Spring has begun!

 The time for seeds has begun!

I get so excited. We have catalogs laying about, bags of dirt in the house and on the deck, trays patiently waiting to be filled and seed packets. Many, many seed packets. Some circa 2011, haha!

Sunday we took advantage of the sun and relatively low wind so I could make a mess on the deck. I played in the dirt, and now have one tray of lettuce seeds and two trays of tomato seeds. I also have what I hope will become an herb garden precariously perched on a windowsill downstairs.

I'm sure there will be more. I'll keep you posted, but as of Friday, I have three brave lettuce seedlings, two tarragon (a new one for us), five thyme and one basil! Yippie!

How does your garden grow?

I don't know about you guys, but I get a little stir crazy at the tail end of winter before everything greens up and it all looks dead, brown, soggy, grotty, and dead. Ha. So I inevitably gather up a bajillion old pots and bags of dirt that Dada graciously concedes to buying and I sift through my seed packets trying to decide what I want to plant. I didn't order any new ones this year, so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the best!

Starting on the left, and if everyone shows up, we will have morning glories, then pansies in the foil covered pot as they like to start in darkness, the green pot with strings to hang from will host Thunbergia which is something white and winding along with Zebrina Malva Sylvestris which, oops, looks like a hollyhock upon Googling. Oh boy. Well, continuing on, in the tan pot are some leggy lettuce sprouts, four sun gold tomatoes are starting in that red/orange pot and last but not least are zinnias and rudbeckia which is a fancy name for Black Eyed Susans, I think. I hope.

The guys in the foreground are brandywine tomato and red currant seeds while the background are Allegheny Sunset tomatoes and cucumbers. We haven’t had good luck with cucumbers since The Best Nest where Dada had the raised bed gardens complete with the soaker hoses. Here they tend to drown in the spring and shrivel up to look pickley in the summer while they are still cucumbers! 

The three pots on the floor are sun golds for Zita, on the table are Thumbelina zinnias, and between them in the plastic bin are marigolds, Cherokee Purple tomatoes, black cherry tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, sweet basil, bee balm, more Rudbeckia, some sweet peppers, and some Genovese basil. And I still have more dirt and more seeds to play with! I’m so excited! With all this rain, though, perhaps I should begin cultivating water lilies... for our moats...

I know I've talked about this before, but some of you are new here. I tend to be more of a "let's plant these for the bees" than a "let's plant these for us" gardener. In fact, gardener is too strong of a word for what I do. I should label myself a putterer. I love plants that self-seed and I drive Dada to distraction as he, with his orderly engineer's mind, likes things tidy, in rows, cooperating with each other and not hogging nutrients while my vegetation philosophy runs towards, "flowers like to be close to their friends, too!" My things crowd each other, avoid each other, don't come up where expected, and come up where they are unexpected. I love that marigolds will crop up wherever they feel like it. "Don't pull him! That's a basil! He stays. And he stays. I don't know what that is. Let's leave it and find out; it's cute!" Can you hear Dada rolling his eyes and protesting? That's how I found out about mulleins, which are cool tall spiky plants with tons of blossoms and large, super soft leaves I've been told make an excellent substitute for toilet paper. Good to know! Especially these days, ha.  

I got a bonus seed packet of Chinese Foxglove last year, which I did nothing with because I didn't know anything about it. I had Dada look it up this year and it looks to me like borage, and even better, it says "tendency to self-sow". WOOHOO! He says I'm fired. So if you hear adult voices squabbling from our general area, carry on. It's just our annual Battle of the Blossoms.  

"How does your garden grow?"

Uh, well, ours is a complete disaster. Thanks for asking. 

I guess we had other things going on this summer. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Here is our garden jungle: 

I can hear Ray Stevens in my head, "embarrassing." So let's have a closer look at things.

Here are the tomatoes:

We planted Cherokee Purples and either Big Boys or Beefsteaks, but I haven't seen anything other than teeny cherry ones come up...

The strawberries are still doing their thing:

And we have a humungous basil:

The borage I planted for the bees is hanging in there:

Heh. That would be the purply blue flowers in that mess. As ever, you can click on any photo to have it open in a more eyeball-friendly page to better investigate.

I have no idea what these adorable yellow flowers are, but they have carroty-looking tops/stems so I purposely didn't weed them as I wanted to see what would happen. Anyone have a name for them?

Cilantro has gone all to coriander:

Butterflies are visiting the apple trees:

Spiders are everywhere:

This particular one is either brave or crazy, having built a web just outside our back door. I can't tell you how many times I've opened the door just a few inches to holler out to the boys and/or the dog, remembered the spider too late, and have had to apologize. It's a good thing I have no hair, or this poor thing would have to redo the web several times a day. And it's right at face height, so it's usually, *door opens, I take a big breath to begin to holler, pull head back a little bit as spider takes cover, apologize to spider, commence hollering while keeping door as closed as possible lest any bugs make it past the web and into the house, slam door shut* The spider is doing a good job as I've only seen one stink bug make it in so far...

The zinnias and marigolds did well! I even saw a hummingbird enjoying the zinnias.

And this, my friends, was lettuce in its former life:

The back "garden" was overtaken by the ghosts of last year's veggies. Apparently we'd tossed zucchini out to die and they reincarnated, took over, and had to be chopped back by PaPa during his last visit:

We did get a few zucchini out of the deal except they were so huge by the time we found them that they were really seedy and not much fun. I guess that's why Aldi sells little skinny ones, haha.

And it's almost apple season already! Eeeep!

Dada bought some fun shades for the deck this summer, which give a whole new resort-ish feel to the place:

Yes, that would be Virginia Creeper, creeper-ing along. There's also poison ivy in there, which all the menfolk currently have as they just can't stay away from machetes and chopping vine-covered branches and oy vey...

And my lovely, tough, good thing they take care of themselves hostas. Hosta? Hmm.

Those poor guys were completely dug up and tossed aside when the geothermal install happened. The guys doing the digging asked what they were and then shrugged, "well, they'll probably figure out how to come back." And they did! Yay!

I sure hope nobody was depending on us for tomatoes (unless they're cherry ones) or cucumbers or anything this year. None of my cucumbers tasted like anything much, and I can't tell if it was just because of chemo affecting taste buds or if it was the ridiculous wet spell followed by months of hot and dry without being watered or what, and nobody else in my family eats them to compare notes with. If nothing else, we helped birds and bees and butterflies, which is half the fun anyway. Uh, I mean, sorry I didn't get out there to weed very much, honey...