Garden Journal

The garden has totally gotten away from me this year — I didn’t get my mulch down in May, made a partial effort in late June / early July, and now much of my yard is a wasteland of weeds, only somewhat camouflaged by all the blooming perennials (thank all the gods for them). I […]

More garden experiments. In the central triangle bed, I threw in some mesclun lettuce seeds (which seem to have mostly disappeared), and two kinds of kale (why, I’m not sure, we don’t even eat kale that often) — Redbor F1 and Feathered Frills. They both seem to be coming up fine, but again, I’m not

So, I tried something new, growing broccoli rabe, and I basically threw the seeds in the soil and ignored them, occasionally watering when it was really hot and dry. I vaguely meant to go thin them at some point, but I did not actually do so. So at this point, advice? Should I thin these,

So, here are two beautiful peaches off our tree. Nice, right? But here’s the thing — there’s only 1 left on the tree. Last year this time, the same tree gave us about a 100 peaches. This year, 3. Oh, wait, 4 — there was one that a cheeky squirrel got. I have no idea

Slowly building out another bed — this morning was mostly pulling out some more of the weeds and watering, but with a little rearrangement too. I realized this morning that I could move my brightly-flowering tropicals (like that purple duranta) from the overcrowded bit of back deck into the bare spots in the new bed,

I’ve never been a summer gardener before — I’ve focused on the spring (especially early spring) garden, and I admit that July / August has tended to be pretty neglected in my garden, which is funny, because that’s when most gardens are flourishing. But I’m often traveling, and I don’t water enough, and everything struggles

First strawberries. I just planted a few of them straight in the ground, and they’ve spread quietly over the last few years — they end up pretty much working as a groundcover. I think if you wanted to make it easy to harvest, you’d probably want a different approach, but I just have fun, turning

Finally put together another pandemic purchase — there was a lot of comfort-buying in 2020, followed by complete lack of energy to actually do anything — a flower trellis. It’s meant to be a lotus bud, so it fits in the vaguely S. Asian decor I have spotted around the garden — I think I

So, it’s been a perpetual struggle in my garden between my theoretical desire to grow vegetables, and my very real love for flowers. The battle is primarily over sun — everywhere with full sun, I tend to give over to flowers, and then my poor tomatoes unhappily struggle in part-sun. I do get some veggies

New tool — a extensible tree pruner / saw. It’s a bit of an investment buying tools like this, but you can use them for years, and when you consider the cost of having professionals prune your trees, it’s a bargain. I wish I’d bought this one a decade ago! It’s perfect for trimming my