Garden Thread

My Doe Hills consider this a challenge!

From Wikipedia, seems there are two black sesames. One is a variant of sesame, the oil seed crop. The other is a vegetable grown for the leaves, and also the seeds, eaten whole or in a paste. They're related.

Aw yeah!!!

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt_fDW6g9O6

And this past weekend we started all the pepper seeds, as well as the dahlias and zinnias.  Garden 2019 is full speed ahead now!

(Edited to add that yes, one of our grow light bulbs is out.  They're such a pain in the ass to replace, though...)

Peppers have finally sprouted!  They always wait until you've completely and utterly given up all hope -- they will not sprout until every last possible shred of optimism that they're going to germinate has been obliterated.  Hugs and I were thisclose to starting another tray of them when lo!  Signs of life!  At long, terrible last!

Meanwhile, in the orchard, spring must be in the air because the trees I'd ordered from Trees of Antiquity last summer and had completely forgotten about showed up last week, and we planted them this past weekend.  One is a Liz's Late nectarine (how could I resist?), which we put in the place of a Rio Oso Gem peach that deer had stripped the bark off of and killed.  The other is a Newtown Pippin apple, which needed a new hole to be dug for it.  This is the first expansion to the orchard in six years, and now we're finally toeing right up to the property line.  If we want more trees after this, we're going to have to start getting creative!  (I actually think there's room for two more in the orchard space in the front yard, but after that we'd need to think about taking out some overgrown shrubbery scrub that serves right now as a privacy screen between us and the neighbors.)

That is such a wonderful thing to be planning.  Plant mementos seem especially meaningful to me, and I love this idea.  (Unfortunately, I have no experience with starting stuff from cuttings.  We have a bay tree that was gifted to Hugs by a long-since-gone customer at her library; it was a cutting from one of her trees.  Ours is now enormous [it started as a stick with two leaves on it], and we've been tiptoeing around the idea of starting a new one.  Instructions online seem to suggest you just cut a stick and shove it into the ground.  That seems... unlikely?)

Garden work coming this weekend!  Peppers and tomatoes are ready to be transplanted into intermediate pots!  Sunflowers need to be started!  And onions need to be transplanted into the actual garden (which is now free of its baby bunny infestation)!  I'm so excited to be getting stuff really going outside!  We're hoping to have our delivery of leaf compost in time to top off all the garden beds, but that seems unlikely.  Which is just as well, I guess, because we need to save up some time and energy for replacing the rabbit fencing...

Well, I'm terrible at any of that kind of stuff, but I'm sure if you do it whenever you can, it's probably fine?  It'll be like a time-release calcium in the soil over the growing season!  Right?  Uhh... don't quote me on that.

Gah, I am so jealous of 🐍 cahusserole 🐍!!!  Our bountifully warm spring is sort of sputtering all of a sudden.  We got the onions into the garden, and last week transplanted the zinnias and dahlias, which had pretty much outgrown their pots.  But every time we say "Now it's time to put the peppers and tomatoes into the garden," it turns chilly again.  I mean, I know we're now past the last frost point for the year, but I don't like those overnight lows in the low 40's...

And even more good news, the Census is next year.

If I posted some pictures of things growing in my garden that I don't know what they are, could you tell me if they're weeds or not? Because I pulled something earlier this season that I thought was a weed and it turned out to be tarragon. I don't want to make that mistake again. I got a new patch this year and there's a lot of stuff leftover from the last guy.

In that case, it's an oak.

Summer's in full swing now, and my garden is being unusually awesome! 

The garlic harvest looked great, and now we've got a volunteer tomato growing in that newly-empty bed (I suspect it's either a Jaune Flamme or, more excitingly, a Berkeley Tie-Dyed, the seeds for which we got last year from 🐍 cahusserole 🐍 -- it's the gift that keeps on giving!).  I also planted some carrots and beets in there, but as always happens when I plant carrots, we got torrential rains that afternoon so I suspect they may have all washed out. 

Onions and shallots are nearly ready for harvest; the shallots have been exciting because this was our first year growing them.  I planted a full bed of bulbs back in the fall, and only about 10% of them actually ended up growing in the spring.  I was really disappointed about that, before discovering that, duh, shallots grow in clusters like daffodils, so each one that germinated is actually going to yield about four or five new shallots.  I still would have liked a full bed of them, but the general crop failure left room for a lot of leeks, so we all win, I guess.

Tomatoes are covered with fruits!  The first of the Zombie cherry tomatoes is turning yellow!  Things are happening around here!

Peppers have already yielded the first banana pepper harvest of the year, and are covered with a ton more fruits.  The various bell peppers will finally have their first yield next week, enough for a pot of chili!  And the jalafuegos are now in that "hot peppers in the summertime" state where there is way more fruit than anyone will ever need.

And my basil, that looked so sad after transplant, has exploded in a riot of awesomeness.  

In short, things are going well!  Also, sunflowers.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bzn8QlInJXb

There is NO WAY you don't have some kind of wasp-related superpower.  This is your superhero origin story -- reaching into the saplings, grabbing a wasp nest in what you thought was your mortal hand, and then having COMPLETE POWER over the wasps!

If I ever own a house again, I want to plant mint in place of my front lawn. It takes over quickly, it's low to the ground, it's actually kind of useful (unlike grass), it's still green, and if one were to mow it it would smell great.