Tag: victory gardens

Signs of Progress: A Garden Update

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The handsome fellow pictured here is Jerry, my cat. He’s prowling through the lemon grass, blueberries, and hollyhocks while I do some basic garden maintenance. Jerry is probably just as curious as I am about who has been nibbling the flowers off of my squash.

I hadn’t planned on doing a garden update so soon. I figured it would be a monthly thing, but then we had a lot of sun followed by a lot of rain and more sun. Those things led to major transformations. I’ve started to get some ripe cherry tomatoes, and I’ve got one tomato plant so huge it will be taller than I am before long. I can’t even imagine the size of the fruit that will come off of it later this summer.

I also got some trellises and tomato cages to try and contain the squash. A trip to my favorite nursery also yielded some sugar baby watermelon starter plants. Of course, there’s not much room in the beds so I put them in the strawberry patch and just outside the raised beds. I also took a couple of seeds from a spaghetti squash that I cooked and planted them. Now I’ve got a couple of sprouting plants. I think I may have to relocate one of them.

It’s really amazing to watch your food come to life. I keep thinking about being a little girl when McDonald’s used to hand out seed packets with Happy Meals (it’s almost too ironic to handle, I know). One year my mother and I planted pumpkins and watermelons. I don’t think the watermelons went anywhere, and the pumpkins got infested by bees. But here I am, probably 25 years later, with a veritable produce section in my backyard. Continue reading →

My June Garden

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The raised beds, in the very beginning…

I have this slightly obsessive need to document my garden’s progress. It’s a rather strange manifestation of OCD, but whatevs… When you first put in your starter plants it’s hard to imagine what they’ll look like in a few months. But if you take pictures every week or so, you start to realize how quickly the little guys grow and how easy it is to overlook the change when you see your plants every day. Tomato plants make for especially good pictures, thanks to the rungs on the tomato cages which clearly mark your plants’ progress.

As long as I’ve got this picture taking compulsion, I may as well put the results to good use and blog about it.

Now that the raised beds and plants are in, I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out how to make the most of what I’ve got. I prowl Pinterest looking for homemade fertilizers, ideas to keep the vines in check, and sprays for powdery mildew and black spot on my roses. But it’s still fairly early in the summer, so here is a glimpse at where I started. Continue reading →