I don’t have the patience for annuals (unless you can eat them), so I figured I’d add some perennial flowers to the garden this year. This spring, I picked up about a dozen daisy-like plants at a really neat family-owned nursery that is literally two minutes down the road from my house. Terrific plants at $2 each – and they are already flowering and gorgeous, lining the entrance to my garden.

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The chives have been flowering for a week. Welcome, bees!

The garden looks completely different, and green. I’ll have to post a few photos this weekend … after we do a bit of weeding!

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Two weeks later we finished spreading the compost and tilling the garden.

Jessi’s half is on the left; Chris’s half is on the right. Let the games begin!

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The red squirrel discovers the sunflowers we neglected…

… he wastes no time snatching one away!

A feast for a king!

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Well, the sunflower seeds that I got from my food co-op made for beautiful flowers all summer long. We’re going to plant more next year, and maybe even buy another variety. We’re going to look into some native sunflowers, and I really want to get some of those giant sunflowers that are good for seed-eating. I’ve also seen sunflowers with jet black petals – kind of neat, but haven’t found seeds for them anywhere.

I don’t think these sunflowers will have seeds that we can eat, but I won’t pull them out for a few weeks anyway, just in case.

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Here’s what an eggplant flower looks like. Our eggplants are loaded with flowers and buds; right now, they look like one of the most promising plants we put in! The potted eggplants grew much more quickly, but the ones in the front yard were quicker to flower – I’ll have to keep track and see which ones produce more.

Our summer squash and pumpkins have all been invaded by squash vine borers. I remember seeing the moths earlier this year around the pumpkins, and asking Chris what they were. We should have looked them up rather than assuming that they were some kind of harmless bug. Anyway, it’s pretty serious and every vine is infested. This morning we performed “surgery” on the plants by slitting open the stems and taking out the worms. We piled dirt over a lot of the stems, hoping that they will send off more roots.

I’m not too optimistic, and I’m sure most of them will die. Since it’s such a small garden, I don’t see any “survival of the fittest” pulling through. We’ll see.

Tip for next year: Apparently, buttercup squash are somewhat resistant to the borer. It takes many years of close watching, crop rotation, deep tilling, and removal of larvae before you can get rid of the problem – and that’s only if your neighbors aren’t growing squash as well. We could try a solid-stemmed zucchini (zucchetta rampicante) to see if that has better results. Otherwise… starting the summer squash really, really early inside and hoping they produce a lot before the larve hatch would guarantee at least some squash next year.

Part of the problem was that we trellised everything. I thought that trellising would mean greater yields, since we only have a city yard to work with. If the plants could have vined along the ground, they probably would have put down more roots!

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On a whim, I went to the Food Co-op early this summer and picked up some raw sunflower seeds to plant along the house. They took off nicely, and the first sunflower opened up a couple of days ago. It’s a bit deformed, and I’m not sure if they will have edible seeds or not, but they add some color to the garden.

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