I decided to focus on the flower garden today.  I have the first dahlia blooming.  These are bulbs that the previous owners planted, and there are 2 bushes that are looking vigorous and loaded with blooms.  I wasn’t sure they would make it through the extra-cold winter we had, but here they are!

My sister gave me some starts from her dahlias.  They are coming up well in several places.  I know some are red–and some are “surprise!”  I’m eagerly waiting to see which is which.

The wax begonias and impatients are starting to grow and bloom.

The later peonies are blooming.  The red ones are done.  I planted marigolds and petunias along the edge of the flowerbed.  I can see some Calla Lillies coming up as well, here and there.  In the back (on the far left) the little zinnia seeds have come up, and I should have a double row of bright zinnias once summer comes.

I got this “firecracker” geranium at a local nursery.  It’s very striking and showy and is blooming more and more already.

I also got these geraniums with the varigated leaves.  This area needs HELP, obviously.  It wasn’t getting enough water until Rob adjusted it, so the only thing that is growing well is the weeds!!  I don’t think the dirt is very good in this area, as well.

The basil is growing well. I even robbed 3 leaves off of it for a sandwich I made.  Yum!  I have a second batch growing in the garden, too.

The food garden is growing well, there just haven’t been many changes.  The delicata squash came up–5 of them.  Birds or squirrels took out 3 of them so far, and the other 2 are only 1/2 there.  So, I’ll go buy a plant.  Things are sprouting, growing, blooming, and setting fruit–Lots going on!  I have been eating lots of lettuce.  It is just beautiful and tasty right now.

The Sungold cherry tomatoes are setting little tomatoes.  I’m looking forward to those.  A few years ago, a teen boy we know got us hooked on those.  He would give Rob a little basketful frequently from his raised bed garden and Rob would eat a few then and there, and bring the rest home.  We knew we had to grow them.  They are so tasty.  Yum!

The people who lived here obviously loved flowers and gardening.  All spring, there has been a steady succession of perennials blooming–both bulbs and plants.  They especially loved iris I think, because there have been 4-5 different kinds, at least.  The latest one is the yellow ones that just bloomed.  They are really tall and matched Ja’Ana’s dance costume perfectly.   There are several rose bushes, but they need some fertilizer or something.  There is a lot of black spot on them, as well.  I’ve been trimming them up, and getting some blooms.  I’m really happy to have so many flowers blooming–it is very cheerful!  The berry bushes are doing well, also, and I will have strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.

My cabbage decided to bolt before giving me any heads of cabbage!  I am very surprised, but it’s no wonder with the huge swings in temperature that we have had.  First, it’s been rainy and very cool.  We had lots of snow this winter, and a very cool, rainy spring.  Then, it hit the 90’s.  I guess that did the cabbage in and tricked it into thinking it was time to make seeds.  I hope the broccoli is not next……

The green beans came up great!  So did the purslane.  Thankfully, I’ve been able to easily hoe it out since the soil is so crumbly and nice.

But…..

Thousands, if not millions, of pigweeds came up to replace them.  So, today, I ran the hoe through it again.  Rob will till soon, but until then, I want to get the worst of it out of there before the weeds get big.

None of that matters.  I have a tiny little green tomato.  Really!  I was amazed and shocked when I came back from camping and there it was!

I have work to do, but there’s nothing new about that in a garden.  There is lettuce to pick, and snow peas forming.  The radishes are bolting, as is the boc choi.  I have a lot of weeds to hoe out and pull.  It’s shaping up to be a great garden!

  Each time the weather has cleared up, I’ve planted a few things.  This week was gorgeous, and I was able to finish up almost everything that needs to be planted now.  I like to plant in succession, and have veggies all summer long and as far into the fall as possible.

I was delighted to see these green beans pop up.  I had been afraid that the birds had eaten them because there were quite a few sprouted seeds laying on the top of the ground.  Thankfully, I planted thickly, and there are plenty that made it.

