We grew this lovely pink zinnia from seed and it now resides outside our front door amidst a volunteer squash patch. Isn’t it pretty?
Also… don’t forget to leave a comment in my Slimkicker Giveaway post to be eligible to win a digital kitchen scale! 🙂
Last week I wrote about how I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of Red Tomatoes in my garden. Well, the waiting has come to an end and I am proud to say that my hanging and containerized tomato plants now have a few dozen perfect little red tomatoes on their vines. Here are some photos… enjoy! 🙂
Tomatoes after the rain this morning (the first rain we’ve had in weeks!)
Tomatoes ripening from the top down.
OK… not a tomato, of course, but also red! Our green jalapeño peppers are ripening to this beautiful red color.
These green tomatoes will be red soon!
Future tomatoes
Perfect!
These tomatoes will be making an appearance in our dinner on Monday. We’re having Spicy Steak and Potatoes with Roasted Chile Salsa and Tomato Salad with Guajillo Chile Dressing. Look for a post sometime later in the week!
Matt and I bought our house in the Winter of 2011 and when our first Spring rolled around I was disappointed to discover that there were very few flowers planted around the house. I decided that I wanted this Spring and Summer to be much more colorful so we’ve been hard at work digging new flower beds, planting dozens of bulbs, making our own compost, and starting flowers from seed. We’ve been rewarded with some gorgeous blooms so far this year and I’m excited to see how everything will continue to grow! Here are some photos that I took on Tuesday:
This lovely bright pink zinnia is growing in the new bed that we dug outside of our front door. I’m especially proud of it because it is one of the plants that we started from seed back in February.
We also started these painted daisies from seed. The bee landed on the flower as I was taking the photo.
These colorful little “superbells” are growing in a lime green container along with some pink blanket flowers and white Asiatic lilies.
I bought a few bags of Dahlia bulbs at Home Depot in the spring and about half of the flowers are this rich, deep red color. The other half are “peppermint” Dahlias… keep reading to see what they look like!
We planted this small purple-flowered tree in a container last Summer and, although it was supposed to be an annual, we kept it inside over the winter and it’s blooming again. I can’t remember the exact name of the plant but I think it might be in the Solanum family.
This clematis was one of the only flowering plants that came up in Spring 2011. It is planted under an overhang in a very shady spot and it’s “dirt” is a bed of river rocks… I don’t know how it survives without any water, sun, or soil but it seems to be doing well!
Last but not least, here’s a peppermint dahlia!
Oh… and on another note, I ate my first Red Tomato today!! It was delicious!
The “waiting” season of gardening has begun. It seemed that back in May and June I spent every spare minute outside in the garden planting, mulching, weeding, and admiring my handiwork, but now that the heat and humidity of July have arrived I think its time for the garden to start supplying me with the fruits (and vegetables!) of my labor. I am getting especially impatient for my dozens of green tomatoes to ripen so that I can harvest them. Every day I check my tomato plants and although most of the tiny fruits are still a lovely two-tone green color, a few are actually starting to turn red!
I have four “planned” tomato plants in my garden (two hanging upside-down in buckets and two in containers) and, much to my surprise, I also have 5-6 unplanned “volunteer” tomato plants that magically sprouted around our back patio. I guess that the mystery tomatoes must have sprouted from my partially cooked compost because they’re showing up between my basil and pepper plants as well as a new bed that Matt and I dug near our grill.
When I found the first plant (and second, and third… before the novelty wore off) I carefully transplanted them into containers filled with half compost and half soil-free mix. They have been thriving and I think it will soon be time to move them to larger containers.
My hanging tomatoes have been growing rapidly and seem to be unfazed by their upside-down orientation. They are potted in large 5 gallon buckets with soil-free mix and compost with thyme and parsley growing on top. (You can read more about how we planted them here.) The plant on the left is a cherry tomato plant and it is full of clusters of perfect little green tomatoes. The plant on the right is a plum tomato plant and has a few larger green tomatoes growing on its vines.
