October.
lasagna garden didn't do too well. I think it was too hot and it was such a dry summer I couldn't keep it wet enough. yellow pear toms did okay and the tomatillos did well until a giant wind storm unrooted them and tossed them about the yard. The other garden did pretty well, staked heirlooms - striped german tomatoes are worth their weight in gold and the lipstick peppers were cute on the bush and sweet. I'm trying to dry the many really hot Pedron peppers that we grew. Hotter than cayenne?? Seem to be.
Neighbors grew really nice flat beans and gave me some seed pods to grow next year. They grew the ground cherry version of tomatillos which are like little tart pineapples in berry form. Or cherry form.
I started a new lasagna bed with my terrifically successful compost output. It is rectangular and in the full sun near the rain barrel. I'm trying to get some cool crop spinach and peas going and beets, carrots and parsnips to over winter. So far its been so wet and cool that not much has happened past sprout and a little growth.
I need to mention that my husband's job is sort of shaky and I am trying to rearrange things and make things look more normal in case we have to sell our house. SOO, I put a few bushes (variegated arborvitae, fountainy forsythia and the already misplaced viburnum near the cherry and dug out a islandy looking perennial bed to surround it. I was so proud. And disgusted. I moved the newly planted pussy willow to a better spot which will be move viewable from inside and I put a red twip dogwood where the stupid bed with tomatoes were and you can see that from the family room, too. I regraded the entire back area and am trying to get grass to go, but its wet and cold so some is coming and other parts are totally water logged. I have added TEN bags of cow manure to this clayey shit to make it better draining. I'm really happy with the way it all looks and just need to get over the idea that it might not really be for me or us. Its still a success.
The fennel was a dissappointment. I don't think I have the right type for bulb eating. It was so woody. It could be the dryness again, I suppose, but they were such flat bulbs and I really want the rounder ones. Next year I will try again.
Next year:
delicata squash
flat beans
tomatillos
striped german
other heirloom toms.
bulls horns peppers
fennel
chard

I am eating a mini harvest salad. A thinning salad, really. Linus' yaya carrots are really pushing eatother around so I thinned them out a bit. Lo and behold little bite carrots. The greens are lovely, too, so I chopped them up a little and threw them in with some purslane from my neighbor's garden. I am watching her garden while they are off traipsing around Europe and have had to pull some purslane for the toms and eggplant's benefit and put them directly in my garden to start a patch. This is really a nice self seeding green you can eat and should eat because it is so healthy. Easy, too. Kind of looks like jade and is nice a juicy.
So lastly, I decided to pull out the biggest fennel bulb in that patch - if I haven't mentioned it yet, I have a separate garden patch just for the fennel b/c I've read other veg don't like to share space with this beauty. So I just hilled up the patch two days ago, but there was a bulb that was big enough to chop and, of course, I threw in most of the feathery greens, too. So kind of needly texture, but excellent salad with a balsamic OJ vinagrette that I made earlier for bread dipping.
Now for the saddest part of my gardening endeavor. The giant canteloupe with the beautiful lobed leaves with silver brushstrokes was not a canteloupe, but a zucchini. Duh, and doh. I had seen the zucchini shaped squash forming and just couldn't believe that it wasn't going to balloon out. It was dark green. It kept getting longer. This was, of course, one of the plants I didn't plant, but had just started from the lasagna layers of winter compost. So, of course, it was a zucchini. When I finally decided to believe it, I ran outside and ripped it out of the ground because this is the melon patch and squash and melon can cross pollinate and the melon will end up bitter. So, hopefully the melon plants - at least I think - will go on to produce sweet fruit for us to gorge ourselves on in a month or two. There were a few amaranth seedlings struggling in the deep shade of the zuc that may happily grow to 6 feet tall now. And I spot to put dwarf cleome I took home from the garden club at the library.
Linus was very happy when it rained Tuesday so the garden club's beds would get a good drink. All three of them helped my bucket the rain barrel water to the beds the other night and had a lot of fun.
Pictures - any day now...

