New Year, New Focus

Behind the quilt, the Potager is undergoing a transformation. So is this blog. My interests lie in so many places, that just concentrating on gardening bored me.
This year you'll get more posts on more areas of my interests.
As for the Potager, that may wait to be revealed in the early spring, but it is undergoing a radical change. That cute little tool shed to the right of the quilt is part of the change.
More will be coming shortly.
Happy New Year to all!

The Wedding

The wedding day was hot and sunny. We set the ceremony up in the side yard, so most of the guests were in the shade. As you can see the lawn renovation worked perfectly and most of the flowers were in bloom.

I has asked my husband to bring home discarded doors. Hurricane Sandy made that happen. Builders who were remodeling were very generous. We used them for the bar menu, to hold photos of the happy couple growing up and we made an entrance to the aisle. You can see how my clever hubby stood these doors up in the middle of no where in the photo below.  It was a perfect touch.

Pipes pounded into the ground and attached to the doors. Someone asked us if they were just garden art. They really looked nice. And made a perfect entrance for the bride and her dad. 

My crafty daughter-in-law spent hours making all the flower arrangements and bouquets. We had thought about growing flowers for the bouquets, but decided against it. Wise decision. All the flowers we had planted with that thought bloomed a week later. We would have been so stressed out! We ordered bouquet flowers from Fifty Flowers and they were really nice. All the centerpieces were from Shop Rite floral department - two days before the wedding we went in and scooped up $150.00 worth of flowers. It worked.

We didn't bother with an arbor or altar. The Virginia Creeper covering the corner of the fence behind them and the trees made a perfect backdrop.

They did a tree planting ceremony (similar to a sand ceremony or a unity candle) My frined Sheila dug up a dogwood tree from her yard and they used that. It was really nice.

The bridal party went to near by Double Trouble State Park for photos.

The tent covered the lawn from the flower garden annex to the tree line. There was plenty of room under the tent for everyone. The bar was next to the house and they danced on the patio and played games by the garage. That tan building in the driveway is a luxury wedding bathroom trailer. It was airconditioned. It was very popular.

In addition to the flowers we bought at Shop Rite, we had planters with flowers and herbs at each table. We had read that herbs would keep bugs away and it may have worked because everyone said that bugs never bothered them. Hubby made the cute little table number birds. I plan to use the left overs as garden markers next year. I will also use the left-over burlap in the garden. 

The dance floor was so hot that other than the couple and parents' dance, no one danced until the sun went down. 

But then they partied until we had to stop the music because of local noise ordinances! Hubby figured out a way to string lights over the patio and they are going to stay up the rest of the summer. They look so beautiful.

 One nice feature about having a wedding in your backyard is that family pets can join the celebration.

Another is that when the wedding proper is over you can have an acoustic after-party in front of the Potager 'til the wee hours of the morning.
The wedding was lovely. Everyone said they had a wonderful time. I did see one of the photographers shooting pictures of the couple in my garden, but we haven't gotten any pro shots yet - all these were all taken by friends and family.
So all in all I would have to say that the backyard wedding was a success. The yard and the gardens looked lovely. It was a tremendous amount of work, but all my kids and my hubby pitched in and we did it. It was a great day.

In the Garden

There are new and interesting (to me anyway) things in the Potager this week.
We are continuing our hot days, big rainstorm routine and it is making the garden grow incredibly fast!

The rain gauge doubled as a japanese beetle trap today! That's fine with me!








The Mammoth Sunflowers are living up to their name. They are huge!

When they finally bloom, I'll only be able to see them from the second story window!

I am hoping to collect seeds to eat. I know you have to wrap the seed head in something so the birds don't eat them all.

I'm gonna need a bigger ladder!

Some of the Freckles lettuce has bolted. I am going to try to collect seeds from it.
This was my favorite lettuce this year.
We are still eating the ones that haven't bolted.
I am amazed how heat tolerant this lettuce is.
The leaves seem to be a bit thicker, but they are still tender and tasty.