My two cherry tomato plants in containers are not doing quite as well as the hanging plants. This is probably because their containers are fairly small (3 gallons or so) and I left these plants out in direct afternoon sun during a heat wave while we were out of town last weekend. When we got home the plants were shriveled and wilted but after a thorough watering they have perked up and are looking OK. Both plants have dozens of green tomatoes and a few have started to turn red!
If even half of the green tomatoes on my plants turn red, it looks like we will be overwhelmed with fresh tomatoes in another few weeks, yum! I frequently eat tomatoes with basil (caprese salad, TBM pizza, homemade spaghetti sauce, etc.) so it’s a good thing that we also have an overabundance of beautiful dark green basil plants in our garden. I’ve already made several batches of pesto and I love being able to walk outside and pick fresh leaves whenever I want them.
The unplanned tomatoes aren’t the only surprise plants in our garden this year. We also have a small pumpkin patch that sprouted from leftover Halloween pumpkins and, much to our surprise, we discovered several giant squash plants growing outside our front door! Back in February we started cosmos, painted daisies, and zinnias from seed indoors and then we transplanted them (along with a generous helping of not-quite-ready compost that must have contained squash seeds) into two new beds by our front door. The flowers grew vigorously in June and a few weeks ago we noticed that one of the “flowers” had enormous prickly leaves. Well, last week we noticed beautiful yellow blossoms on the large-leaved plants and at that point realized that the “flower” plants were in fact squash plants. How exciting!
I think we’re on track to have a great harvest this year. So far we’ve picked at least forty green beans and have plenty of fresh basil, thyme, parsley, mint, and marjoram at our disposal. Now we just have to wait for our tomatoes to turn red!
After months of growth my garlic plants finally have scapes that are ready for harvesting. Scapes are the “shoots” that garlic plants send up to flower as the bulb is still developing. Because the bulb is not yet fully formed you are supposed to cut off the scapes so that plant can refocus its energy on the bulb. The scapes themselves are packed with garlicky flavor and can be used in all sorts of recipes. I’ll be posting more scape concoctions as the week goes on but for now I’d like to share this delicious recipe for Scape Pesto.
Oh, and before I post the recipe I have to brag about the rest of today’s garden harvest. In addition to the scapes I also picked a handful of beautiful green beans, a large bunch of basil leaves, and three (yes, three!) strawberries. 🙂
Garlic Scape Pesto (serves 2)
You will need…
2 Garlic Scapes
15-20 Large Basil Leaves
3-4 tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/4 cup Grated Parmesan Cheese
Salt and Pepper to taste
Combine all ingredients in a blender or food processor and chop until well blended. Taste the pesto and add olive oil, salt, pepper, or Parmesan as needed to reach your desired flavor.
What can you do with your fresh Scape Pesto?
My vegetables and herbs are growing like crazy! We’ve had streaks of unusually hot weather (80-90°) punctuated by periods of relatively cooler weather (60-70°) here in Southeastern PA and it appears that my plants enjoy this every-changing variety of temperatures. All of them have at least doubled in size in the last few weeks and several are already flowering or growing vegetables.
As of today the following plants are growing in my garden:
With the exception of our whitefly infestation, we’ve had a pleasant, easy time with our garden so far. We mulched all of our plants with either shredded leaves or mostly-composted leaves from our spin bin and we have lots of little fences in place that have successfully kept Bailey away from the plants. I’m just starting to be able to use my thyme, parsley, and basil for cooking and soon we will have strawberries, jalapeño peppers, and green beans to eat!
Here are a few pictures of my garden:
Last year’s jalapeño plant that I saved over the winter has a handful of peppers growing on it.
What a difference 3 weeks makes! Hanging tomato plants with thyme and parsley from 5/13 and 6/4.
Green beans are finally growing on my “St. Patrick’s Day” bean plants!
