Cheryl's Garden Goodies

Sorry I haven’t been posting lately.  The garden production has slowed down a lot, so I don’t have too much to post about here lately.  The yellow squash, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes are starting to produce.  Here’s my harvest from Sunday.   A couple of lemon cucumbers, a few cherry tomatoes and a yellow squash.

I’ve been hand pollinating the squash, and so far so good.  The squash is growing up one of the Free Cycle tomato trellises, and it’s working out pretty good.  It’s growing nice and straight up.  I check the plant every morning.  The female blooms get pollinated and the leaves get stuck back into the trellis.  If I had know how well this was going to work out, I would have planted at least two squash plants.  I see I’m way ahead of last year’s squash.  Hopefully the dreaded squash borer won’t find the plant.

I’m sorry I pulled all of my lettuce plants.  The weather’s been so cool I’m sure they’d still be growing just fine.  Plus, I haven’t put anything in their place.  I planted some more bush beans, but the germination rate was two or three plants out of two Dollar Store packs of seeds.  Hmmm.  Maybe the Dollar Store is not the best place to get bean seeds. 

I’ve gone a little pot crazy.  When you don’t have much space you start working on containers.  I’ve repotted three of the four raspberry plants into larger containers since I haven’t figured out where I could put them in the ground yet.  The bugs have been having a field day.  I’ve got to remember to spray them with the garlic/soap/pepper spray.  I can do it now since the berries are gone and I don’t have to worry about garlic tasting raspberries.

Here’s my “berry patch.”   I’ve got three blackberry plants, one gooseberry plant, and three blueberry plants.  I’ve read up on how to prune the blackberries and I hope I’ve done it right.  Hopefully I’ll have some berries next year because this year I didn’t even see a single flower.  I have no idea how to prune the gooseberry plant, so I just tied up the branches to keep them in some kind of order.  I even got three berries off of it this year.  The bigger blueberry had a couple dozen berries on it, and the little ones that started out as twigs have put on a tiny bit of growth. 

The container habanero pepper (grown from saved seeds from a grocery store pepper) is doing fine in its container.  I only picked one pepper from it, but I think what I’ll do is let them all ripen on the bush.  Since I don’t really use them I’m not bothered by the fact that production will slow down once the peppers mature. 

In another pot I’ve got a regular bell pepper that’s doing better than the in-ground peppers.

I stuck what I thought was dill plants into the four corners of the pot a little while ago (experimenting with interplanting).  The dill turned out to be fennel, which I also don’t really use.  The leaves really do taste like licorice.  Maybe by the time the fennel makes a bulb I’ll have found an interesting recipe for them.

Here’s the egg plant with the volunteer tomatoes (and to the left the petunias grown from seeds).I’m sure these were compost tomato seeds.  I figured what the heck, I’ll let them grow and see what happens.  As for the egg plant, it’s been so long ago that I grew one I can’t remember the sequence of how they grow.  It had its first flower a couple weeks ago, but I still don’t see any actual egg plants growing yet.

I got some mint plants from a Free Cycler that I’ve put into four different pots.  I love mint tea.  I’ve read that you can make tea with any berry plant leaf.  I tried it with the raspberry leaves, but it just didn’t do it for me.   But mint tea, love it, love it, love it…but I don’t love it so much that I would plant it in the ground and have it take over.

I’ve got some of the patio basil plants in pots.  They’re cute plants and all but I don’t really use basil.  Maybe I’ll try to make some homemade pesto and broaden my culinary horizon so to speak since I’ve got these and the ones in the ground planted next to the tomatoes.

And then there’s that which needs to be in a pot.I think plants have a drive to live and prosper that matches us humans.  This is the mother bulb from my elephant ear last year.  I tried something different this year, which was to separate the two bulbs.  Notice the flat surface on the top of the bulb?  There was another bulb on top of that with a few leaves growing on it.  I planted that into the usual spot, and three days later all the leaves were laying on the ground.  I don’t know if it was the squirrels or something else.  I see one more leaf coming on, but the plant is nowhere near where it was this time last year. 

I just transplanted the bell peppers out of the little blue SWC in back of the elephant ear.  I guess I’ll just stick the elephant ear in there.  It seems kind of cruel not to give it a real home instead of a plastic bag.

More catching up next time.

Happy Gardening!!!