Garden Update May 28, 2012

It's been HOT HOT HOT here this past week. I've been busy planting vegetables and flowers and scoring awesome deals on clearance plants and manure at Lowe's. Here's what's going on around my yard:

First up, the vegetable garden. I actually used twine to mark out the square foot dimensions. The resulting garden is a little rigid looking, but the nice bonus to rigid looking is that I can plant significantly more than I have previously. I've quite a few more empty spaces and I may put some annuals in there to help attract bees.

This shows my peas climbing up the back fence and the large 4'x8' bed of alpine strawberries. The peas are a bit stunted from the heat-they are about 3' tall and are flowering and setting fruit. We've munched on exactly 3 peapods thus far. The strawberries, however, have produced nearly 1 pound of fruit with lots more to come.

Sorry for the bad angle--this is Bryce's corn bed and to the north of the corn is our newly planted asparagus. Most of the asparagus has popped through and it's looking like most of it is female and they are all setting berries.

My awesome trio of rain barrels! They are becoming covered by the perennial sweet pea vines and other assorted plants. I've heard that people in the neighborhood call our house "the one with the rain barrels" and since there's no ^*&#&*((&  when they talk about our house I guess it's all good. Right?

Little progress has been made out front in the new cottage garden bed, other than Brad has been busy cutting sod out to get the new shape. See the hose? That's my form for the new layout. The poppy has finally bloomed and it was worth it to leave it there all by itself.

Here's a close up shot of the poppy-it's about 3 feet tall and is LOADED with blooms.

Here's why we haven't made much progress out front-5+ yards of mulch was delivered last week. We get our mulch for free from a local tree service. They only give us good chips from non-diseased trees, usually maple, and they dump it here for free. They save on the landfill fees and we save this much mulch from ending up in the landfill. As it's maple, we can't use it in the vegetable beds, but it makes for great mulch around the pool and sandbox.

Can you see the bee on this pink Salvia? I wish I knew the variety as it has a lovely round habit and the bees LOVE IT. I got it from Lowe's last year for $0.50.  Yep. Fifty cents. It's awesome this year.

In the backyard, my Spiderwort is in it's glory. This looks so great paired with my old fashioned orange poppies.

My Sweet William that I grow from seed every year is prominent in front of the shed. I've got quite a hodge podge of plants in here, but it looks nice & my next door neighbor has a prime view of this garden from her deck. If you look in the bottom right corner of the photo you can see that our shed is falling apart. We're not sure what's holding it together at this point, but since it's still standing, we'll leave it there.

There. That's a tour of the highlights around my yard for this week. I can't believe how much is actually blooming and growing so early in the year!

Check out how the garden looked late May 2011.

Spiderwort

Check out my amazing Spiderwort (Tradescantia) plant. This baby is nearly 4 feet tall--I have a tomato cage in there somewhere to help keep it upright! This was given to me from a friend, J, who got some from her Dad, taken from somewhere wild on his property in Northern Michigan. I don't do anything to it-I don't even water the darn thing. I just whack it to the ground when it's done blooming (usually August) and it comes back bigger and better every year. 

Grow Your Own.

Celery. Grow your own celery. It's super easy! I first saw this idea on Pinterest and just had to try it myself. I've never grown celery in the garden and this seemed like a super-frugal and super-easy (ahem, lazy!) way to grow some.

This photo shows about 2 weeks worth of growth. I simply chopped off the end of a celery, placed it in a saucer of water and waited. I think I'll leave it in the saucer until I see evidence of roots and then I'll plant it out in the garden.

Whatcha think? Have you ever tried this??

First Strawberries!

Drumroll, please!

Here they are--the first strawberries of the year!

Yeah, okay, it's only 3, but they were SUPER YUMMY. None of the kids wanted to eat one, so I got 'em all to myself. They are that perfect combination of sweet and sour and SOOOO red in color! My strawberry plants are dripping with green berries and I expect to harvest a pound or two from our 4'x8' strawberry patch.

Webelos!

Brett bridged over to Webelos this week. Our Pack does a nice ceremony for the kids advancing to the new rank. Our Webelos had already had their Crossing Over to Boy Scouts in March, so this ceremony is just for the kids moving up a level. 

We collect their neckerchiefs ahead of time and have the Webelos 1 go across the bridge to be Webelos 2. They wait there and are given Webelos neckerchiefs to present to the Bear Scouts who cross the bridge. It's a cool thing-each older rank puts the new neckerchiefs on the next youngest rank. It's a big deal. The boys really get a kick out of tying the new necker on the younger group. The Tigers become Wolves and some of them were so excited when I told them that next year, THEY will get to put neckerchiefs on someone. Gives them something to look forward to. 

I know a lot of Packs don't do anything to recognize the new rank level, but I'm glad ours does. 

Quotable Kids.

Never take a 4 year old to the store to buy a birthday present-and then tell the 4 year old to NOT tell his brother what we bought.

Bryce & I picked up Brett at the bus stop after school. Brett got in the car and this is the exact conversation.

Bryce: Hey Brett-y, we bought Mario Party 9 at Meijer today.
Brett: (looks confused)
Bryce: It's for your birthday. I'm not supposed to tell you.

*facepalm*

The rest of the car ride home was that Brett, even though he knows what his present is, may not play it until his actual birthday.

Lesson learned. Must resume gift shopping WITHOUT Bryce.

Let Them Play Outside!

I'm always hollering at the kids to "go outside." It's been beautiful here lately and there's no reason to stay in the house. Lest you think my kids sit around and play video games after school--no, they don't. They come home from school, empty out their bags, get a snack, do homework, and they are allowed 1 tv show (usually "Cyberchase" or "Arthur"). Then I get 'em out!

Check out what Brett made the other day:

A nice slingshot, from a birch branch he said he found on the ground. So far-the slingshot has not been used against his brothers, but it's only a matter of time.