Author: Kelsy

Hi again! It’s been a few seasons since we updated, but it’s spring again, and it’s time to get everything back in order! :3

Last year’s garden was mostly experimental in a lot of ways. We ended up learning a lot of things. We had a ton of tomatoes in the summer, and the tomato plants ended up taking over the pepper plants and killing them off. XD We also had way too much lettuce and scallions come in at the same.

Here are a few photos from the summer harvests. There was a lot more than this, but we didn’t keep up with the blog, so these are just a few things I found in my phone’s photo log!

Not pictured – tons of lettuce and scallions! It was great to have scallions all summer and not have to buy any at all from the grocery store until the late Fall. 😀

So back to the present, day – this year, we have already started getting the garden ready for spring. Mike built two new raised beds a few weeks ago, and we got those filled with soil. We cleared out all of the grass in between the beds and surrounded them with mulch.

We cleaned up our strawberry bed. Most of the strawberry plants survived over the winter without us having to do anything to them. They naturally got covered with some leaves from the tree in our backyard, and we just let it go to see what would happen over the winter. I can’t find a “before” photo naturally, but it was completely covered with daughter plants and vines and dead leaves. We pulled up all of the plants, added another layer of fresh soil and compost (because the soil level had sunk pretty low), and replanted some of the happiest looking plants, giving them more space this year.

We also added some spinach in the middle. We did two sets of 3 seeds. You can see a few sprouts popping up already. We planted these on March 8th, and this weekend we want to do another two sets so we can work on succession planting this year. So we’ll do some spinach every 3 weeks until we get sick of it or until the first frost in the Fall. XD

We also found a few garlic bulbs in the soil of the other bed that got missed and already started sprouting! So I spaced those out and hope they’ll do something. Last year, the garlic ended up being super tiny. First, I didn’t realize that I needed to remove the “scapes” before they flowered, so the plant ended up putting a lot of energy into flowering. I also didn’t realize that there were two types of garlic – hardneck vs. softneck. AND, on top of that, we found out that we were supposed to plant garlic in October to over-winter, but missed out on that in 2018 and 2019. So later this year, we are going to plant both softneck and hardneck garlic, and we’re going to get that in this weekend to see if we can get it to do anything. If not, we’ll definitely try planting some in October this year to properly overwinter it.

This year we also want to plant some zucchini and cantaloupe, which will go in one of the new beds, and the other new bed will be for peppers and tomatoes. We’re going to try to do peppers again this year! Hopefully we can give them enough space so the tomatoes don’t take all of the sunlight.

We also have two containers that we’ve been planting some scallion seeds in. We have been planting ~7 seeds in each container each week, in hopes that we can see some scallions popping up soon. So far, there’s been no luck with that, but we’ve had some cold weather, so maybe they’ll start germinating soon. We decided to try container planting scallions because after some research, we realized that the variety of scallions we have been planting (Tokyo Long White) are actually perennials and we might be able to have scallions year-round. So we’ll see if we can figure that out this year!

Other than that, we moved the chives to a pot. We haven’t actually cooked with them at all. I mostly wanted them for flowers to attract pollinators, so I’m hoping they’ll be happy in this pot.

The chives are actually in the old lavender pot! We also repotted the lavender into a much bigger container. It was completely root-bound, so we’re thinking that it’s going to be able to take over this larger container over the season. Eventually, we might just stick this in the yard somewhere, but I like the idea of having container lavender, so we’ll see how it does. :3

Finally – we have some updates on our flower situation, too! First off, there’s a daffodil that randomly popped up next to our birch tree, and the grape hyacinths are back again this year, but there are a lot more of them!

There are also some huge leaves that look suspiciously like the tulip from last year, so I’m really hopeful that will bloom out again. I think that one didn’t pop up until April, so we’ll see if it blooms again this year!

We also planted some vinca (or perriwinkle?? not sure if they are the same thing) next to our fence last year, and this year it is really going to town! We need to clear out some of the grass and weeds that have crept in, but it’s really blooming this month, and we were surprised to see how well it’s taken off.

This year, we decided to add two new flower containers in the back yard. One of them is a huge half whiskey barrel that we’re totally in love with. There’s a variety of flowers in here, let’s see if I can remember offhand. The funny looking yellow one on the left is a donkeytail splurge, and then the grassy plant behind it is a carnation. Then there’s a yellow ranunculus next to that in the back (hard to see in the photo). There are poppies in the middle (see the next photo for a better look at those), and then some moss and a perriwinkle, and something that I think might be a corydalis but actually didn’t come with a tag.

