Mike – Parsol Farms

First Strawberry ^__^

The garden has been growing CRAZY well the past few weeks. I’ve been pretty diligent about plucking off the flowers on the strawberry plants to encourage the plant growth – but it looks like one snuck by me!! I’m just gonna leave it since it’s getting close to June which is when we theoretically should stop plucking the leaves – and it’s pretty cute:

And here’s what the whole strawberry bed looks like. Aren’t these gigantic??? Those leaves are overflowing and it’s making me happy.

Speaking of overflowing – do you see this lettuce and scallions?? We’ve been harvesting them as we need them for various meals (we had our first salad this week with lettuce from the garden <3) but whoops we clearly planted too much stuff all at once. We’ll want to space out the plants a bit more next year.

This may be a bit hard to see (sorry for the bleh photo) but the Nectarine tree has a _ton_ of fruit growing on it. We are plucking off most of it since the roots haven’t really established themselves yet and we don’t want the tree to like destroy itself – but I think we’ll let a few grow.

The blueberries are mostly doing well. The one in the middle is a bit sad but that’s ok. The other two are pretty happy. Our mulch plan clearly didn’t work as well as I hoped, though – as there are weeds poking through that I’m battling. RAWR. Oh well – eventually may get rid of them and they give me more to do outside.

Our lavender is also experiencing a crazy growth spurt and now has stems larger than the pot itself. Maybe a new pot is in order at some point?

Last, but certainly not least, our sunflower is doing pretty well. It got a chunk bitten out of it but it still seems pretty happy and is growing fairly well.

So ya – that’s my update for now. Hope y’all are doing well. I’m looking forward to the strawberries om nom nom.

Garden update + new plants

It’s been quite some time since I’ve made a post about the garden – sorry about that! We haven’t been doing a whole lot with the garden other than just letting things progress and watering occasionally – but this weekend was a big weekend for outdoor work!

I finally bought a weed whacker and spent a long time this morning mowing + assaulting the weeds and the backyard really cleaned up nicely. Sadly I didn’t really think about taking photos to show the progression but the yard is looking much better. One of the big things with the weeds / just general lawn stuff is that they were definitely encroaching on some things like our blueberry bushes. You may have noticed this in previous photos – but today we decided to attempt to fix this!

We went to our garden store and bought some mulch along with some other things I’ll go into below. Kelsy helped trim around the blueberry bushes and then I layered on the mulch to try and make it so it’s both easier to mow around them and less things encroach on their space. I also just really like the look of mulch around the plants so woo.

Our row of blueberry bushes – now with bigger mulch rings!

A close up of one of the happiest of our blueberry bushes with more mulch

Before I get into the new plants, I also wanted to share a status update of some of our old ones. Our nectarine tree appears to be doing quite well and also appears to maybe have fruit forming on it? I’m a bit confused as it wasn’t supposed to produce fruit for 3 years. I’m unsure if this is like strawberries / blueberries where we should pull off the fruit to encourage plant growth or if we should just let it do its thing. More research will need to be done.

Surprisingly, to me, the strawberries that we planted just in the ground near the old tree stump appear to be quite happy as well. We hardly have done anything with these but I guess whatever is happening in the environment is pleasing to these plants so yay.

Our actual strawberry bed is also doing pretty well. While most of the marigolds are really struggling, the strawberries themselves appear to be really happy and there’s a never ending battle of me vs the flowers as I continue to rip them off.

The lavender is growing quite large now but still not much in the way of flowering. I wonder if we needed an even larger pot o_O

Last, but certainly not least, we added four new plants to our garden today!! We have 2 types of tomatoes, a bell pepper plant, and a Habanero plant. It’s been super hot so I think that these plants should be happy. I’ll let Kels fill you in more about these in her post. We also bought some cute supported for the plants to help as they grow.

Aside from those new plants in the middle – do you see the size of our onions and lettuce??? They’re getting crazy big. I’m glad we trimmed up some of the lettuce before cause wow.

Anywho that’s all for me today. Hope y’all have been well 🙂

Front yard work

This weekend our goal was to move that Azalea bush from the back yard to the front yard. Naturally, this rather small project spawned lots of other things. ^^;;

On Saturday morning we woke up early to go to the store and then as I was looking outside I was like hmm we have a lot of really tall grass / weeds / etc so maybe I should mow the lawn real quick. So I did that but then the edges of the lawn looked kind of bleh because you can’t really mow up to the fence and some of our property has a substantial slope around the edges. So I started pulling some things up by hand and then was like, “Kels – we should figure out something to do about the edge of the lawn so we don’t need to do this.”

So we did some research and went to our garden center and talked with some people and came up with a plan. For now, we bought a few “ground cover” plants that don’t need to be mowed and are almost like weeds in that they take things over. We were thinking we could put some of those in places we don’t want to have to maintain. We also are gonna eventually get some mulch to make like a mulch barrier around the edge of the lawn.

