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!

The Back Gate

There's something new at the back gate. Clever hubby made a boardwalk between the Potager and the cement in front of the garage. How pretty!

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!

Strawberries are planted

I received my Strawberry order the day before my big party last weekend and so they stayed in my crisper drawer of my fridge all week. When I got out to the garden, I was a bit surprised to find that while I thought I had ordered 25 strawberry plants,  I had in fact ordered 75. I do not have room for 75 plants. That is the problem with seed catalogs. They make you dream big!

The first step was to trim the roots to 4 inches and to cut off any old leaves or branches.

The work shelf that hubby had built into the Potager came in handy!

After they were all trimmed I had to fit them into the Potager.

I was able to fit in 25 Ozark Beauty strawberries. These are ever-bearing and, according to the directions, should not be allowed to develop runners.

It also said to pinch off the flowers until July 1.

The June bearers took up a bit more room. They have to develop runners and have all their flowers removed this year.  I planted the Annapolis closer together than it said to (about 12") in a row, only having room for 8 plants. I only had room for 8 of the Jewel also, but I tried planting them in a zig-zag to give them the 18" apart it said in the directions. These will be matted beds, meaning they will fill in the spaces between with runners (baby plants) and give me lots of berries next year.

To remember what is where and what I need to do, I put the instructions on a stick and put it next to the fence.

In order to fit in the strawberries, I had to move the Asparagus.

More about that later.

This is the back of the Potager, which is now devoted to strawberries.
I am planning on getting copper tape to try to stop the slugs from getting the berries before I do!


I had a lot of left-over June Bearing Strawberry plants.

So I potted up a bunch in a large pot near my back steps.  I am not trimming off the flowers on these and will happily eat what ever they give me, then, sigh, compost the plants. There are 12 plants, 6 of each, in this pot. (And this picture was taken 4 days after I planted the strawberries - the Jewel strawberries are taking off! In the garden bed also.) The rest of the plants were gifted to a friend who likes to garden. Sharing plants with fellow gardeners is one of the things I like best about gardening.

Haste makes ...a big mess

It was a big busy weekend for me, I had my whole side of the family coming to celebrate my Dad turning 80.  There was no time to garden. However, the seedlings coming up did need a bit of watering. I dashed out with my watering can Saturday morning, lifted the handle on the yard hydrant in back of the Potager (as my garden faucets are not on yet) opened the valve to fill the can and sprayed icy cold water down the front of my jeans. I finished watering and went in the house to change and prepare for the party.
Did you notice what I did not do?
I did not put down the handle on the yard hydrant. While the valve was shut off and there was no water coming out of it, the water was still coming into the hydrant.
That night it went below freezing and the morning of the party, we woke up to a flooded yard. Oops!

In the background, with the red handle, is the yard hydrant I forgot to shut down.

There was water surrounding two sides of the potager.

And the paths on one side of the Potager were also flooded.

What a mess.

Normally I hang out looking at the garden when I get done with my chores and I normally would have noticed that I left the handle up.

It was not a normal weekend.

But in the end, the garden and it's surrounds dried out, the party was a success and everyone had a good time. Maybe not a normal weekend, but a really good one, nonetheless.

Showing it's Age

This is the old planter that sits in the middle of the Potager. It once sat in my Great-Grandfather's yard.
It is old, perhaps as old as my father, or older. From this side you can see that it once had a rope like detail around the top. But that has all been worn away from decades of sitting outside.

This is my dad at three years old in 1934. He is at his Grandfather's house. Do you see the sheep lawn ornaments behind him? I have the one to the right of him, although the years have etched away the details.

The years have been hard on this planter too. My husband fixed a broken corner last year, but now this large crack has appeared in the lower corner. I'll ask hubby about patching it up. But I think it's time for this grand old pot to be spending it's winters somewhere warm - or at least sheltered.