Well, shit. I am not good at this as you can tell. So much has taken place in the garden and in my head planning, planning anew, scratching plans and winging it. The winging it is where I feel best. I call it Zen gardening, or zen yard work. I go from thing to thing and sort of remember something I was going to do along the way that probably would have been forgotten if I hadn't happen to head in this direction, etc. The thing that's important (I think) is that I'm out in it and doing rather than sitting inside, waiting, dreaming and scribbling sketches and plans only to be lost in the reams of paper my kids bring home from school.
So, I managed to start a bunch of things. Peppers (red "lipstick" - a small sweet pepper I'm hoping will convince the kids through its cuteness to eat, an orange bell and a small spicy "Padron" from Spain - think Tapas). I also got some vine heirloom tomatoes - the usual Cherokee, Striped German, etc) and some tomatillos. I was "good" and did a nice hardening off of most of this, BUT I put the tomatillos right into my hot unfinished compost bed and burned the hell out of them. Did I not mention that I have a hot unfinished compost bed made mostly of the trash can full of kitchen scraps accumulated over this long winter and some mushroom soil (really, what is this really) and a little bit of dirt. SOme newspaper in there, too. Anyhow, I have that stuff started and a friend gave me some yellow pear tomatoes in exchange for 12 crowns of asparagus, b/c, while I haven't mentioned them yet, the other 13 took up a fairly sizeable spot. Fennel is coming up around the now blooming white spirea. I put the peppers and tomatoes in a spot improvised when a two foot high maple sapling was discovered there and planting around it was the only way I could keep Jim from mowing it down. The kids planted carrots, beets and pumpkins (lots and lots of pumpkin seeds) in the two big barrel planters that I had used to hold the kitchen scraps from the fall. I have a bit of an herb garden going near the kitchen which I wish I could claim to go to everyday for cooking inspiration, but so far I made one omelet with chives and one soup with sage. Both are flowering nicely, prettily now and I think I'm going to garnish with chive flowers on something sometime soon. Basil is stillin infant stage and I keep forgetting to get (first find) taragon. I love taragon! So that's about what's going on, except there is some additional leveling of ground by rearranging sod (not recommended method, but I'm low on cash and flush in energy) and a poison ivy sighting and handling that seems to have gone okay.
Oh yeah, there is a 4 foot lovage plant in the front yard that looks interesting, giant ornamental celery bunch, but I must find some appropriate soup recipe soon. Maybe I'll make a few gallons of veggie stock and freeze it.
WAIT, very exciting. I get to see new green every day from my bedroom window as the "hot" bed pops new seedlings everyday from the melons (cantaloupes and water) and some beans.
So I'm caught up, and boy that's a good thing since no one reads this and I'm just reporting and not being very productive here.

Placed an order with Johnny's seeds. I am such a mess - I have written down in about 10 different places the stuff I want to grow, how I want to grow it and what I need to order and what I have (couple years old now, but I'm still going to try the seeds). So I ordered tomatillos seeds (and will collect them for next year, too). Chard, carrots, peas, some other stuff and asparagus! Not seeds, the roots and 25 of them so my focus right now should be where they are going to go and getting that ready for when they arrive. Right after ordering them I had a pang of fear that I'm going to have to move again before they bear anything for us. This happened at our last houses. The new owner will probably be mortified by the phallic spears emerging from the ground in the next month or two.
So I have all of the kitchen scraps from the winter and could do a lasagna garden thing, but I'm not convinced this is the best thing for the asparagus plants. It could get to hot with the decomp, it could not get all the nutrients it needs, b/c the little bugs are busy breaking down. So, I think I might do a little lasagna thing at the bottom, but use a lot of finished compost up higher. (I'm planning to build a raised garden bed). SO, where the heck should it go. There is a spot that would get full sun most of the day, and is sort of protected by bushes in the winter.
raised bed pros:
neat and tidy, which i never am.
keeps out animals, especially when surrounded by rocks. what kind of rocks do I want? maybe the bricks from the garage? Maybe some slate?
keeps me space conscious, except I already predict that I will stick all seedlings in ground even if it means in the middle of the garden next to the garage getting very little sun.
Thinking, thinking...