The poppies have already started blooming out this past week! They are so pretty. Here’s a close-up.

We also have another container with an English daisy in the middle and two ranunculus varieties on either side. The ranunculus are so pretty! They look like roses. All of these flowers are perennials, except the ranunculus, so we’ll have to replant those again next year if the daisies don’t completely take over. The daisies are really happy though, and I’m not sure if they will spread at all.

Anyways, that was a HUGE update, but we did neglect the blog for the past year. XD Hopefully this year we can keep up with it a bit more. If nothing else, it’s really nice to look back and see what we did last year and see what time things started growing.

Happy Spring!! 😀

Hi! Mike’s been updating you on the rest of the garden, but today I have a long overdue post about our pepper and tomato plants. 😀

A few weeks ago, we had a stretch of days that were 80˚F or hotter, which is unseasonably warm for this area, so we decided to go ahead and plant some tomatoes and peppers on May 11.

We had one row of space left in between the lettuce and the onions. Here’s what this row of space looked like a few weeks ago, before the lettuce decided to grow in leaps and bounds.

I planted the habanero at the top of the row, and the bell pepper right next to it. We got a little trellis thing that we will eventually tie the bell pepper to, to help it support itself, but for now I just placed it nearby so it will be ready when the plant starts to need support.

Then I planted the two dwarf tomatoes on the bottom of the row. These will hopefully not need support, since they are supposed to grow to be more bush-like. My grandma mentioned that they might have been happier growing in a container, so something to consider for next year. It would be fun to have a little container garden with tomato varieties! 😀

Naturally, the next day it started getting cooler and rainy again, but the plants have been doing well so far! They are definitely getting crowded out by some of the bigger, more established plants. Next year we will have a second set of raised beds, so we can plan out the layout a bit better. This year has been mostly a grand experiment. :3

The Sleeping Lady tomato already has a few flowers on it, but the Geranium Kiss variety seems a little less happy. Either way, it definitely looks like they’ve grown a bit in the past few weeks.

We’ve started harvesting some of the lettuce and onions, but there is so much here! As Mike mentioned in his post, next year we will have to stagger the planting a bit more. But it’s been fun to be able to eat the first vegetables from our garden this year! 😀

We’ve had a few other flowers and unidentifiable plants pop up in the yard over the last two weeks! So I thought I’d give you a rundown, starting with my favorite.

A few weeks ago, I noticed some suspiciously flower-like leaves popping up next to our birch tree in the front yard. Lo-and-behold, on April 16, I noticed the flower bud.

A few days later, when it started to open, the shape became more distinctive. A tulip! Probably!

A lot of our neighbors have tulips in a variety of colors, but I think this color is my favorite. When it bloomed fully, we were in for quite a treat.

It looks like the only one that’s going to pop up this spring. Since tulips are bulb flowers, I guess it will pop up again next year. Although I’m still a little fuzzy on the details of how bulb flowers work. It would be fun to see if we could get a few more in this location since it seems happy here, under the birch tree. More research is required…

Grape Hyacinths

Next to the tulip, you can see that we are also getting some grape hyacinths. These have been popping up for a few weeks now in random spots in our back yard. There’s also quite a collection of them growing under the birch tree.

We have noticed tons of these in our neighbors yards as well. Apparently they are bulb plants, too. I don’t know much about these, but I’m happy to encourage them, or at the very least, just let them grow as they like!

Violas

While planting some of the white vinca near the fence line, I noticed these pretty little shade-dwelling flowers.

Upon closer inspection, they looked like pansies. Which was puzzling to say the least.

After doing a little bit of research, however, I determined they are violas of some sort. There are like 100 different kinds of violas, so I’m not exactly sure which kind, but they look a little bit like the Labrador variety. There are three different spots along the fence line where they are growing, so I’m excited to see if they can survive and spread further!

Two Unidentifiables

There are, of course, tons of unidentified plants in our yard, but here are two that I’m currently really curious about.

The first is a leafy, groundcover-like plant with these pretty pink/purple flowers. It grows in several locations in the yard, mostly in partially shady/partially sunny spots, but there’s also some in a spot that rarely gets sunlight.

