Spring? Who can tell, the weather has been so weird!

Last fall we had Mary Ellen of Verdesign develop a plan for our garden.  She did an amazing job and we've been so pleased.

She suggested that we plant spring bulbs in the front and back of the house.  We hesitated-and now that they are up I can't imagine why.

Backyard

 This is a shot taken from the back yard, looking up at the vegetable garden.  We never had flowers here - we never really thought of it as part of our garden.  We put the bench there to look down the ravine, and the "seasonal stream" which in the past few years has been more like an ongoing marsh.

We have yellow daffs, daffs with orange trumpets, all facing south as they strain to reach the sun.

Front bed

This is a shot of the front of the house, looking to the right of the front door as you face the house.  The vegetable garden is in the upper right.  The andromeda have great color; the forsythia in the back pick up the yellow of the daffodils in the front.

Before the daffodils bloomed we had snow drops-starting on New Year's Day for heaven sake!

Magnolia

The "piece de resistance" was our magnolia tree, which Mary Ellen moved to the back of the house and which got a lot of sun this year.  Here's a shot before the frost killed the flowers :(

We counted 11 flowers and then we had frost.  Every magnolia in the neighborhood looks as though the flowers were burned-all brown and shriveled.

I think my favorite new view is the view of the center circle (which is really an oval). The ferns that will arrive later in the spring are sending up their fiddleheads, and in a few days it will be full of grape hyacinths, but right now it's a profusion of daffodils.

This picture doesn't really show off the sun dial in the center but I hope you get the basic idea.

Center with daffodils

Happy spring, everyone!  And happy gardening.

Images from the garden before the heat wave

Things were coming along best before the heat of early July, and then all the specialty bugs, worms, caterpillars and who knows what else. You know--plant asparagus, get asparagus beetles, plant squash, get squash borers. ETC. Anyway, these are pretty pictures.

Garlic!

Softneck and hardneck.

August: the garden is at its peak

We have a ton of stuff from the garden, even though we lost our zucchini to squash borers and most of our cukes. These pictures tell the story-that's a huge head of cabbage, from which we hand picked a ton of cabbage worms and drowned in soapy water (and we probably ate some, too).

We're still getting strawberries (you can see them in front on the cutting board but some critter got most of them-not sure which critter).
We've harvested Black Krim heirloom tomatoes - those are the ones with the little bit of a crack in them. They were fabulous. Note the two types of potato-red and yukon gold.

And the real surprise? Banana peppers, all from one plant. Anne has become convinced that Mel Bartholomew might really know what he's talking about: Square Foot Gardening here we come!

Our garden doesn't look like his-yet. We've got the raised beds, all we need now is the plan.

July photos

No pictures of the garden, just of the bounty of the garden: potatoes! What a surprise this was (even though we planted them, neither one of us expected that they would really grow!). Look at how happy Anne is with our 2 1/2 pounds of red potatoes. They were delicious and very, very special.

We also got beans, both green and purple. These have been fabulous, and I've really enjoyed making a green bean and potato salad with a mango yogurt dressing (last night with a cumin yogurt dressing!) from Moosewood Low Fat Favorites Recipes, one of our favorite cookbooks. Here's a link to the Moosewood Restaurant site, if you're interested.

This has been the best garden year yet!

Where has the summer gone?

So here are some pictures of the garden-it's now August and I somehow didn't even post one picture all of June and July, so I'll just post highlights (but not the squash borers or the asparagus beetles-more pleasant highlights).
So here are a few June shots-on the left is the cucumber obelisk (with a Gerber daisy on top-thanks to Betty Torrance, thanks Betty!) before it was overrun with too many cucumbers.
And before bugs got most of them.
The tomatoes are a much happier story, so here's a shot of them from early June (above) with a whole mess of (I think) Johnny Jump Ups in front of them.
One last June shot, the one in the center above-look at how neat everything looks!

Spring, or should I say, summer?

One of the nice things (perhaps the only nice thing) about the storms of the winter is that we now have "partial sun" in our vegetable garden, which is a huge improvement over the "partial shade" that I believe that we had last year.
I only know this because we bought a Sun Calc light meter that tells us this. And the garden is looking great. This is an early picture-note the fencing at the very top.
This is a new addition to keep woodchucks out of the garden. Bill Alexander in this excerpt from The $64 Tomato tells the story of the woodchuck in his garden who waited for the pulsing on the electric fence to stop and slipped through the two electric wires. Bill Alexander called him "Super Chuck."
Made me glad I didn't bother with the electric fence this year. Anne wasn't too keen on it since it only takes one time for the batteries to go, or for the grounding to come undone, and the woodchuck has salad.
Everything is very lush-look at this, taken over the Memorial Day weekend-those are the snap peas on the pea fence from Gardener's Supply (our favorite place for garden stuff). And the raised beds are last year's model from Square Foot Gardening. My nephew Michael got this year's model-tool-less! When these fall apart, and they will, I'm going for the "tool-less" kind. We used Mel Bartholomew's book, Square Foot Gardening, New Edition as a guide. I especially like the revised "Mel's Mix."
Let me tell you about the strawberries-Anne harvested this pint on Saturday. They are amazingly sweet, and amazingly soft-if you make a fist with them in your hand you'll have squished berries.
So far, so good. Let's hope it stays this way!