Well, I haven't been here in a while, already. I was worried I would do this. Start and not kkep going, much like my attempt at NaNoWRiMo this year. (got to get back to that - i wrote over 4K words!). Anyway, 3 kinds under 8 - that's my excuse. Also, reading a lot instead of being constructive with garden planning, etc. At least I'm reading gardening books. Not the reference or how tos that I buy or get from the library and just glance through gaining little useful info. I just finished Roger B. Swain's The Practical Gardener, which is a good read, a fast read and full of little bits of info. I took some notes, but then just tried to enjoy the anecdotes about his gardening trials and travails. One chapter about experimenting or actually "trials" of gardening was very enlightening. "What passes for wisdom may in fact just be acquired prejudice". Which is true enough I may embroider it on a throw pillow.
I was thinking yesterday about how really really good and constructive it is to think about the past, near or far, and try to learn from it. ANd to think of it in a new light, for example... actually I can't think of a good example. Some ah ha. Ok, I have been thinking about moving to PA and how I have gone through depression trying to find myself here and say goodbye to my old home (Cleveland) and I have been thinking of it in terms of contact with friends and a well known environment, my memory creates these expectations, like the light in the dining room and the sound of rain on the windows. The view down the street.
This still isn't a good example of what I mean, but anyway, I now am trying to think of aclimating mind, my eyes, my senses to a new place and how that's a good thing. Changing your perspective is good.
Back to the garden. I discovered that the crocus bulbs I forgot to put in the ground were sprouting in the car port. So, I took some in a stuck them in some potting soil in a few pots. Maybe some will come up and it will be a little indoor spring thing. I don't usually like forcing bulbs - a colleague from work used to force paperwhites adn then give them to people for their desks. The smell would slowly take over the area, which happened to be a chemistry lab, and anyway they had a smell more repulsive than most chemicals. For me, at least. So, the crocuses will be cute. If it works.

Tonight I will spend some time ordering seeds and plants. I have seeds (some a few years old, but probably good) and I plan to use a lot of them. I have bought leek seeds many times, but only remember growing a few. A friend told me that they over winter really well - maybe I'll remember that this fall.
blog thought: Can I set this up to make it easy for me to remember things later? Can I create some lists to add to on the sides??
I have fennel seeds, but as this is one thing that I really want to have work I might buy more. I love fennel and can't get it at the farmer's market. I can get tomatoes so I think I might not plant tomatoes this year, which would be a first. Tomatoes have always been a staple in my gardens - I start them from seed and they usually do really well. But, maybe I just won't do them this year. Tomatillos, on the other hand, are also pretty scarce at the FM.
There are a thousand different lettuce packets - my most favorite being mizuna. I will stake out a spot for the cold season raised bed (still can't really commit to that) soon.
Plants I'd like to buy : everbearing strawberries, wild(ish) blueberries, currant (yes, I like fresh and dried) and asparagus. Some day I will have fresh cut asparagus from my garden to celebrate spring (at least a few years off).
I planted the tart cherry last fall and hope to see some signs of life (like pretty flowers) in a couple of months. I think I will try to get to d.c. for the cherry blossom festival this year.

Well, this is bold.
My garden is currently frozen and somewhat littered with dog feces. Its muddy in places where I dug up sod and clumpy in places where I threw sod. It has random plants, some I added right after we moved in so that they would get established over the fall and winter. Others (the pink flowering ones) linger from my house's previous owner. I have great visions for my garden tempered by the knowledge that it won't come quickly, shouldn't come quickly. That knowledge I obtained through experience. There is a family back in Cleveland who will curse me in the summer when all of the plants (many edible, many, many edible) will compete for space and potentially make all of them uniformly unhappy (and the edibles inedible). If I was still there I would get to work rearranging and sharing with neighbors or creating new beds. Very efficient.
So, I have been given a clean slate (and already done some damage), but I learned something about myself recently. I can stick to some things, especially given a new medium and a new computer to play with. I will use this blog to keep myself on task and remind myself of my choices and observations and use my energy for good. My good, at least.
SO, off to the races...
Raised bed, even with wood sides and gravel under to deter rodents. New soil, mostly compost. Over wintered compost in the bottom (lasagna style) where I plant stuff that isn't rooty. The overwintered compost is, of course, frozen and won't be real compost for a while.
Herbs by the door.
Lavender in the front.
pea tee-pee or tall tunnel for the kids (did I mention I have three boys, 7,5 and 2).
green manure for the rest of the crappy clay yard - lightly seeded and maybe mowed in patterns.
REAL cold weather garden - greens and peas.
that's all I can remember for now.