Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Today was my day off. I had plenty of work to do though. Summer is on the way. I'd just finished talking about entertaining with friends for the summer the day before with Lipton, so I woke up energized to get my back yard in shape. Remember when I started my garden? Well, I started it last year and had some success with leafy greens like collards and mixed lettuce, but failed with fennel, onions and pretty much every thing else.
Here are links to my garden blogs if you want to catch up ...
Gardening was fun, but I needed much more time to dedicate to it for it to flourish, Martha makes it look so easy. I bet it has something to do with her having help :-) So I called in a horticulturist and took a trip to a nursery in Red Hook, Brooklyn to pick out some babies ...
Those are cactus' and succulents. My favorite one is in the bottom left corner. All perfect for me because I don't havee to water them everyday. I did get some bushes and trees, but these lil dry sand lovers are my babies. Just so you know ... I didn't scrap the whole garden. I did have something nice happen ... my onions that didn't bulb underground, grew lonnnng stalks and began to flower! So, we uprooted them and plotted them along my back fence. Look at how tall they grew in just one year from a seed!
Pretty neat, huh? And that was through the winter with snow cover and all that. Those were some troopers! For the people that may be into landscaping, I also got wisteria, clematis, some bamboo, a corkscrew willow, a spidery looking conifer, a Japanese maple and a new word I learned from the horticulturist ... two procumbents.So now instead of waking up every morning wondering if bulbs of onions and fennel are forming beneath the ground, I wake up wondering how far up the trellis a vine has grown.
This is my wisteria vine, it only took a week for it to travel from the bottom of the picture to the top. Pretty neat.Up next, I get inspired by a chef friend and send my guy to go grocery shopping...
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6 comments:
Oh my! I leave my guy at home when I go grocery shopping. He has a fit when I go off and look at stuff not on my list. I like to browse!! So I just leave him home. Otherwise when we home from the store I notice that I forgot something ON MY LIST because hew as rushing me! :)
And if I send him to the store, I get 5 phone calls because he can't find this or that, etc. So it's easier to do it myself!
Sunny - I found a gorgeous Blueberry Tree at WholePaychex here in Philly so I'm thinking of doing a patio garden - any suggestions?
Ok first - girl you look GORGEOUS in that pink reppin' for Lipton. And second - I am also a novice gardener and have planted a lot of the same things you've got. Crossing my fingers my onions, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, peas, radishes, eggplant, zucchini and herbs will hang in there and allow me to go produce shopping right in my own backyard!
jen, you know i am sooooo glad i am not the only one with an grocery list-challenged man. i mean he literally laughed out loud, not just lol, when i started to draw the list, but he came back with everything. if i didn't make the list, he'd call asking about scallions vs. onions vs. chives lol and want to know is it heavy cream or whipping cream, duh they are the same lol. can you hear my frustration? it's so cute to me, though and he's actually learned plenty of dish names and techniques since we met. gotta luv em, eh?
lys, girrrrl. lemme ask my guy, cuz i'm clueless. i'd buy it though and then the one thing to think about is your sunlight. do you get full, partial or shade? and then ask if the base needs shade and top needs light. some trees are like that. also think about mulch or rocks. email me and i'll send you pics of my rocks and my mulch so you can see the diff. i like the rocks cuz the mulch gets dry if you don't tend to it.
lindsey, wow, thanks! i remember feeling summery that day and it may be a bit too much info, but at the last second i took off the tourniquet that was my spanx and said forget it, what's an inch?! felt good to be able to breathe teeheehee. as for the garden, you are gonna love watching the onions grow because it's pretty fast, just really give the soil a good turn and space em out, for some reason i didn't do a good enough job for them to bulb. my tomatoes, those were great green, but the rain killed the flavor of the red. my radishes were the same as the onions, no bulb. and my peppers died before they even took, i started them inside. it was hard losing them because i'd put so much work into them. poor plants, victim of my bad gardening skills.
I really love your little dry sand lovers babies. I am not a perfect gardener when it comes to vines. I just want to ask how does your wisteria vine grow neat like that? I have some of that but not so neat as your vine.
rose silver, yaaaay a succulent lover! i fell in love with them when i saw them and totally changed my mind from flowers in my framing beds to those along with cactus'. my wisteria, i prune and guide up the pole. you have to decide which is the strongest vine and trim the rest so the strong vine gets all the nutrition. then if it ever strays far from the trellis or pole, just guide it back, but i've had a vine stick out about a foot from the pole and in the matter of days, it finds it's way back home and wraps around. now form y clematis ... it's not vining like it should so i'm going to send it packin to the back of the yard and get another wisteria to replace it. i'll take pics soon to show the progress. i've only had one flower bloom though :-(
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