I am finally back to finish up the garden tour! And I cannot believe that three weeks have passed since I wrote my part 1 post! We have been just SO busy! Mainly busy with non-garden things, but we have done a few garden related items, AND of course the garden has been growing! But I want to give the next part of our garden tour, so will just pick up in the garden where I left off. . .
Above is one of the corners of the garden. It is one of the three original garden beds that we put in, back before we started connecting them and put mulch in the pathways so we wouldn't need to mow. This is right outside our bedroom window and our bathroom window, and I LOVE being able to look out at the garden every morning while I get ready in the bathroom! Our bathroom is the tiniest bathroom we have ever had, but being able to look outside at the garden and the sun rise more than makes up for the lack of size! I have this garden bed filled with perennials, just a random collection of things. My purple coneflowers I started from seed--they are in three spots in this bed. There is a short purple spiky thing that I bought at Walmart on clearance but I have no idea what it is--sorry about that! Almost completely passed blooming, so it is hard to see in this picture is a light pink gara, also from Walmart. A week or so ago it was glorious. It has these tall grass like fronds that get covered all up and down with lovely tiny pink flowers. Then also passed are some basic yellow/orange day lilies that I bought from my niece when her club was doing a flower fund raiser. Oh--I almost forgot! Not sure if you can see it in the above picture or not, but in the corner farthest away is a purple day lily that I bought at Lowes in a little pot for $4.00. I chose this pot on purpose, because when I looked at it I could see that there were actually FOUR tiny Day Lilys in that pot. So after bringing it home, I carefully separated it in half. My daughter got one half--with two small plants for her garden, and I planted the other group of two in my garden bed. These are some of the ways to save money in gardening: 1) plant perennials! 2) plant from seeds 3) divide plants to get more for different locations
Above is not a very exciting bed--just one of the little "connecter beds" that goes from one 4x8 garden bed to another 4x8 garden bed. In this case, this little bed has a cherry tomato planted in the back, and it DID have four sunflowers planted along the front edge. That is, until the cute but bad little chipmunks dug up three of my four sunflower seedlings! Yes, I replanted the ones they dug up and left to die--they didn't even EAT them, just dug them up--but they dug up the replants as well, so I gave up and decided to just be thankful for the one sunflower they choose to leave for me. Once the sunflowers are larger, I think they don't get hurt by the chipmunks, but those rascals just dig in the same exact spot where the tiny seedlings are, leaving the seedling exposed to languish on top of the soil in the hot sun and perish before I find it and try to rescue it! Oh well! That's life in the garden!
So now we come to our kale bed. See any kale growing in it? Nope! Me either! This is what USED to be a lovely kale and collard bed, that was filled with beautiful green plants for us to eat. We did eat from it several times, but the problem is the netting we had to protect it from moths did not get put on on time (that is what the frame is for, to drape the netting over and clip it to the bottom edge). This meant that the nasty moths got into our kale, laid their eggs, and hatched out their little devouring caterpillars and they ate and ate and ate and grew big and strong eating all that kale and collards . . . leaving no good leaves for us to eat! Rather selfish of them, don't you think? I mean, they COULD have at least SHARED! So in an effort to at least try and save our plants--in this area, kale will actually grow through the winter time when the moths are not around to eat it--we went ahead and took the netting off. It wasn't helping anyway, because they had already gotten inside it so it was actually rather keeping the moths IN with our plants instead of screening them OUT. We also picked the plants bare of all the leaves and put them on the compost pile far away. BUT, we left the plants there, because they will grow back.
They are already growing back baby leaves! I emailed a gardener friend today, and asked him for advice on what we can do, and he shared of a powder that is safe and we can use it to dust the plants with. So maybe we have a hope of saving the plants after all. Time will tell! We should probably do both--powder the plants AND put the screening back on top of them. . . I will have to talk to my hubby and see what he wants to do.
Next to our kale/collards bed we come to our second tomato bed. This one is filled with Roma tomatoes. These were all grown from some old seed that I had, started in the basement under regular shop lights back in February. They are looking nice, and we already have quite a few green tomatoes on them! I cannot wait for them to start to ripen! Nothing--NOTHING at the vegetable section of the grocery store can beat a garden ripe tomato! And since these were from seeds that I already had purchased a previous year, it felt like they were free! The cages were from previous years as well. They do rather start to fall over as the plants grow, but we do our best to pound in a stick here and there to help hold the cages up, and sometimes tie a few of the cages together!