While we were at the garden center, I managed to grab a photo of one of the numerous hummingbirds they have there ^_^ (Apologies for the hard to see bird – but it’s on the fountain in the middle).

Kels is gonna make a blog post about all of those plants we got and what she did with them – but I’ll glaze over that since that was all her 🙂

I spent a lot of time pulling up weeds and I did manage to discover some gargantuan looking slugs (?) and wanted to share those.

In the front yard, I dug three holes to plant the three larger plants we had (the Azalea bush + two flowery things Kels liked). Here’s some photos of what it looks like:

I really like the tri-color look we have going. Hopefully those plants take to that area well 🙂

Our raised beds are still looking good. Kels went through and cleaned up all the lettuce so we actually have reasonably spaced out stuff now. Not a whole lot has changed but I like posting the weekly photos. Once we really start having plants, I’ll maybe maybe like a post that just shows all the weeks so we can see the slow transition

Oh and here’s the latest strawberry stuff around the tree stump – Kels added one more for the fun of it since this one is supposed to be good ground cover.

Last, but not least, we may have bought some ridiculous statues that I thought were adorable. We haven’t quite figured out where they’re gonna go yet – but I put them on the deck and the cats were originally horrified much to my amusement. Fairly quickly, though, they got over it and seem to have accepted these strange things.

Anywho – that’s all for my update. Hope all of you are having a good April 🙂

Nectarine Tree!!

So I’ve been searching around for a nectarine tree for the past few weeks and haven’t been having much luck despite the fact that numerous articles online mention how well nectarines grow here. One of my best friends (Winx) was at a garden center near where she lives in Portland and texted me that they had a couple of nectarine trees! Since Kels and I were off today, we decided to drive on down and see about getting one ^_^

We found one there and it was even a fairly decent breed. While Fantasia Nectarines can be affected by Peach Leaf Curl (which is fairly common up here) – it sounds like there’s some fairly easy things we can do to help protect the tree.

Getting the tree into the car did pose a slight issue, though – as it was quite large but we managed to do it without any major incidents.

When we got home, I had to dig quite a large hole. It needed to be at least 2 feet in diameter and far enough down that the top of the root bulb would sit flush with the soil. Fortunately, I finally decided to order me a wheelbarrow type of thing and man did it help! Made it so we didn’t have this giant pile of dirt we had to pick up off the yard.

The pile of dirt + wheelbarrow + nectarine tree + Kels’ legs

After the hole was dug, we mixed some native soil with our good potting mix and some fertilizer and put that around the root bulb. We also added an inch or two of fertilizer on top of that and made sure it curved up around the edges to make a nice pit for some water

Aside from the nectarine tree, we also got an Azalea bush and planted it before realizing that they are toxic to dogs so we’re gonna have to move it to the front yard instead. Whoops ^^;;

While I’m posting, might as well give an update on the raised beds and other plants. Everything appears to be coming along well! Still need to clean up that lettuce <__<;;;

Strawberry bed with the pretty flowers blooming 😀

Shhhh just pretend you don’t see the lettuce

One of the blueberry bushes – look how many of the flowers we’ve had to pluck off so far!

Anyway that it’s for the the week. Things are still going well here ^_^ – hope all of you had a great week and thanks for reading!

Bonsai Tree + Status Update

Heyo all! Hope y’all have been having a good week ^.^ The plant stuff here has been going pretty well – although I haven’t actually done any physical work this weekend in relation to plants (woo!)

To start, Kelsy bought me a Rock Juniper Bonsai tree for my birthday that’s coming up soon and it’s adorable. It’s quite tiny right now which is fun. I imagine if we re-potted it in the future, it could get larger.

Here’s where I placed it – maybe need something else up there, too – but it’s a nice addition ^_^

While we’re taking a look inside, we also have two majesty palm’s that I very much enjoy. We got them right when we moved in and they’re still doing really well! The one closest to my work desk seems to be doing better than the other one but it’s hard to tell why. Maybe more sun?

The happier palm next to my desk. It’s taking over!!

Outside of the house, the plants are coming along nicely. I may have planted far too much lettuce in a short area <__<;; Let’s just call it a learning experiment and see what happens.

A close up of the far too much lettuce. This is the 2nd row – there’s a row to the left of it that’s slowly coming up. I planted less seeds in that row (and of a different breed)

In other exciting news, the onion started we’ve planted are starting to really pop up! I’m looking forward to seeing how they progress 😀

Here’s a high level overview of this raised bed – we still have some room in the middle for future plants as it gets warmer

In the Strawberry bed, our flowers that we planted are starting to really bloom and they look so pretty. The Strawberry plants themselves also look fairly happy so yay!