I have about three spinach plants that I hadn't picked yet. I always seem to notice them after dinner and say, tomorrow, but then eat something else the next day. Poor planning on my part.
I guess ithey're bolting, but instead of getting flowers on the top , it's getting broccoli looking like things up and down the stalk! That's different.

I need to pick these and saute the leaves for dinner.

I've never grown onion before. Are they supposed to form on top of the soil like that?

Look at the size of this Black Krim tomato! And no bottom rot! I can't wait to eat this guy!
No signs of turning red yet.

This looks like it will be my first White Scallop Squash. I've had other little ones, but they all had blossom end rot. This guy looks pretty healthy!

And I love the little curly-cues this plant makes!

If you look past the leaves, you'll see two (there are actually three) Eight-Ball Squash.
These were my favorite new vegetable last year.
They get eaten when small so they are only a few days away from dinner!
Stuffed squash - yummy!

The spaghetti squash plant looks healthy, but there is the tell-tale damage along it's stem that a Squash Vine Borer may have made a home inside the stem. I will clean it out and bury the damaged part. Hopefully the rest of the plant will send down roots and survive the onslaught.

We are eating cucumbers already. They are so wonderful this time of year - a taste of summer. I remember having so many by the end of last summer that I could not keep up with them. But at this time of the season we anxiously watch each one, anticipating being able to harvest a true "summer" vegetable.

Our church has Vacation Bible School this week, so the garden may get ignored a bit. I'll have to make an effort to get up extra early to get the gardening done before work.

First harvest - Radishes

The first harvest from the Potager on Wednesday - fresh radishes! These were French Breakfast radishes planted on March 12.

Tossed in vinegar and water with a bit of salt and pepper.

A fresh, yummy addition to our dinner!

Clematis

Last summer I purchased two unmarked clematis post season - one at my grocery store, and one at a garden center. I paid $5.00 for one and $2.00 for the other. Both grew enough to have a few blooms last year. One was purple, one was white. I researched Clematis care and found that some get trimmed back and some don't, so I left them alone all winter.

This spring I have noticed that they are two different types, because the white one looks dead at the roots, but has leaves coming out on the top...

while the purple one is dead on the top, but has growth coming out from the roots!

I'm looking forward to their sweet flowers blooming by my swing this summer!

A new home for the Asparagus

You gotta love a garden vegetable that is a cultivated weed, basically.

Last summer, in an effort to smooth out the backyard where my pre-Potager garden was, my hubby plowed down the asparagus bed. I literally cried over those lost asparagus.

But then, lo and behold, they grew back.
And in spite of the fact that it was totally the wrong time of year to transplant asparagus, in August, in one of the hottest summers on record, I dug them up and transplanted them into the Potager.  You can see the original post about this by clicking on the highlighted words.
There wasn't enough room in the Potager because it was filled with tomato roots. They were planted way too shallow.

A few weeks later, during another heat wave, I dug up some more and threw them in a pile of dirt behind the Potager just to try to save them.

Then this year I ordered too many strawberries, so the Asparagus had to be moved yet again.
But where? We live in the Pine Barrens and our natural dirt is sand. There was no place to put all the asparagus I had dug up.
I left them in a tub trug with some dirt and covered them with a damp towel for several days. Days with cool nights and thunderstorms and torrential rain and wind.

After work today, I dug up the pile of dirt that I had thrown the second batch of Asparagus in. There was way too much dirt in there and I piled it into a wheel barrow. About half of the Asparagus I dug out of this bed had survived and were showing signs of life. (Hubby had put a wooden box around the dirt pile a month or so ago.)
I was so busy digging that I never even noticed that hubby had made two more boxes for me! We moved the boxes near the new Asparagus bed.
I dug a trench and mounded some compost in the center of the trench.

I then laid out the best looking Asparagus on the mound, then gently filled in the trench, leaving just the "eyes" near the surface.

I repeated this for one of the new boxes my husband had made. The wheel barrow full of dirt came in handy.

