Wild Violet's Garden Blog

One evening this week, Monday, June 20th to be exact, my Hubby and I planted our new blueberry hedge around the two outside edges of the potager.  I ended up deciding on 'Northblue' plants since they looked nice at the nursery and Auntie Linda, who grows just a tiny ACRE of these blue beauties, gave her seal of approval to the performance of this northern-hardy variety.  Apparently they've only failed to produce once in twenty years for her, that's a pretty solid record in my book.  I don't really have it in the 'budget' to buy eleven #1 gallon blueberry plants, so Hubby and I declared them his Father's Day gift, pretty much making them a necessity.  That's how we roll. I wanted to act like a sober gardener and plant in straight rows for once, so I actually measured and marked the rows w/ paint before digging.  They are planted on center 4' away from the outside veggie boxes.  'Northblue' is supposed to get about 3'...

Over the weekend we discovered the strawberries are ripening.  The Girl was confused at first about what the heck Mom was looking for under the leaves until I handed her one and she tasted her first ripe strawberry, warm from the garden.  The taste of homegrown just blows the grocery store ones away, no comparison.  Then she was enthusiastically on the hunt also.  She is sort of learning to pick only the red ones, and Mom is learning to watch her close and inspect berries for bugs and creepy crawlies before she shoves them in her mouth.  In other news, the sweet corn is up a couple of inches, as are the Zucchini and Winter Squashes.  Pumpkins mostly survived the transplant and I have watered almost every day since they've been out.  Last week we had two days of 90-100 degree temps and I thought for sure they were all going to get cooked.  The only variety that did pretty much all croak was 'Superfreak Goosebumps Hybrid'.  I had a ...

Sad news for a tree hugger like me: we had to have a huge maple taken down in our backyard.  The ginormous silver maple sitting smack dab in the middle of the backyard was slated for trimming by the power company, on account of our old-man-next-door-neighbor down the line complaining to them that his power was flickering (picky, picky!).   Big 'Ol Mr. Silver Maple is in the background of this old shot of my perennial bed  A couple of weeks ago, a very nice tree trimming guy subcontracted by our power company comes to my door and tells me they need to trim the big maple but that it's seen better days, is showing signs of internal decay, and that if I want to the power company will go ahead and have them remove it (at no cost to us) because it's a 'hazard tree' to their lines.  I asked around and it sounds like a tree that big would probably cost us at least $1,000 to have cut down otherwise, and no doubt i...

Hubby tilled the big 'Back 40' garden this morning with a borrowed tiller (thanks, Putz) after blowing our tiller up last night.  Oy vey.  Something is always breaking around here.  Planted Peaches & Cream sweet corn today (10 rows, each about 10 feet long, I suppose).  I had more corn seed than I thought and just kept hoeing more rows to use it up.  I love having sweet corn in the freezer for the long winter.  Since I got a little crazy w/ corn, I used up a lot of space which I had intended for pumpkin patch.  But still ended up w/ 12 hills of pumpkins of various varieties that I had started inside.  Those poor transplants were spindly and some were already flowering in their flats (can you say 'stressed'?) so I hope they make it.  I cut the flowers off when planting so they'll put their energy into new leaves and roots, gave them good waterings, and intend to water faithfully daily until they get established.  We'l...

Is it weird I have that Willie Nelson song in my head?  It feels good to be gardening again.  Lots of planting progress has been made.  Last week on the 23rd of May, I popped in some nasturtium seeds (Fordhook Favorites Mix) to crawl up my metal trellis that's stuck in the center of one of the garden boxes.  I soaked the seeds in water overnight first, like Mom always does w/ her seeds.  The package said to nick the seeds w/ a file to scarify them but really, who's got that kind of time?  I guess I could have rubbed them between sandpaper, but didn't think of it at the time.  Hopefully the water soak loosened their seed coats up enough.  Nasturtiums are attractive to hummingbirds and are edible flowers so I should be eating some fancy salads this summer.  La tee da!  On Monday when we got back from Memorial weekend camping, I transplanted my onion sets and broccoli out of their flats finally.  They are looking hap...

Yesterday I spent much of my supposed last day on earth (some crazies have predicted this based on some ancient calendar somewhere) shoveling cow poop in the rain, slogging around in the mud from trailer to garden with a one-handled (ask Hubby about that) wheelbarrow.  Thank goodness the predicted apocalypse did not yet arrive, as I'm not sure God would have let me in yesterday, at least without a shower to wash all the manure off.  But all in all, it was a spectacular day!  We have the boxes all filled and ready to plant!:  Soggy, but triumphant. The Girl helped us for a while today before the rain really got going, then we finished up while she napped. Notice how sunny it is in this picture?  The rain quit and the sun came out just as we finished the dirty work, of course.   We also got the Girl's sandbox installed and filled, and a little stone path laid to it from the patio.  Today I used my sad little broken whe...

Well, spring has sprung I guess, but after all the complaining that Mother Nature was late, I still wasn't ready for her.  The landscaping season has kicked in and that nasty stuff called 'work' is interfering with my own gardening hobbies, so it's been a while since I've posted.  Here's what's new:  1. The tarp experiment to kill the grass failed rather spectacularly, but at least I tried.  The blue tarps still let too much light through and black plastic would have been infinitely better, had I had some.  Instead the tarps made a lovely little greenhouse effect and when I pulled them up found happy, fluffy grass grown higher than the rest of the yard, except for the spots where the rocks were holding the tarps down, those were squeeshed good.  Anywho, gave up and did spray roundup one evening this week between rain showers (rain-fast in 30 minutes? let's hope so!).  The dandelions do seem to be curling up and suffering which brings me at leas...