--what I wanted to plant and where it would go--if I was to have any hope of keeping things organized. I used Excel to make a simple diagram of my eight 4x4 raised beds. Here's what I ended up with:



Here's a picture of what my garden area looks like in real life. This was taken during the planting process, hence all the crap you can see laying around.


As you can probably tell, I've adopted a square foot gardening method where I've sectioned off each bed into square feet and planted accordingly. I didn't make note of the number of each plant per square foot in the chart, but obviously this varies depending on the size of the plant in each square.

I should also note that, this is not all of my garden. I've also got:

-two types of potatos in potato cages
-a new asperagus patch I just started this year
-rasberry, blueberry, kiwi, and two grape plants
-watermelon, honeydew melon, luffa, goard, and winter squash vines
-sweet corn
-sage, lemongrass, stevia, rosemerry, parseley, more bell and hot peppers, and cuban orregano in containers

I'm making this up as I go along, folks. I can hope that some of the stuff I've planted works out and produces some food. I guess I can be assured, however, that this is going to be a very exciting growing season. What I do know for sure is, I'm so excited!

Thanks for reading!