The other is a leafy plant that looks almost like a tree sprout. I don’t think they are tree sprouts, but I’m honestly not sure what they are. There are tons of them in the front yard right now. I don’t really want to pull them up until I figure out what they are and if we want to keep them.

So I think that covers our current collection of surprise plants. If anything else fun pops up, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, in a few days I’ll have to do an update on the sunflower situation. :3

As Mike mentioned in his post this weekend, we decided to try to plant some alternative groundcover in a few places in our yard. We already have some clovers that we seeded last year, but there’s one specific problem area where it’s a small, sloped strip of ground in between our fence and the sidewalk that’s difficult to mow and where we wanted to try something new. In addition to that, alternate groundcover should generally require less water and will provide some diversity in our yard. So with that in mind, we went to the local nursery and asked for suggestions.

I… may have gotten a little excited about the groundcover. To be fair, the person at the info desk was also really excited about groundcover, and pointed out several varieties that would do well in different locations in our yard. I wish I had taken a photo of the whole tray, but I ended up buying at least a dozen different plants. Some vinca, three varieties of thyme, a mossy thing, and another strawberry plant.

Vinca

We got two varieties of vinca – a purple one that does well in sunny areas and a white one that does well in shady areas. We went for evergreen varieties so they won’t die off in the winter. The purple one – ‘Bowles’s Variety’ also called Creeping Myrtle – ended up going on the slope next to the fence, which gets direct sunlight for most of the day.

Apparently vinca can grow quite aggressively and is considered invasive in some parts of the country. It’s not listed on the invasive plants list here (and I’d hope the local nursery would not be selling them if it was!), so we are looking forward to it’s aggressive takeover of this slope.

Here’s a look at the three plants before I mulched around them.

Not pictured is the before photo of what the sloped area looked like before I manually pulled out all of the various weeds that had been growing there. :p I ended up putting some mulch down around the vinca so it could get established without competition, and I’d like to also eventually pull out the rest of the vegetation near the sidewalk. But that’s for another day…

After planting the purple vinca on the slope, I had two plants remaining, which I put next to our house in a sunny spot, close to the blueberries.

And then it was time for the white vinca, also known as White Periwinkle, which likes shadier spots. I planted it on the other side of the fence line and also in a shady spot by our unused firepit.

On this side of the fence, I decided not to mulch around it at all. I like the idea of it competing with the clover. In the ideal scenario, we wouldn’t need to maintain the vinca once it’s established, so other than giving it some extra water for a little bit, we’ll just see how it does in these locations.

I used to have some corsican sandwort growing in this exact spot by the firepit, but I decided to move it and the other two that were by our shed to shadier locations, since they prefer full shade.

Here’s a look at one of them in its new home.

It’s still probably getting too much sunlight here, but less than before. We’ll see how it does in this spot and then move it to the front yard (which is nearly full shade all day) if it doesn’t seem happy here.

Thyme

Another alternative groundcover that likes sunny locations is thyme! I ended up getting three different varieties to try out in a very sunny location on the side of our house. We got Pink Chintz, Elfin, and Wooly varieties.

The wooly one is my favorite! It really feels wooly. But the other two look like they’ll have pretty flowers eventually, which would be fun. Here’s a look at two of them on the side of the house, with some mulch around them.

This side of the house is very sparsely populated with grass, weeds, and clovers, so I’m hoping the thyme will spread happily here. I wish I’d gotten more, but perhaps we’ll go back to the nursery soon… :3

Moss & Moss-like Plants

Other than the thyme and vinca, we’re also encouraging moss to grow in shadier spots in our yard. In the photo of the firepit in the vinca section, you can see some growing on the firepit. We also have some volunteer moss in several areas, especially in the front yard.

Given that we live in the rainy Pacific Northwest, there’s not much we need to do to encourage the moss. It’s more like, we just need to let it be and it seems to do its own thing.

But I also found a fun little plant at the nursery to add to the collection! It’s not really a moss. It’s called Scleranthus biflorus or a cushion bush, and it looks like moss, but it likes sunny locations.

I planted it in the sunny spot next to the shed where the corsican sandwort used to live. Although the corsican sandwort seemed really unhappy in this location, I think the Scleranthus biflorus will really like it.

More… strawberries?!

As Mike also hinted at in his previous post, I may have also gotten another strawberry plant…. ^^;;

In my defense, this is more of a “wild” variety. It’s called a Beach strawberry and will apparently make for good groundcover. It already looks like it’s ready to spread to new territory, so I’m excited to see what happens with it. And who doesn’t want more strawberries, really?

