mystery rose
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The old rose in my community plot is showing some pink!mystery garden rose: Rosa gallica Charles de Mills
tasty, healthy and priceless …
I love this comment from Soilman so I’m posting it again! ‘Efficiency’ is what we’re all desperately trying to get away from at an a community garden or UK allotment site. ‘Efficiency’ means chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers and machinery. That’s what commercial farmers do… unfortunately. With all the resulting freakery and horror that they inflict upon our food. I adore ‘inefficiency’. It’s tasty, healthy and priceless. Wonderful!
Baptisia australis – false indigo
My neighbor gave me seeds last fall from her blue false indigo plant. I planted them today in a pot. Such a beautiful clear blue flower! I hope my seeds sprout. Blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) is native to the eastern US and was an important medicinal plant to Native Americans. The seeds require some sort of abrasion to be applied to their seed coat in order to germinate. The plants are legumes, members of the bean family, and are able to fix nitrogen. Planted in full sun in even…
so many rabbits…
I think we have a bumper crop of rabbits this year. I have never seen so many. Babies and adults – they don’t even run from gardeners and cameras. A pair lives in my neighbors backyard and Skippy watches them through the fence. He’d love to get out and chase them. I disturbed 3 tiny little babies while weed whacking the garden paths yesterday. Very cute! The baby bunny in the photo here was at Mt Auburn cemetery today and hardly even looked up at me. The big one is…
growing fast – photos of my community plot
My plants are growing very fast, but still the gardens look like mostly dirt. The potatoes are getting very big. All my asparagus plants (10) sprouted and shoots are 5-15 inches tall now. Today I filled in with dirt to the top of the bed and accidentally broke off a thin shoot. So I ate it. Absolutely delicious!!! My popcorn is up now. Two dense rows of 2 inch plants. I’m planning to transplant some to thin the rows since I have room for a third row. How exciting. I’ve…
garden work
List of today’s garden work (all in my home garden): Replanted more pea seeds in areas where none came up yet.Planted Chinese pole beans, Tongue of Fire shell beans, and Fortex pole beans.Planted 1 row of soy beans (Butterbeans).Planted dahlia tubers.Added lower trellis to cucumber trellis. A couple days ago:Transplanted cucumbers.Brought plants to my parents garden: tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins and peppers.
chickadee update
The chickadee babies have hatched (I think). Yesterday both parents started bringing food to the bird house. Every 15 minutes or so. I don’t hear any chirping from inside. Chickadees are so secretive. Here is a paragraph I posted earlier: “On April 27, I noticed that the chickadee pair were building their nest, bringing moss and grasses. A few days later they brought fluff and fuzz. Maybe around May 1 she probably started laying eggs. The female lays one egg a day for about a week. On May 8, I…
community gardening thoughts
I just took a look at just at the post and heated discussion on Community Gardens at Garden Rant recently (May 7). Guest Ranter Ed Bruske describes a whole different concept in community gardening. A new way to remove all individuality (and probably pleasure) from of the community gardening and increase efficiency. No thanks! I’d much prefer CSA shares. I’d even rather go to the supermarket …. … Instead of assigning individual plots, why not form a co-op that would operate more like a farm? Food production would be so…
lead in garden soil
Here’s an article from the New York Times: For Urban Gardeners, Lead Is a Concern. “It’s kind of a dirty secret nobody really knows about because we’re all distracted worrying about lead in toys from China,” said Gabriel Filippelli, a professor of earth science at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis who has published several papers on lead accumulation in soil. His and other research indicates lead levels in people’s blood correspond directly to the amount of lead in the soil where they live.
This is a journal of my vegetable gardens. Skippy thinks the garden is his, even though I do all the work. We're located near Boston, in USDA zone 6. I have bees, chickens, fruit trees and berry bushes, too. I use all sustainable organic methods and strive to grow all of my family's vegetables myself. -Kathy
weeks and counting until my last spring frost
My garden this week
Skippy’s vegetable of the month – Egyptian walking onions!
