New year, new gardens

 Yes, gardens with a plural s.  This will be long because... well, lots of stuff and it's been a year.

What sexy dirt looks like

The uptown garden has expanded off the deck.  This year I decided to amend the soil. It was a lot of hard work for just some dirt that meant digging two trenches, adding blood meal to each, and then refilling the first trench with the soil from the second trench before topping it off with topsoil... and so on.  It was a lot of work for things to look like dirt.  As one farmer said to me, "But it's becoming sexy dirt."

In that space, I have some strawberries (what's left, at least, after the squirrels found them), two miniature rose bushes from Trader Joe's last Valentine's Day, some snapdragons, lavender, salvia, phlox, and the hosta.  The hostas have been there for ages but keep coming back.  I don't know what the bushes are that have been there for ages, but there they are and they work into things as well.  One of the teachers at school gave me four Dahlia tubers.  I don't know if they'll do anything, but I'll put them in this week as they seem to have a bit of a sprout.  

I also added a couple of covers to the drain pipes - a gargoyle and a dragon to keep him company. 

On the deck, I have the herbs.  On one of the hooks is a large everbearing strawberry plant.  She is a total diva, but I love her. The traditional bowl of herbs this year has dill, a couple of basil plants, flatleaf parsley, rosemary, and marjoram. The rail box has rosemary, oregano, curly parsley, and purple sage. I have a pot of basil on the deck and a bowl of lettuce on one of the tables. I'll add some Parisian carrots when I pick up some drainage rocks for the bottom of my square planter.

I know it will all look beautiful when all the work is done and things have started to fill out and grow.  It all comes down to patience... not a lot of something I have.

Let's Go Downtown...

The downtown garden is getting a lot of work done to it. 

I took this before I started and my husband said, "Wow! It looks good, what are you growing?"

I replied, "Weeds."

Yep, I started late clearing the place out this year.  New England weather has been... well, odd to say the least.  But it's New England so it's to be expected.  It took three or four days to clear it all out.  One of my original raised beds had a couple of boards rotting out, so I had some new wood cut for it.  

Just as a reminder: measure twice, cut once.  I'm ending up with two six by two instead of seven by three beds this year, which is OK.  I did mix up a new batch of Mel's mix (1:1:1 peat moss: mixed compost: vermiculite) for the center bed, which also had new wood and a reduced size bed.  The beauty of the slotted concrete corners is I can pull and insert new boards without having to rip nails out and such.   

Let me give a big shout out to my husband.  All the old wood and debris that had piled up in one corner is mostly gone now because he spent time hauling it to the dumpsters and wood piles for me so I could focus on rebuilding my tomato and pepper boxes. Of course, in the middle of all the weeding and prepping, I discovered a pretty good sized ant colony had taken up residence.  With a little research, I boiled up some water, dissolved some sugar and Borax, and saturated a bunch of cotton balls to place around my boxes.  It seems to work and there will be a full post on that later.

The far box is my peppers and eggplant, the middle box will be the tomatoes this year, and my onion box... well, the onion box is just fine thank you very much, and would like to be left alone to do its thing.  The Egyptian walking onions I thought were going to die last year came back with a vengeance.  It will be a nice crop this year with enough reseeding for next year.  The garlic onion things (I should find out what they're really called) given to me years ago have spread.  There is one clump in the box, the rest have scattered all around the plot.  

Perhaps someone will curse me as a ghost of gardens past as I curse the mint and mugwort planters. It's time to start chasing the rogue plants and dumping them back in the onion box with a firm warning to stay put.  (Oh yeah, that should work.) 

My old tomato box will be my three sister garden.  The corn is planted and I do need to pull and replace the boards around it as well as top off the soil, but it's wicked boring right now.  Photos will come as things grow. Basically, I have to wait until the corn is about 10-12" tall then plant the beans, wait until they are using the corn for support, and then plant the pumpkins. Hopefully, by mid-July it will all be looking good.

Squash and cukes get planted today after some final weeding in their box.  All in all, it's shaping up.  I'll get real photos and shorter posts up... but hey, it's been a year.