The Gift of the Deep Freeze and Other Garden News

Last winter was cold.  Pipe-breaking cold.  Remember?  I do.  Vividly!  We had very little snow to make it fun.  Not that snow would have been fun in that kind of cold anyhow.  Kind of lame.

Spring was late.  Later than it usually is here, and that's LATE.  My tulips popped up eventually, but failed to bloom.  So I had a lot of green leaves attempting to look pretty, but no flowers to accent them.  Really lame.

But the late Spring has delivered an unexpected summer gift.  Lilies!  My beautiful lilies are bursting, busting, blooming!!!  Gorgeous!  The past three summers we have lived here, they have done the bloom-fest while we are in Washington, so I miss it.  There are usually a few stragglers to enjoy after we return, but the evidence of the glory I missed, in discarded petals and wilted stalks, is obvious.  But with the late Spring, the lilies are also blooming late.  They are going crazy, and there are more to come.  Not lame at all!

Since my attempt at a vegetable garden is once again in nearly-full-suck-mode, the lilies are bringing me extra joy.

I sure love them!

Since I'm on the subject of gardens, I will provide the Chaos garden report right now as well.  This year has been more successful than two years ago (last year we were so focused on basement finishing we never quite got to the garden), but it has still been frustrating and low-yield compared to the glorious bounties that have come from Washington gardens of our past.  The first year, our measly harvest inspired Adam to call one of our beans the $350 bean, because that is about all that grew from our investment.

This year we've had some varied and surprising results.  I planted some strawberry plants, that have sent off a couple of shoots for new plants and will hopefully produce actual berries next year.  No yield there, as was expected for first-year strawberry plants.  I also planted a lot of spinach, lettuce, carrots and radishes.  None of which have grown.  Let me take that back.  I have TWO carrots and had maybe 5 radishes, that never appeared to be fat, well-fed radishes, but more the starved and listless radish variety that look more like they were saying a rude, irreverent, "Eat me!" instead of "Oh yes, I am deliciously fit for consumption."

That the lettuces never came up at all shocked me.  Two years ago I had a few lettuce plants that looked so pathetic I had given them up for dead soon after transplanting the seedling starts, but they proved me wrong and came back like gang-busters (in a Colorado-lame-growing-climate kind of "gang-busters"), declaring their hardiness in an unforgiving land.  So no home-grown salads for us this year.

Two little carrots

 The tomato plants, that were not started from seed but rather seedling, are making an effort.  The plants aren't heavy with tomatoes and haven't gotten more than twice the size they were when we planted them, but if those tomatoes they're growing can get going on turning, I think we might have a crop!

While we're on the subject of tomatoes. We had, what we believe, an exciting visitor to our little patch of land.  On the drive home we listened to one of my old favorites and a road trip must-hear, Bunnicula, by James Howe.  It's the story of a vampire bunny that sucks the juice right out of the vegetables, leaving them white.  Well, upon our return from Washington, we discovered a little white tomato sitting right by our tomato plant.  Surely Bunnicula had been to our house!  Our imaginations made what otherwise would have been a gross discovery, fun.

I got pretty excited about our pepper plants, also not grown from seed.  They started producing peppers almost immediately after I planted them.  We have pimento and yellow bell (because that's what the store had when I went to get some).  But I think something else also got excited about them because they were eaten, ripe on the stem.  Darn!  There are still a few flower buds that might give me a couple peppers, enough to make a nice salsa fresca with those tomatoes!  In the meantime, I'm on the hunt for a fat, satisfied bug with pepper on his face.

 The one leafy green that did come up half-heartedly, is the rainbow chard.  There isn't a lot of it.  But considering the lack of any lettuce or spinach growth, I am happy about what I've got.  Hey!  I have enough for a nice minestrone soup!

 While we were on our trip, in addition to feeding Ruby, our dog sitter was also asked to water the plants.  Part of the problem with this year's garden is that I think she may have been a little spare on the water, even though I instructed her to give them a good drenching every day.  We had a lot of afternoon thunderstorms during July, which dump a lot of rain in a short period of time.  Unfortunately, there is usually too much water all at once and most of it runs off the garden bed sides before the earth has time to absorb it, so it's not good for watering the garden all the time, but I think on days we got rains she didn't water at all, so the plants suffered for it.  So the herb garden is slowly struggling to come back now that we are watering it more intensely.  The snow peas are similarly struggling. 

 The beans bushed up nicely before we left, but then they seemed to just stop.  They are nearly the exact same size as they were a month ago.  It could be the lack of water for a month causing the stunting, like with the herbs and peas.  So that's what we've got, a few little bean bushes with a few little flowers that might give us a few little beans.

 And now we finally come to my greatest hope.  The squash.  I have a number of zucchini plants and one acorn squash plant.  I love zucchini, one of my vegetable favorites.  And if all goes well with my pretty little squash plants, I will have zucchini galore come fall!  I just might be knocking on your door with a zucchini gift!  The plants seem to be thriving, blooming and strong.  So I'm hoping for a very late frost, to give my little zucchini flowers time to become little zucchinis that mature and ripen.

So that's the full garden report.  Hopefully I will also have a harvest report.  It may only contain information about food products you can make with zucchini, but at least that will be something!