Our First Potatoes

We harvested our first potatoes yesterday. We planted the seeds in early Feb and didn't know what to expect. Amelia was born in March and needless to say, the potatoes fell victim to neglect. Not a good thing with container gardening. The plants never bloomed and actually withered away altogether. Yesterday we dumped the container expecting to see nothing and we found a handful of potatoes from each container. It was pretty exciting! We are definitely going to grow them again and I imagine with more attention and care, we will have even more to harvest.

Welcome Summer

The cosmos in Maggie's garden are quite charming right now and the nasturtiums have happily found it's place in our yard once again. The mint is relentless as always, popping up everywhere and there's a rumor that we will be drinking some yummy mojitos this summer. The squash is rambling about in Sam's bed and volunteer tomatillos are popping up everywhere! The tomato plants are on the small, leggy side but that's not all that surprising considering the low temperatures and record rain we've had this month. We do however have blooms and fruit and of course lots of hope for plenty of bruchetta. I started off the morning today contacting Farmer Fred , our local Master Gardener via Facebook (how great is that?) inquiring about planting tomatoes this late. Hopefully I can get at least one more in the ground. Other than that, I am planning on pulling out some climbing roses that aren't doing so well and replacing them with something else. Something bright! I am thinking about the black eyed Susan vine but heard they are frost sensitive. I plan to pop in the garden center today and see if I can find them. I have only seen them available in seeds.

Rhododendrons & Red Onions

I love our rhododendrons. They bloom for only a few short weeks out of the year but it's well worth waiting for. Not knowing what a rhododendron was, these were the only plants that I saved on our property after we moved in. Everything else was cactus and shrubs that were pruned wrong and covered in cobwebs and they had to go.

Last weekend I caught my first glimpse of summer. I think a lot of people did. Our local garden centers were busy. I bought some red onion starts to add to the red onions that I planted by seed weeks ago. These 6 packs hold a lot of onions. Each plug is a bulb. It's hard to see in the picture below, but the onions are filling up the right side of the bed. I also managed to get in 8 tomato plants, 3 squash, 6 bell peppers and herbs. It's great to be working in the yard again!  

Finding my way back to the garden

Blame it on winter or perhaps the new addition in our family but either way, it's been awhile since I've found myself out in the garden. With baby Amelia being almost 1 month old and the weather warming up, I'm slowly finding my way back to the garden. The zinnia & cosmo seeds are planted & the beds are prepped and waiting to be filled with tomato plants, squash, cucumbers and more. I recently added soil to the potato pots and my husband helped me with the wire on our fence for the climbing pink jasmine. The jasmine is ready to bloom and this will be the year that we'll start to see significant growth from it I'm sure. Here are some recent pictures.

Growing Potatoes in Containers

Every year, I mention to someone how much I'd love to grow potatoes. I remember harvesting them once, when I was a teenager, out of a neighbor's garden. I couldn't stop digging. It was so exciting to find potato after potato! It wasn't until a year ago, or so, when I discovered they could be grown in containers. I thought this was great because I heard potatoes can attract insects to the garden and also I heard that they are a pretty cumbersome plant taking up lots of real estate and that they are difficult to get rid of if you don't manage to pull all the potatoes up. I also thought this would be a great gardening project to do with the kids. I surfed the web a bit looking for good tutorials and found a great article here from Love Apple Farm. Our seed potatoes were on the small size so we planted them whole. It was a fun project to do with my daughter and we enjoyed our afternoon in the garden on one of the first sunny and warm days of the new year. We can't wait to see how they do.

Lettuce, Arugula & Cauliflower

I love this time of year. The weather forces me to slow down and relax more and the holidays are always fun and exciting, especially with two small children and now a baby on the way! Even the yard  seems to offer us a break with our lawn growing slower and the garden beds benefiting from the rainfall. Our lettuce & arugula are now ready for harvest. This is our first year growing cauliflower and so far so good! Our other veggies are coming along just fine. With the exception of the greens, we have to wait patiently for the garlic and onions to come in. In the meantime we enjoy all the other pleasures of this time of year.

From Summer to Fall

Overall it's been a very mild summer for us here. We've had only a handful of days of intense heat unlike Maybelline's Garden over in Bakersfield - yikes.  Perhaps that's why our tomato crop was not anything to brag about. We also got hit this year with  katydids and sadly they devoured a few of our tomato plants and reproduced like mad. There are a few more tomato plants left in the beds but I'm giving up hope on them as they are becoming quite an ugly site. I'm about to fill a few more vases of zinnias up before I yank those out too. I hate to pull them out while they seem to still be doing so well but want to make sure that I have the room for the fall garden.  The zucchini is still thriving and showing no signs of stopping so quiche is definitely on our menu this week and we have a ton of tomatillos, eggplant and bell peppers that are soon ready to harvest. Sadly we had no luck with our pumpkins this year so we'll make yet another trip with the kids to the pumpkin patch, which is always quite fun and bring four home. With the exception of the noisy leaf blowers on our street throughout the week, I just love this time of year.