These snow peas are about to bloom.  They were one of the first things I planted.  These are the ones that are supposed to produce in 30 days.  Well, they came up right before Easter.  That was about 5 weeks ago, so they are not going to produce in 30 days.  But, if you look closely, there is a bloom at the bottom of the picture, so it won’t be long.  It was really rainy and cold this spring.   I don’t know if that slowed them down, or what, but they are blooming before my standard favorite, Oregon Sugar Pod II, which I planted as well, on the same day, so I could compare the two.  I left the blooming green onions that I planted last fall so they could lean on them.  If the onions go to seed, that’s fine, too.

This lettuce is starting to come along.  I picked enough to add to a salad Sunday.  I’m not sure if you can see the carpet of weed seeds on the right hand side of the lettuce.  In some places, the ground is red because the weeds are so thick.  I’ve been hoeing them out while they are tiny, and have been making good progress.  Rob will also do some tilling before long.

I picked a little boc choi, and a few radishes.  I’ve also been using green onions, and was able to get a few good spinach leaves from the bolting spinich.  They were still good in the salad.  You can see that I have another bunch of tiny lettuce seedlings coming up in the background.  I love having lettuce all summer long, so I plant every 2-3 weeks.  I also plant thickly, and then cut small plants out of row, giving more room for the others to grow.

The Marion berries are blooming.  So are the strawberries and raspberries.

The cabbage and broccoli are doing well.  They are beautiful in the morning sun.

The chives are blooming beautifully behind the rhubarb.  I planted thyme, parsley, rosemary, orange mint and dill in front of the rhubarb.  I will probably move some chives forward eventually. I’m not sure why they planted them behind the huge rhubarb.    Maybe it wasn’t huge then:)

There is a small area left in the garden that has not been planted.  I plan to put in a second planting of green beans later.  I want them to come ripe in the middle of August, so should plant them around the middle of June.  I also have some squash seeds to plant, and I plan to plant them in a flowerbed by a dead tree stump.  I will let the vines cover it over, hide its ugliness, and get squash to boot.  I need to get those seeds planted ASAP!  Maybe tomorrow.  We will see.  This is the week of appointments.   I’ve got 2 dental appointments for 2 kids tomorrow, and that will take all afternoon.  We will do school all morning.  In addition, on various days, we have 3 doctors appointments for various ones, plus Ja’Ana has extra tap dance practice and her weekly house cleaning.  Thankfully, it doesn’t take long to plant a handful of seeds.  Thankfully.  Because timing matters when it comes to gardening.

I’ve finally been able to get outside a little bit.  I have a LOT to do, but it’s been too wet to do it.  Over the past week, the weather has cooperated enough for me to do some yard work.  I have a lot of plans for this new place.  As bulbs and plants begin to emerge from their winter hibernation, I’m getting a sense of which ones I want to keep and which ones have to go.

This is going to be my herb garden.  It is a flowerbed next to the vegetable garden.  I’ve already removed a huge lemon balm plant.  There is a small one in the back that will stay.  I don’t use much lemon balm.  I want thyme, rosemary, sage, dill, cilantro and basil. I planted the parsley plant for a start, and I can see that there is a chive plant in the background. There are many little chive starts coming up.  I will only keep a few, and will either put stepping stones throughout the area, or move the chives forward.  I use them a lot in cooking and want them accessible.  I will leave the rhubarb.  It looks healthy and established.  I also unearthed a cold frame and will plant some things in there once I get a bag of dirt poured in there.  I’m not sure what, yet.

Rob got part of the garden tilled.  There are still a lot of weeds, and he will be re-tilling the rest and finishing the parts he did not do over the next couple of weeks.  He double-tilled this area, so I could plant.  I planted Golden Acre cabbage and broccoli from starts I bought.  The broccoli is a spring mixture, which should stagger the harvest.  I planted Walla Walla onions from little plants (the bare-root bundle) and Benny red onions from a 6-pack.  I have not grown them before, but that’s what Wilco had.  Pasty planted most of them, which was very helpful.

I planted seeds for Detroit beets, Nantes carrots,  spinich, pale green Swiss chard, Boc Choi Chinese mustard, Mixed radishes, Oregon Sugar Pod II snow Peas, Little White Snow Peas (the 30 day kind, it promises, we shall see), several lettuces–Buttercrunch and a mixed variety.  I planted a small quantity of many cool-weather seeds and plants and will succession plant those which I want more of.  I will plant the warmer-crop veggies later in the spring.  It’s way too cold and wet for them to grow, yet.