This spider guards my garlic plants – I think he probably set up shop here to catch a few whiteflies.
This is my latest discovery in the garden and one of my most exciting so far… a tiny pumpkin patch!! We left a few pumpkins here after Halloween last fall because they were too heavy for the spin bin composter and Voila! We have pumpkin plants! I contemplated moving the rocks back but then realized that the plants were actually rooted in/around the rocks so I just put a little compost over top and we’ll see what happens…
This day lily is potted in the same container with my chives, marjoram, and marigolds. True it its name, we’ve had at least one new bloom every day for several weeks now.
Yup, that’s a strawberry!! Looks like I’ll be eating it soon…
Matt’s mom gave us several garlic cloves last Fall and we had our first “scape sighting” this morning. Woohoo! We’ll cut them off soon and think of something yummy to make with them.
We grew this zinnia plant from seed! I jumped the gun back in February and started lots of seeds indoors (waaaay too early in the season but hey, I’m learning!) and after a few weeks of struggling outdoors in April nearly all of the zinnia, cosmos, gallardia, and painted daisy plants that we grew are starting to bud. This plant was the first to flower.
Last but not least, our potted Oleander plant is flowering again! We bought it last year in late June when it was in full flower so it’s nice to see that it made it through the winter and is flowering once again. I love the big, white flowers.
How is your garden doing at the start of June? Please share! 🙂
Related posts:
Vegetable Gardening Season has Arrived! 5.7.12
Gardening Update – One Month Later 4.17.12
Gardening… On St. Patrick’s Day! 3.17.12
A few weekends ago when Matt, Bailey and I were at the Dock Daze event in Maryland I got a panicked phone call from my brother. He had stopped by our house to pick up some boxes he’d been storing there and on his way to the basement’s bilco doors he was swarmed by clouds of tiny white flies. Sure enough, when we returned home from the event we were dismayed to see that the miniscule flies were covering the undersides of the leaves on our boxwood bush, bean plants, tomatoes, peppers, and basil. Ugh!
Whiteflies! (Photo from sarracenia.com)
A quick google search of white flies on boxwood revealed that these tiny pests are in fact called “whiteflies” (how practical!) and they cause damage by sucking a plant’s sap. There are all sorts of chemical “cures” for whiteflies on the internet but luckily we had the presence of mind to consult some organic gardening resources before spraying our vegetable garden with poisons. 🙂
Stop! You don’t need these chemicals to get rid of whiteflies! (Image from arlnow.com)
We began our chemical-free whitefly offensive by thinning out the whitefly population a bit since there were literally thousands of them hovering around our garden. Matt took a shop vac and spent 30-40 minutes gently shaking and brushing our giant boxwood bush and vacuuming up the flies as they flew out of the bush. I don’t know how much the shop vac did to ultimately squash the whitefly population, but it was very satisfying to watch them get sucked into the vacuum!
Watch out whiteflies…. the ladybugs have arrived!
Next, we consulted our favorite organic gardening resource, Mike McGrath from “You Bet Your Garden.” We searched the archived questions of the week from Mike’s radio shows on the Gardens Alive Web Site and found this very helpful article on white flies. It turns out that you don’t need dangerous chemicals to fight whiteflies… all you need is some beneficial insects like ladybugs or lacewings! We purchased 1500 live ladybugs on Amazon from Hirts Garden’s and they were waiting (in a mesh bag in a box) in our mailbox a few days later.
A ladybug hanging out on the boxwood bush (the original site of the whitefly outbreak).
Here’s what we learned about releasing ladybugs:
It has now been about 3 weeks since the first whitefly sighting and I’m pleased to say that every last one of those swarming pests has vanished. Our shop vac and ladybugs did their job and our garden is whitefly- and chemical-free!
Not a whitefly in sight!
