I got a paper at the farmer’s market recently that tells me when to start plants for my area. Guess how many should start in February/March like I started them?
Yeah, none. Well, I’m laminating it so I have the sheet next year.
Anyway! How’s my gardening going?
Firstly, strawberry and squash towers!
Well the watering is going great as you can see from the surrounding plants which are thriving. I need to weedwhack them and then maybe put down some cardboard and mulch around the bases if I don’t want the produce hiding in the greenery. The strawberries, which I got as bare roots, are thriving! Hooray! The marigolds I planted with the strawberries are also going well. The squashes are… coming. Some of them. I stuck in some seeds recently so we’ll see if they sprout soon. If this goes well, I’ll let you know but probably not do it again next year; I want a raised bed in the back yard fenced away from getting tromped by dogs and use runners from the strawberries to make 4 strawberry towers instead of 2 and the squashes/pumpkins should end up there. Plot plot scheme scheme.
The raspberry starts I got are also showing green; I bought 5 black raspberries and 5 yellow raspberries that are separated from each other because apparently the blacks are more susceptible to disease that the yellows/reds may carry. I again might need to rake out some mulch and cardboard around them to make it easier to see the plants and not the incursion of lawn. I also have some black raspberries that I grabbed from our old house. I’m not expecting harvest from them this year; raspberries grow a stem one year that produces fruit the next year. Then there are 6 blueberry plants; also not expecting produce from them this year. In fact I plucked flowers off so they could focus on growth. I want to get more of the black beds and theoretically just have 2 in each later down the road but for now, 1 metal bed and some bagged fruit. Then there’s the potatoes. It’s a mix of seed potatoes I bought this year, leftover tiny ones that weren’t big enough to eat last year (which was pretty much all of them because I had to harvest early for the move), and some russets that started sprouting in the kitchen. Most seem to be growing well so I’m hopeful!
Not pictured, I’ve got some peas and beans growing, some herbs in bags, tomatoes and peppers in an aquaponics system inside (maybe I’ll post about that later), a few rose plants, butterfly garden, and… I think that’s about it this year. My success with seeds started indoors this year has been…. very very low. I’ll probably try again next year because I can’t stop myself but I might try for a smaller amount.
And there’s the Bleeding Hearts pictured at the intro! Those and the Lily of the Valleys are some of my favorite garden flowers and I’m pretty chuffed to have both of them growing at my house this year.
I’m going to try to backlog a little bit but expect the next few months to be shorter. As Jane Austen says, “[I am] in daily expectation of my confinement” which is a weird but not totally inaccurate way of putting childbirth so I expect my energy going in different directions for a while.
Intellectual Property of Elizabeth Doman
Feel free to share via link
Do not copy to other websites or skim for AI training