The blackberries we moved last fall are leafing out well.   I need to make sure they don’t grow back by the fence where we removed them from.  The raspberries there were here need attention.  They need new posts and wire, and to be pruned.  There are about 100 new starts growing and I need to move some over, and remove some.   The ones we moved here with us are starting to put out little tiny leaves, which is a relief, because that variety is the kind I love–so tasty. The blueberries are going to leaf out soon.   I hope they bloom well.   I got the strawberry bed into good shape, and the new plants are starting to grow a little bit.

I’ve only just begun to clean out the flowerbeds.  There seem to be random groupings of bulbs coming up in the middle, sides, edges, etc. of the flowerbeds.  Sometimes, there is a tall group coming up in front of a shorter one in the back.  I need to get rid of some and move some, once I figure out what I have.

We planted some dahlia starts from my sister in several places.  The daffodils Patsy planted last fall are getting established and will bloom better next year.  She planted each little bulb far away from each other little bulb and only a few had the strength to bloom this year.  Next year, it should be awesome.  We moved some other daffodils from the flowerbeds into that bed, and I showed her how to plant in groups, with a few bulbs in a cluster or area.  There are a few tulips that are lovely right now.

I emptied out some pots I brought from our old place and planted the primroses and pansies down into the edge of the flowerbeds in the back.  I had the girls plant some herb seeds in those pots and put them by the back deck.  If I get a lot that come up, I will transplant some of them into the herb bed and keep some in the pots for easy access from the kitchen.

I hope to do either wax begonias, or impatients along the edge of the front flowerbed in the front, plant zinnias along the house in front, and nasturtiums in the planter box by the front door.  Rob plans to put moss-killer on the grass, and keep mowing it.

During the night, the weather had the grace to drop a gentle rain onto all I planted yesterday.  Lovely.  I love spring.

When we moved into this new house, we were delighted to find berry bushes growing in the garden.  They are a blackberry of some sort, probably Marion berries, according to the old owner’s daughter.  They were growing up against the fence, and clearly had not been trimmed for a while.  Since there were quite a few chopped off pieces on the ground on the neighbor’s side of the fence, we concluded that he probably did not care to have them growing through to his side.  Also, we could not access the back side of the berries.  So, we decided to move them a couple of feet out away from the fence.

We started by digging up clumps of new, fresh vines.  They were a nice bright green color, and we left the old, gray-brown ones to be taken away.  We tried to make sure there was a nice clump of roots on each one we kept, and some even had a new bud growing.  Rob, Lovana and myself all had plenty of turns digging.  Once a good start was dug up, we planted it in the dirt and laid the vines out away from where we were working.  What we did not want or need, we put in the yard debris can.  We anticipate that the roots of the old vines will send out new shoots and we will need to kill them, but it sure looks great now.

A week or two passed, with plenty of rain to keep them alive.  Rob went up to my sister’s farm and grabbed a few fence posts we had stored there, and got some wire.  Today was nice and he pounded those fence posts into the ground and strung the wire between the posts.  He put several posts in the row, about 5 feet apart, and strung a low wire and a higher one.

Then Patsy and I tied them up with baling twine.  We tied each group of berries up to the lower and higher wire, and whenever the vines were long, tied them into a circle, using the wires to support them.  Next spring, they will fill out and make a nice barrier between us and the neighbor, be where we want them, and easy to pick.

It looks amazing!  As we were doing that, Rob was over on the left pounding in a few more posts for some raspberry plants I dug up at my old house.  My aunt kindly kept them all summer under her automatic sprinklers.  I got 6 good root “clumps” from my pot.

He strung wires for them, too, and I planted them.  They are really small after a summer crammed into a pot, but we will see how they do.  I have high hopes.

We both felt really good about getting these jobs done.   I don’t think I’ll harvest much next summer, but in a couple of years………YUM!  (The berries in the background are a project for another day–they are everbearing raspberries that were here–I need to trim and tie them up, and Rob needs to put in a better wire and maybe some more posts.  They don’t have as much flavor as my old berries, so I am super happy some of mine survived.)  It was great to get a nice day on a day we did not need to work.