We made these delicious pizzas for dinner a few weeks ago just when the spinach in our garden was at its peak. I picked about 3 cups of baby spinach leaves (almost wiping out the whole crop but that’s ok… I was making room for pepper plants and basil!) and rinsed and dried them well before using them in this recipe. Fresh spinach leaves from the garden are juicy and bright green – very different from the bagged stuff you buy in the store! I’ll definitely be planting more spinach when the weather cools off in the Fall so we can continue to enjoy this delicious leafy green.
Herbed Pizza with Spinach and Feta
For those of you who follow my blog, you may remember that I got the gardening “itch” way back in March and as a result I planted spinach and beans in my tiny vegetable garden on St. Patrick’s Day. The spinach (a veggie that actually likes to grow in cold weather) has done great and I have been able to use it in several recipes including my Trader Joe’s style Eggplant Parmesan and my Herbed Spinach and Feta Pizza (coming soon!). The beans were less thrilled about being planted in the winter and have taken their sweet old time coming up, but now that May has arrived they have suddenly taken off and are starting to look like real bean plants.
It’s amazing what can grow in 10 days! Garden on April 15th (left) and April 25th (right). You can see the spinach in the front and the beans in the back.
Matt and I enjoy listening to Mike McGrath’s organic gardening show “You Bet Your Garden” on NPR (the archived podcasts are great entertainment for long car rides) and we’re trying to take some of Mike’s advice to improve our garden this year. According to Mike, a good “yard waste compost” (a mixture of shredded fall leaves and nitrogen-rich green matter that has had time to break down to a soil-like consistency) makes the best mulch and also provides great nutrition and disease control in the garden. We’ve been religiously composting our kitchen scraps all winter and now that it’s getting warmer out we’re hoping to start seeing some fresh compost in our spin bin composter soon!
Potted cherry tomato plant that has been “mulched” with partially composted shredded leaves to retain moisture.
I have several plants around the patio in containers, including two cherry tomatoes from my neighbor, a planter with chives, marjoram, marigolds, and a day lily, a combo of sweet and chocolate mint, and a serrano pepper plant. I’ve been really impressed with the brightly colored orange, red, and yellow marigolds so far — they’ve been blooming continuously for a few weeks and have a lovely fragrance. Apparently they repel insects so they’ll come in handy when our summer mosquitoes arrive!
Chives, Day Lily, Marjoram, and Marigolds on the patio
Now, back to those beans… When I planted them in March I imagined having fully matured bean plants by now so I planted them across the entire back half of my garden. Since the bean plants are clearly not ready to sprout beans anytime soon and I want to plant my basil in that same exact spot, I decided to transplant the strongest beans to my new strawberry patch. Apparently beans and strawberries are “companion plants” so I figure that they will enjoy cohabitating the same small strip of my ever-expanding garden.
The transplanted bean plants are now scattered throughout my new strawberry patch.
Perhaps the most exciting additions to our garden this year are our two upside-down tomato plants. I know that the whole upside-down growing gimmic is a bit of a fad and I’ve read lots of criticism about it on the internet, but after having a giant tomato plant take over my garden last year with its long, snarled branches and watching its tomatoes sit on the ground and get eaten by bugs, I decided that hanging plants sound pretty promising!
Hanging tomato plants with thyme and parsley.
Rather than purchasing the tupsy-turvy type of hanging tomato bags, we selected two large galvanized buckets from Home Depot and Matt drilled holes in the bottoms for the tomato plants to feed through. When it came time to actually plant the tomatoes, we lowered the buckets to below eye level and Matt held each plant at the proper height (burying the stem up to the first true leaves) while I carefully added soil-less potting mix. We topped off each bucket with herbs (thyme and parsley) and then covered the surface with partially composted leaves from our compost bin. I’ll be interested to see how these plants do over the next few months!
Close up of the bottom of one of our hanging tomato plants: We threaded pieces of an old t-shirt around the base of each plant to hold the dirt in and drilled holes around the perimeter of the buckets for drainage.
