Updated Photos of the Garden

I purchased this lavender plant a few weeks ago from the Hub City Farmer's Market.  It's grown a lot since I potted it and it smells wonderful!  In the background is my favorite little blue chair I got from an antique store/ flea market.

I just purchased this transplant last week from a guy people call "The Professor".  He grows and sells transplants and fresh veggies from home for a killer price! Most of the transplants are $1 and his veggies are cheaper then at the grocery store.  You can even pick a gallon of blackberries for only $10- that's only $2 a pint!  This particular bell pepper will actually be purple when fully grown!  The Professor had some already full grown peppers and they are beautiful!

This is a very small sampling of our blackberries!  I can probably pick 2-4 cups a day of berries right now, if I had time, and there are just as many red berries that will be ripening soon.  It's been great having the huge production this year.  I've made a few desserts with them and have been putting them in my salads for lunch frequently.  The best part is being able to "gift" freshly picked blackberries to friends and family.  I can even show them the little cuts I got on my hands from the thorns from picking their berries that morning. That's a labor of love!

Figs in waiting!  Our fig tree has loads of unripened figs just soaking up the sun and waiting for their time to shine!  We may put some kind of netting or a fake owl in the tree to deter birds from eating the sweet fruits.

A peak at the front beds of the house.  You can see Frank the Frog defending the garden, the varigated liriope, the nandina bushes, and the newest addition to the garden, caladiums! 

Front to back: Garlic chives, Roma tomato plant in wire hoop, jalapeno plant, a very dry rain barrel, wood pile.

The tomato plant is hard to see behind the freshly planted, sprawling chives but the plants are doing very well! 

Green beans! This is one of several plants producing beans.  I will be snapping those suckers off today and preparing a delightfully fresh dish with them! 

Tomatoes and Peppers

         Its been a few weeks since I invested a little time and energy into the garden.  Mothers day worked out to allow for free time during the day, so I took full advantage of my time and the beautiful day and tended to the garden.  The veggies are looking a lot better since I added the Miracle Gro a couple of weeks ago but I still wanted to add a little top soil under each plant to reduce the amount of compost.  This, as you can imagine, was somewhat time consuming to achieve.  The black weed paper was one obstacle I had to overcome.  I thoroughly enjoy not having to pick weeds (yet) out of the garden thanks to the paper so it was important that I didn't rip the paper too much and have gapping holes.  The other concern is obvious: the plants are rooted in their location and I didn't want to uproot them.  With painstaking care, I added enough topsoil to make myself feel better and offer a little incentive to the plants to continue growing.  I did, of course, rip a huge hole in the black paper in one area of the garden but, ah, what's a girl to do!

Roma Tomatoes
(The variety I am growing) 

        I also transplanted my three tomato plants and a banana pepper plant.  I had previously moved the tomato plant seedlings to clay pots outdoors to give each plant more room to grow.  The plants quickly became larger transplants and looked great.  When I finally moved them to the garden I was amazed at the speed in which the roots grew.  It seems like the roots must have been out of room to grow a week or two ago without my realizing it.  I carefully transplanted the four plants into a lovely mixture of top soil, native soil, and compost.  Hopefully, delicious ripened tomatoes and peppers will make it to my table soon!

         The green bean stalks are starting to flower and the fig tree is starting to produce figs (not yet ripe).  I plan to get a camera soon so that I can share photos of whats going on.  We already have a camera but its designated for the business since Justin takes a lot of pictures for work.  My last little project yesterday was one of inspiration rather than a "to do".  More on that for my next post!

A Little Left of Well

I've been sick for nearly two weeks now so it's been a little while since my last post.  On top of that, the garden is struggling and hanging on for dear life due to some mysterious cause.  The leaves of the plants were turning yellow instead of a bright and happy green and it seemed that the plants' growth was stunted but there were no bugs to be seen and I don't suspect any type of disease.  We have a few hypotheses for the culprit: too much watering, not enough watering, high levels of chlorination in our water, too much compost, the garden gods are against us.  After talking it over with a few family members that garden and are much more skilled than I, we decided to get Miracle Gro for vegetables (which I was mildly saddened to have to purchase) and 200 ft of extra hose so that we can better water our garden.

Side note on the watering situation: The garden is about 200 ft from our outside source of water.  We have a rain barrel that we put out a couple of months ago with the intent of watering the garden with rain water but it has rained exactly 1 time since we put it out, so no watering from the rain barrel yet.  I was lugging jugs of water to water the veggies until today.  (See why I blame the garden gods?  One dose of rain in two months, really?  I guess the garden gods forgot the phrase, "April showers, bring May flowers".)  Ok, back to the story.

This 200 ft. of hose just made my life and my garden so much better.  I expect that with the Miracle Gro, the new found source of water, and the Alaska Fish Fertilizer we have been using, our garden will recover in no time.

Since I haven't been out in the yard for about a week now because of my sickness, I was delightfully surprised by our blackberry bush.  Four cups of plump blackberries were ready for the picking and literally hundreds of red berries are patiently waiting to turn black.  I doused the bush with water (thanks to my new hoses) to encourage nice plump berry production.

For the first time back in the garden in a week, it felt really nice to be out there and feel like I was being productive with the garden.  I still need to transplant our tomato plants which look great and I need to pot the lavender transplant I bought from the farmers market.  Those thing will have to wait until Monday though, because Festival International is this weekend and plenty of good music, friends, and food are awaiting!