You can also see in the above picture with the tomato bed where I have not finished mulching the pathways in our garden. I waited to purchase more mulch until it went on sale the start of the summer for Memorial Day. When it did go on sale at Lowes, I grabbed eight bags. So I have the supplies, but now I need more time--and unfortunately you cannot purchase that in bags at Lowes!
After the tomato bed with the Romas in it, we come to an empty bed. This is one that we just added in this year. My plan is for this bed to stay a vegetable bed, and not a flower bed. This way I will have some beds to rotate my tomatoes around each year. Previously we had them in the same location year after year, but we ended up getting some soil borne diseases and learned that crop rotation with tomatoes can help with that. SO, the two tomato beds that we have this year are not the same two beds that I planted tomatoes in last year. With adding this new bed in this year, I decided to try a bit of trench composting. I had read about trench composting, where you basically--just as it sounds, dig a trench and bury your compost. Only in addition to that, you are burying it right in the garden bed location where you are going to want it to stay. So instead of piling it somewhere else in your yard and then later when it turns to compost transporting it over to your garden bed, it just breaks down right there in your garden, underneath the dirt. So this empty unplanted garden bed was the perfect place to try out a bit of trench composting for the first time. Both my husband and I decided that we LOVED trench composting! One step, instead of several steps! Then, after trench composting for about a month or two in this new bed, I noticed what you see in the above picture starting to pop up. Upon closer inspection, I discovered they were not weeds, but cantaloupes!!! True story--I had actually been considering doing trench composting in this bed for a while, and then covering it with plastic and planting some cantaloupes in the center of the bed. Well, I guess I don't need to plant cantaloupes any longer, because the trench composting ended up accidentally planting them for us! They are not nicely spaced in the center of the bed, but I think they will grow just fine where they are, and I will simply try and guide their vines to sprawl out towards the middle of the bed and not out into the pathways. We'll see!
This garden bed above is also a new one we just added this Spring. It is a work in progress, as you can see. Right now, there are just three flowers planted in it, and we added the cardboard around the plants to help keep the weeds down. Our plan is that once we get a few more flowers in the bed, we will mulch the bed and that mulch will cover the cardboard. But I wasn't sure how fast this was going to happen, because since I am wanting mainly perennials in my garden they do cost quite a bit more. WELL, I had a happy surprise happen to me last Friday! I was at Walmart, and my habit is to always start my shopping by swinging by the plants and especially to look on the Clearance shelves, or as I call them, the "Dead plant shelves" to just see if there happens to be any perennials. Most of the time there isn't, but once in a while I find one or two. Well Friday was my day! I discovered tons of plants on the Clearance rack! And the nice thing for me was there were lots of perennials and while they WERE quite wilted, they really did not look all that dead to me. In fact, my hubby who was with me, and I both thought a nice drink of water would revive quite a few of them. . . AND most of them were marked down from $7.88 to $1.72!!!! So we happily filled a shopping cart with them. In all, with tax included we "rescued" thirteen perennials and paid only $26! What a blessing! At full price, that would have been $102.44 (plus $10 for tax) worth of flowers! You can see them lined up in the above picture, just next to the garden bed and a log is helping to hold them up as we were having a windy day. We do not have them planted yet, but have been watering them and they have perked up very nicely and I think already look very beautiful--and they will be even happier once planted! About half will go in this bed you can see here, and the other half will go in a new bed that is mirroring this one just across the way. We got several more pots of bee balm, two of butterfly bush, quite a few of coneflowers that are a orange/yellow hue--not the regular purple that we have already, and three pots of something I cannot remember the name just now, but the orange/red flowers just to the right in the picture! They are all looking so pretty, with just some water! So this is another of my "secrets" for gardening frugally--check out stores for plants on the Clearance shelves!
Well--I truly thought I would be finishing our garden tour with this post, but I still have quite a few things to show and tell about, so I think we will need ONE more post to finish up. Or maybe two more. Or possibly three? I will try and not take three weeks to write up the next post, but no promises as I AM pretty busy!
Are you growing a garden in your yard? If so, do you stick with all vegetables? Or do you mix in fruits and flowers along with it? I would love to hear about your garden, and what you do to garden frugally!
Happy Gardening!
~Susan
