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.
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?
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.
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 😀
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.
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 ^__^
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ^_^
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… ^^;;