Last year the gardens turned out mediocre. The vegetable garden didn’t yield much for me. I had absolutely no broccoli, no strawberries and no cucumbers. I did get a few green peppers and tomatoes, but the tomatoes were really small. The butter lettuce grew really well, but tasted terrible. I’ve decided I’m not planting that lettuce and broccoli again. I won’t plant green peppers again either because we didn’t even eat the ones that grew. I think the strawberries needed to establish themselves some, and didn’t have enough room to really grow and produce fruit. I’m pretty confident that I planted the cucumber too late to give me anything.It’s definitely a trial-and-error learning experience. I’m starting to plan a lot better for what is going to be fruitful and what is going to last.
The flower gardens last year did pretty well for annuals. One major note is that I didn’t understand the difference between an annual and a perennial last year, and I happened to plant almost all annuals. The only perennial I planted was by accident, and it did make it through the winter and came back strong. This one was good ol’ phlox. Other than that the impatiens and geraniums gave out at the first sign of a cool breeze. I took two of the gerbera’s inside for the winter to see if I could over-winter them. It worked! They even kept blooming for a couple of weeks after I brought them inside. I just set them by a window that gets partial light and watered occasionally. They went dormant for the winter and looked dead really. Around mid-March this year, they came back A couple of lonely green leaves sprouted and they are getting bigger and taller. I’ll put them back out front again this year with some daylilies and probably try to over-winter them again.
THIS YEAR I’ve gotten much smarter about this whole gardening thing! Perennials! Maybe I won’t have to destroy all of my joints and muscles by planting each year now. Plus I feel better about my ability to keep plants alive now, so I was willing to get some plants that I really like now that I don’t feel that I will kill them.
I started a few from seed, which is brand new to me. Moonflower, butterfly (milk)weed, pumpkin and shasta daisy. I sowed the seeds 12 days ago in one of those Jiffy greenhouses with peat pellets. I know a couple of these are annuals but if I can grow them from seed I don’t mind spending the money. The moonflower is coming up really quick, with big leaves. I’ll have to plant it soon. Shasta daisy are sprouting, but still small. I haven’t seen anything from the pumpkin and butterfly weed. I read recently that I should have cold-treated the butterfly weed seeds first but they are already sown now. I hope they grow, I was really looking forward to that one. I don’t really care if the pumpkin grows, just a little experiment to grow my own jack-o-lanterns.
Onto the veggie garden: strawberries, tomatoes, and raspberries. I let the fall leaves cover and stay on the strawberry plant from last year, and it came through the winter really well. There are about 18 off-shoots from the original plant now, and I intend to just let it take over the spot I made for my veggies last year. Now it should have enough room to really grow and give us some strawberries. I decided to grow beefsteak tomatoes this year since last year’s were so small. The whole point of my growing tomatoes is so that I can have fried green tomatoes all the time, and for that I’ll need the size of them to be worth frying. Raspberries grow wild in my neighborhood anyway, so I thought that was a safe bet to plant. We’ll have our own raspberry bush now instead of having to walk along other peoples’ property to get some.
I think the best decision I’ll have ever made is to switch to perennials for the flower garden. I love cut flowers so I mostly planted those. I looked at a list of perennials (so that I wasn’t tempted to buy more annuals), and picked the ones I liked. Then I cross-referenced my list with the ASPCA’s list of toxic plants to dogs. Our dogs are very curious and will chew and eat anything. I can’t risk them eating a flower that I brought inside to put in a vase and getting sick. What I ended up with is peonies, lilies, roses and candytuft. I planted candytuft last year but I’m going to try them again. I have all dark red and pink lilies in bulb form scattered through the rest of the plants. I almost didn’t buy peonies, since I don’t have the patience to wait on a bulb for it and an established plant at our local nursery was around $25 (too much in my opinion). Then I found one at Lowes for $8. Beat that! I bought double pink peonies, and there is already one bud. I wait Last but definitely not least, I planted eden climbing roses in white/pink. The buds are pink and they change to white once they bloom. They are supposed to have a light fragrance, and once they are established they are really beautiful. The eden roses are around 100 petals to a flower, whereas normal roses are around 40 I think. So they are jam packed with petals and look really awesome. I don’t know if they will give me anything this year, but maybe next year they will. I also threw some lavender in there for fragrance and groundcover, and I did plant four impatiens to help fill the garden in until the others get closer to full size.
Pictures of the new gardens are coming…
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