The blueberry bushes are still looking good and appear to have not died since we put them in the ground which is always a positive thing.

A blueberry bush with some friendly clover neighbours

Last update is my clovers that I planted last year are doing super well. They’re so pretty and are also gargantuan. It’s hard to get a sense of scale but here’s a photo I like of them. You can see the smaller clovers towards the bottom and the larger ones in the middle.

Well that’s everything for this week. Coming up in future weeks – we want to figure out more trees to add the backyard and perhaps more flowers? We’ll see how it all goes ^__^

Diggin’ Holes and Plantin’ Blueberries

Everything hurts. Did you know digging holes is a lot of work? I guess let me back up a bit and talk through the day. So this morning we were like ok let’s plant the blueberry bushes since we finally got the OK from the utility places that we can dig in our backyard without issue. Kels wanted a third plant and we needed to get some soil amendment to help increase the acidity of the soil so we left for the gardening store.

On top of getting a third blueberry bush and the soil stuff, we also got some more potting soil, a pot, and four flower type things that Kels will prolly write about. Loaded everything up and came home.

We originally were thinking about putting the blueberry bushes along the back of our yard so I dug a hole and then we were like hmm actually this is a bit shady so maybe we should move them. So now we have this random hole in the back of our backyard cause I was too lazy to do anything about it but maybe we’ll plant something there later <__<;

Went to the area near our raised beds and proceeded to dig and dig and dig.

With all the soil out, we mixed in this planting mix at a roughly 50 / 50 ratio with the native soil.

A different angle – you can see the soil to the left and the grass above (we put the grass soil elsewhere)

After we mixed up the soil and the mix, we put the plant it (after making sure to loosen up the roots). We then covered it all in mulch being careful to not get the mulch too close to the base of the plant.

Repeated this step three more times (oh my goodness my back) and we ended up with this (Apologies for the not so great photo).

While I was doing this, Kels put in some of her flowers near the strawberries.

Bed 1 after 1 week and with the new flowers put in

The last thing for the day was potting our new lavender plant and placing it near the raised beds. Hopefully this plant will flower and help attract bees to the nearby plants.

And that’s all for the day! Looking forward to not having as much work to do in the upcoming weeks. Watering is nice and chill. Although I think we may need to rip off the flowers on the blueberry plants to encourage growth for the following years (and encourage it to not produce berries this year). More investigation is needed.

Planting day!

Today we finished getting the soil and bought a variety of things to plant. Soil is so heavy and it’s hard work to just get the amount of soil we bought into the beds (in total we used 16 bags of soil + 2 bags of a soil amendment). Each of our beds is 4 feet by 4 feet with a depth of just over 12 inches.

Bed with all the soil + compost mixed together

Here’s all of the starter things + plants we bought (but there’s also some seeds not pictured).

After unloading everything and getting the soil all set up, we went about putting the plants in. As you can see above, we got 4 different types of strawberry starters (Tri Star, Eversweet, Albion, and Seascape) – but whoops did we totally not realize just how many strawberry starters are in each container. We ended up taking 6 of each of them and filling up an entire raised bed – but we still had tons leftover! We messaged our neighbours who we’ve previously talked about gardening with to see if they wanted any so hopefully they won’t go to waste.

Planting the strawberries were really interesting. We had to dig decently far down so that we could put the roots in without them bending. We weren’t really sure what to do with fertilizer so we just like dumped some in the hole and mixed it in with the soil. Guess we’ll see what happens lol.

The raised bed full of strawberry starters (pre watering and pre any seeds being planted between them)

After we finished with the strawberries, we began the second raised bed where we are planting a lot of other things. We did two rows of different types of lettuce seeds. Planting lettuce is pretty interesting – you basically just use your finger to make line in the soil, plop the seeds and some fertilizer in, and then lightly push the soil back on top. Hopefully some of them germinate!

Other than the lettuce, we also planted some onions, scallions, garlic, and chives. For the onions, we basically just had like little bulb starters that we stuck in the ground (as you can tell we have no idea what we’re doing but just trying things). The other plants we just spaced out as was suggested and did much of the same.

The second bed with the lettuce seeds on the left and the garlic, onions, and chives on the right.

Once we finished up those raised beds, we decided to take the strawberry starters and just plant some in random spots throughout our yard to see if any grow. I’m not expecting much from those but it’s fun to experiment anyway.

Kelsy planting strawberry things in random spots to see what happens

A more complete look at the two beds together after everything has been watered

You may have noticed in the original photo of all the plants that there’s two bigger ones still in pots not pictured above. We decided to get some blueberry plants – but due to state laws, we have to have someone come out and mark the gas lines on our property before we can dig a hole to put those blueberries in. Photos and more to come for that in future weeks.

Overall today was a lot of fun – albeit a lot of hard work. I’m tentatively hopeful that at least some of our plants will work out ^_^