Overall, I think I spent about 12 hours working in the garden last weekend and I enjoyed every minute of it. I had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of vegetable gardening season all winter and I am so excited that it’s finally time to start planting! What are you planting in your garden this Spring?
Mint plants on April 15th (left) and May 5th (right).
Related posts:
Gardening Update – One Month Later 4.17.12
Gardening… On St. Patrick’s Day! 3.17.12
You may remember that back on St. Patrick’s Day I prepared my little garden plot for the new year and planted spinach and beans. I posted several photos of the signs of Spring at that time (crocuses, our first daffodil, cherry buds, etc.) and, as one would expect, everything has continued to bloom, bud, and grow since then. I figured since a full month has gone by it’s time for a new garden/yard update so here goes!
Last Fall Matt and I planted close to 200 daffodil, tulip and crocus bulbs. Since the first daffodil sighting in mid-March we’ve had dozens of these cheery flowers blooming at any given time. I think the key was to buy a mixed variety pack because as one type of daffodil starts to wilt there always seems to be a new type of flower coming up to replace it! You can also see one of our tulips blooming in the background here. (Photo from 3/30/12)
The beautiful weeping cherry tree in our front yard surprised us this year by blooming about a month earlier than last year. This photo is from about 2 weeks ago so by now the blooms have already been replaced by tiny green leaves. (Photo from 3/30/12)
Even our vinca is blooming! This groundcover vine literally holds our front yard together — we have had some major erosion and the water has cut paths in our front lawn. Luckily this vinca is the last line of defense before the road and it seems to withstand the gushing currents of rainwater pretty well. We’re going to try to divide it so that it covers more of the front yard. (Photo from 3/30/12)
We have two flowering bushes near our patio that smell absolutely wonderful. I did some searching on the internet and I’ve concluded that they are most likely Viburnum Carlesii (but if you think otherwise please let me know!!). The bushes have clusters of sweet-smelling flowers that start out as dark pink buds and then open up to pale pinkish-white blooms. We may try to find and plant more of these fragrant bushes around the yard. (Photo from 4/7/12)
OK, OK, I know that this is not technically a photo of the garden and I know that Bailey’s face is completely out of focus here, but I think that this photo captures the feeling of Spring at our house very well. The grass is getting greener, the sky is nice and blue, the trees are budding, and Bailey is spending most afternoons lounging in the sun. When we’re outside (and she’s not busy hunting squirrels) Bailey loves to play catch. In this photo she was scooting towards me in the grass on her side. By this point she had pushed about 10 feet and she REALLY wanted me to throw that tennis ball! (Photo from 4/7/12)
Last Saturday we braved the crowds at the Home Depot Garden Center in Glen Mills, PA and picked out several container plants including these two mint plants. The one on the left is “Chocolate Mint” (so named for its chocolate-brown stems) and the one on the right is “Sweet Mint.” (Photo from 4/15/12)
While at Home Depot we picked up a flat of Marigolds and I planted them in a large container with a Day Lily, Onion Chives, and Sweet Marjoram. On our drive home a huge bag of potting soil fell on the Marigolds but they seemed to have recovered from this traumatic experience and are doing quite well now. (Photo from 4/15/12)
And here’s my garden! My spinach is coming up nicely and we were even able to use some of the thinned spinach shoots in our Sausage-Corn Scramble on Sunday morning. The bean plants were much slower to sprout (I guess they don’t like to be planted in March??) but now they are above ground and growing fairly quickly. I just planted moonflowers and morning glories in the bare strip in the back there so hopefully they’ll be working their way up the trellis soon! (Photo from 4/15/12)
Last but not least, here’s a photo of our front yard. We have cherry, crab apple, and dog wood trees and they were all in full bloom this weekend. Beautiful! I think mid-April is quickly becoming my favorite time of year simply because of these gorgeous trees. 🙂 (Photo from 4/15/12)
The Little GSP 