So that “covers” the groundcover for today… :3 We’ve had a few other fun surprises pop up around the yard over the past week or so, but I think this post is quite long enough. So I’ll do another post later this week corralling all of the random flowers and other plants that popped up all on their own! 😀 Thanks for reading!

I’m going to do two posts today. I’ve been meaning to do a post on my lettuce cleanup, which Mike hinted at in his post this weekend. So this first post will talk about the lettuce cleanup process, and then I’ll do a post dedicated to my groundcover planting adventures this weekend. :3

On April 16, I decided it was finally time to clean up our lettuce seedlings. A sad day, in some regards, but we’ve learned for next time that we need to spread them out a bit more. XD

The suggested space between the seedlings sounds to be about 4 inches, but I decided to keep a few extra to see if some would do better than others. And then we can thin out a bit more once they grow bigger.

On the 19th, I noticed a squirrel investigating the garden. I went outside to find that he had been digging in our lettuce!

I guess he didn’t find anything good in there, because the lettuce seedlings seemed intact, and it doesn’t seem like he’s been back since. (Although I’ve seen squirrels foraging in the yard on other days since then.)

Today, the lettuce seedlings are looking quite happy. They’ve grown a lot since I thinned them out on the 16th! I think they are about ready to be thinned out again.

I’ll probably thin them out one more time to make sure they have the recommended 4 in. spacing now that some of them seem to be growing bigger. 🙂 More lettuce updates to come next week!

Mike posted a few photos of the garden in his nectarine post, but I want to give you a flower-specific update. The marigolds in the strawberry bed seem really happy there! They are blooming out quite nicely.

There are also some little scallions sprouting next to the strawberries as well. (The drier-looking photos were taken a few days ago, before it started raining, btw. Everything has gotten plenty of water since then.)

The lavender looks about the same? I don’t know what to expect with this one. We saw some lavender that was already blooming at a different nursery, but I haven’t done much research to see when this one will ever get flowers.

And here’s a long-awaited photo of the Corsican Sandwort that I planted next to the shed. (It’s a bit dry in this photo but has gotten plenty of water since then.) I need to pull the grass out that’s growing in between in, but it seems to be doing okay here. Apparently there should be little white flowers sometime in May, so we’ll see if those appear!

The Battle of the Sunflowers

In the first Notes from the Garden post, I mentioned that I also planted a few sunflower seeds. The seedlings finally sprouted last weekend, but there has been a great tragedy since then…

A day or so after they sprouted, I noticed the leaves looked like something had taken a bite out of them. (The soil is dry in this photo but it rained the next few days afterwards.)

Today, the situation is even worse. There is only 1.5 sunflower seedlings left. ;____;

Here’s the last little hold-out… Not much hope for it’s survival. 🙁

While we were at the nursery getting the nectarine tree today, we also bought a planter, so I think I’ll try putting some sunflowers in there. It started raining after we planted the nectarine tree, so we’ll probably work on that project next weekend.

New Flowers!

We also bought some new flowers while we were at the nursery. An azalea and some corydalis.

We already planted the azalea in the previously-dug hole from the blueberry adventures before we realized that azaleas are highly toxic. Since we have a small, fluffy dog who likes to run around the back yard, we are going to move this one to the front yard.

Since we have to move the azalea to the front yard, we are going to plant the corydalis there as well. All three of them are pretty shade-tolerant, and our front yard is very shady, so they should all be happy there. Here the corydalis are still in their little pots.

Clovers

Mike also posted some photos of his clover patch, so I wanted to give an update with photos that show a size comparison.

These clovers are huge! Here’s what they look like compared to my hand.

Fairy Tree

That’s the end of our garden updates, but I wanted to leave you with one last thing. While we were taking a walk in a park nearby, we found a tree full of roses.

No clue what this is, but I want one! Here is a close-up of the roses.

Anyways, that’s all for our garden adventures this week. 😀 Hopefully we can get the azalea bush transplanted to the front yard next weekend, and then we’ll also still need to find something to put in the hole in the backyard. Hopefully, something less toxic… ^^;; Thanks for reading!

