Why do the herbs always need to be picked when there is no other food in the garden to season with them?

I have more chives and catnip than we will ever use, so if you’d like some… please let me know. Of course, last week I also planted catnip seeds that I bought at Monticello. Because one can never have enough catnip. (Maybe this is why we have a grey cat who visits our back yard now…)

A lawn care company left a flyer in our door yesterday. We are part of the 57% of families in our neighborhood who don’t use herbicides on their lawns.

I prefer watching gold finches eat dandelions to the noxious smell of weed killer. I think we’ll try making dandelion wine this year.

When temperatures are in the 60s for long enough, hundreds of tiny mantis will emerge from this egg case. They will seek out aphids and other tiny insects – and eat eachother if there are not enough to be found. They wait in stillness until their prey comes close enough, and with incredible speed catch and devour.

They have the ability to mimic leaves and ants in order to escape their predators.

I secured this egg case to one of our daisies in the garden, so it won’t blow away with the wind. I hope to catch them hatching.

The garden is seeded and planted; rain is in the forecast. Now we just sit back and watch it grow!

Today… here’s Puck:

Checking things out. He stays in the paths (mostly).

“Broccoli…. cauliflower… kohlrabi! My FAVORITE!!”

Enjoying his garden

We’re finally seeing spring days in the 60s and 70s, with beautiful sunshine. But the temperature at night is still dropping into the 30s, which means that our nightshade plants are still traveling between the deck and the kitchen every day.

Tomorrow I hope to put in a good chunk of tomatoes. I’ve had problems with transplants dying off the last few years – not sure if it’s due to planting before a big rain, cutworm, or something else – but recently about 1/3 of my tomatoes’ stems have broken off right above the soil line after planting. So I have a few extras, and will wait to plant a handful for a week to see if I need to replace them with others. I have some large pots that the extras can go into, and a bit of extra space in the garden.

If the forecast looks good on Thursday, hopefully the eggplant and peppers can go out then!

I spend my days being a semi-nerd by profession.

In my spare time, I garden. And just to tie the two together, I make spreadsheets.

Here is what my garden looks like now:

And here is the sunflower planting schedule, so we are guaranteed to have flowers in bloom on September 10th:

I realize now that I am addicted to growing cole crops. I have 18 tomatoes, 16 peppers, 8 eggplants, and a variety of melon/zucchini seeds that I wanted to plant. I need a bigger garden!

My my terrific brother picked up three loads of these 16″ blocks for me at less than $1 per piece. There are 26 blocks per bed, bringing the project to a grand total to $52 for the frame. (Well, plus labor… but I needed the exercise!) Not too bad. The garden is on a slight hill and so they aren’t perfect. The beds are planted though! They are about 15′ x 4′ each (inside measurements 13.33′ x 2.67′).

I’m holding off on strawberries this year. Inside the beds are catnip, sage, thyme, chives, daisies and artemisia. I may have to move the artemisia out of the beds in a couple of years as it could get too large.

In the back of the bed, I planted alternating holes with last year’s onions that we missed. These will grow tall, and produce beautiful flower heads. I put basil in alternating holes around the rest of the bed, and plan to seed sunflowers in the other holes later this summer. The sunflowers need to be in bloom for cutting mid-September, so I won’t put those in until July.

I finally started hardening off tomatoes and peppers this week. Last year I decided to start fewer plants inside, and purchase more at the local greenhouse… but I ended up buying seeds anyway. It is just so hard to resist starting plants inside! I already put in all of the cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, and kohlrabi – and seeded radishes and carrots. The rest of the garden should be seeded within the week, so all that’s left will be tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant.

They look pretty good; if the weather patterns hold most of these should be able to go into the ground next weekend. I do have a row cover and some fabric in case temperatures drop into the 30s later this May.