I've read that deer and rabbits don't like Asparagus, but I'm thinking I may need a fence to keep Smokey and Binx from using this as a litter box.

The finished bed. We won't be swimming in Asparagus, but hopefully, in a few years, it will meet our needs.

I'll put landscape fabric down and make a mulch path because there won't be enough room to mow the grass weeds between the beds.

The other bed will hold the two raspberry plants I bought last month. I just need to find some soil with which to fill it.

So there they are, tucked into their new, and hopefully final, home, having survived being plowed under, moved in 100 degree heat, left unplanted in a tub trug covered with a towel during a thunderstorm and replanted once more.

Yup, you gotta love a garden vegetable that is basically a cultivated weed - and survives like a weed! Thank God!

It's a Small World

To the casual observer, the garden looks like nothing is growing. But that's not true. There is a lot growing, it's just very, very small now.

You might notice the little radishes, but in between, you have to get very close to see the carrots coming up.

You may notice the onions (which are not looking that good) but you have to look hard to see the baby spinach coming up between the onion rows.

It's easy to see the towers for the peas, but you have to observe carefully to see the peas coming up!
And the lettuce, beets and turnips were too small to see clearly in a photo. Yes it's a small world now, but give us a few weeks of warmer weather and see what we become!

Seedlings and Caterpillars

It was chilly in my garden yesterday - in the 40's when I went out to work in it! I hope we don't have an early frost!
The radishes I planted between the carrots are looking good. These are a blend of Black Spanish, Cherry Belle, China Rose, Easrly Scarlet, French Breakfast, Long Scarlet, Minowase, Sparkler, White Hailstone and White Icicle. It's fun to see what you get when you pull one up.

These are purple top turnips.

I pulled out the dill and put in lettuce. Now I have a bunch of dill seedlings growing with the lettuce!

Dill is one of those plants you only have to plant once!

I stuck some mint at the edge of the woods and it looks good. Mint is too invasive to keep in the garden. The deer and rabbits don't eat it, so it will flourish here.

And just when I thought the asparagus I had transplanted was dead, this little sprout appeared.
I hope the frost holds off until he grows a bit bigger.
I'm not sure what the Asparagus bed will look like next year.

Cabbage -- not so good. I need to find a way to keep the bugs out of these. They are starting to form heads, but the heads are full of bug scat and holes. Yuk! Not just the green caterpillars but also these brown guys. They are ruining my crop! I spend most of my time picking them off lately. And all the gardening books said cabbage was an easy crop to grow!

The parsley has caterpillars too, but these will turn into Black Swallowtail Butterflies. They are different from the Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillars the parsley had before (which got eaten by birds!)
There are three of them. Maybe I should put a netting over them to help protect them.
Why don't the birds eat the cabbage moth caterpillars?

Thinking Fall

I can't believe it is the last week of August already.
The summer flew by.
It is time to think about the fall garden.

Since the eight-ball zucchini bit the dust, I removed it and added 5-10-5 fertilizer to the soil.

In this space I planted to the right, Golden Beets, Tall Top Early Wonder Beets and Detroit Dark Red beets. These are all old seeds, so I'm hoping they will come up.
I planted Swiss Chard Bright Lights in the center, and Purple Top Turnips to the left. The turnip seeds are also old seeds.

The cabbage plants I impulse bought at Lowes two weeks ago are looking good, in spite of the fact that the day I planted them, cabbage moths were fluttering around them. (Do they just hang out waiting for someone to plant cabbage?) I haven't seen any egg masses yet.

As for the Asparagus in the future lawn, most of it has been moved to a berm of soil behind the garden. Deer and rabbits don't like Asparagus, so this should be okay. When he has a minute, my husband will build a box around the plants and we'll fill it in properly.
They seem to be doing fine. I know it was totally the wrong time of year to transplant them, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Homegrown Asparagus is so much better than store bought!
Binx doesn't care for Asparagus, he just likes walking around the garden with me!