Blueberries & Flowers

While Mike dug a bunch of holes in the yard yesterday, I helped plant the blueberries as well as a few flowers we picked up from the nursery. Here are some of my notes on our journey with the blueberry plants as well as a look at the flowers I ended up planting. Plus a bonus surprise at the end…

Things to Consider When Planting Blueberries

Blueberries need a certain number of “chill hours” where the temperature gets below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. In the PNW, this can be difficult to achieve, but we found “low chill requirement” blueberries at our local nursery (Sunshine and Bountiful Blue varieties) that should do well in our area.

Blueberries like acidic soil, so we got an “Acid Lovers” mix and mixed it 50/50 with our native soil. (You can see a photo in Mike’s post from yesterday.) Of course, we didn’t actually pH test our soil so… >___< It will be an experiment to say the least.

Blueberry plants should be planted 5 feet apart with 8 feet between rows, so we figured we could plant them 4 feet away from our house and around 5 feet away from each other.

It’s also recommended to cover the planting area with 2-4 inches of mulch to help prevent weeds. We had short blueberry bushes, so we ended up doing maybe 1-2 inches of mulch. Apparently you can increase the amount of mulch over time as they grow taller.

The first year after planting, it’s better to remove the blueberry flower buds so the plant’s energy can go into growing and establishing roots. This means no blueberries the first year! So after we finished planting and mulching, I tried to remove as many of the existing blueberry buds that I could. This took… a really long time. And I don’t think I got all of them. ^^;; I’m going to give it a second check next weekend.

Blueberries also have a few varieties of fungus, etc, that they are prone to. Unfortunately the plant closest to the fence seems like it might have one of them… More investigation will be needed here…

Marigolds & Lavender

When we got to the nursery, Mike so kindly reminded me that I had wanted to look at flowers. So I ended up getting 4 marigold plants and a lavender plant.

When I was a lot younger, I used to help my grandma and my mom plant flowers, so I’ve planted marigolds before. This time, I mixed the plants in with our strawberries to hopefully encourage bees when the time is right. It might be a tad too early to have planted them, but hopefully they’ll do okay.

I also planted some lavender in a terracotta pot. I’ve never grown lavender before, but I love lavender flavored things, so perhaps I’ll have to figure out what to do with it if it actually grows. :3 The lavender flowers should also encourage pollinators once they bloom.

Surprise Lettuce!

At the end of the day, after finishing planting the blueberries, I noticed some lettuce popping up! I’ve been checking the beds very closely every day to see if any of the seeds were doing anything, so I was really excited when I finally saw some of these little seedlings. 😀

It’s hard to tell if this is “Row 1” lettuce or “Row 2” lettuce, though… Perhaps we should have marked them better. XD Hopefully the other row will also start popping up, too, otherwise we may never know which one this is. Either way, the little lettuce seedlings seem happy so far. A good way to end the second planting day!

Hi Friends!

Welcome to our gardening blog! Part of the reason why we wanted to make a blog was just to keep track of things we learn, things we want to do in the future, and things we want to remember. So I want to do a series of notes that just consist of things that we need to remember or to think about doing. These are mostly just going to be notes for us, but if you have any tips or tricks, please let us know! ^^ We are definitely trying to do as much internet research (and talking to people at our local nursery) as possible, but there is much to learn along the way.

Things to Do

• We want to plant some flowers near the raised garden beds. Possibly lavender or marigolds. Someone at our local nursery mentioned that we could start planting marigolds in two weeks.
• We have a tiny amount of space left in the raised beds that we could use to plant a tomato plant or a pepper plant or two. It sounds like we need to wait until after Memorial Day to do that though.
• We could plant more lettuce or scallions in 3-4 weeks and then continue to stagger planting them like that, so we can have some producing all summer long.
• We need to plant the blueberry bushes still. We have to wait to do that until the utilities people come later this week.

Things to Remember

• We have ever-bearing/day-neutral strawberry plants, and the recommendation is to pluck the flowers until July once they start flowering.
• We need to make sure the beds stay watered, so they are moist down to about 3″. It sounds like we need to water more frequently during the first few weeks after planting, but then we could get a rain guage and only water if there is less than 1″ of rain that week. (In our area, it doesn’t rain much in the summer so it sounds like we will need to keep watering frequently in the summer.)

Miscellaneous Notes

Here’s what we planted in our first row of lettuce:

Second row of lettuce:

Here are some sunflower seeds that I planted next to our garden shed, pictures to come if they actually end up growing XD

And finally, some cute groundcover I planted next to our (unused) firepit in the shade. Also next to the garden shed, where it will probably die from too much sunlight. Whoops… ^^;;