How does my garden grow: July

My garden posts have been sort of slim. Who wants to go outside to take pictures. It’s flippin’ HOT!

Right now, my garden is a mix of thriving and dying.

Thriving: Black-eyed peas

Dying: Sunflowers

Thriving: Mint

Dying: Cucumbers

How does my garden grow: June

While sometimes I feel like I’m garden failure — I do have some things growing at the moment. Some things that, if luck, pollinators, and weather align…I might be able to eat.

Here’s what’s growing now…

Corn…

Black-eyed peas…

Jalapeño…

Baby cucumber…

Singing the compost tumbler blues

I am currently compost- less.

Last week  I added a bucket of food waste to my tumbler and spun. It remained motionless, so I gave it a good shove. It moved, but not in a way I expected.  The vessel bottomed out and half-rotted compost started spilling out onto the yard — and dangerously close to my sandaled feet.

My husband (thank God) was in the shower. If he encountered the sights and smells of the past 3 months of kitchen scraps — and our last haircut, he would surely gag…or worse. Food doesn’t just turn to dirt on its own. It’s helped along by chemistry, maggots, mold and a host of other un-pleasantries.

I grabbed a large bin and some garden gloves and started shoveling the worm-y mess as fast as I could.

So now I have a bin of half-composted food and a disabled tumbler in my backyard — and a giant bowl of scraps in my kitchen awaiting a receptacle.

A-maize-ing corn

My husband’s dad grew up in Iowa, home of corn.

I guess “knee high by Fourth of July,” is a saying there. Well my corn is going to be thigh high by the fourth of JUNE.

Here it is before:

Here it is now:

Sadly, it’s unlikely it will pollinate.  But still, it’s corn!

Growing sweet potatoes

I  pulled an old sweet potato from the shelf that had grown several appendages and figured I could do one of three things.

1) Throw it away

2) Compost it

3) Bury it.

I chose option 3.

I dug a hole, threw the potato in and have watered it deeply every few days.

Turns out, I did it all wrong. You’re actually supposed to plant the slips (or appendages). You cut them off of the sweet potato, and bury them with the part that was closest to the sweet potato down (that part grows the roots). I planted mine in hard ground. It likes a big mound of loose compost or dirt.

That said, it looks like in about 100 days  I still might have some sweet potatoes:

Or maybe it’s poison ivy…

Salad table redux

I learned first-hand this summer that salad doesn’t like the heat.

As soon as temperatures got into the 90s, the lettuce in my salad table started tasting weird/wilting.

For the summer, I’m trying something new; Making my salad table into an herb table.

I just planted basil and mint.

Desert veggies: June

I went to Baker’s Nursery over the weekend and got thoroughly depressed when I saw the size of the cucumber and squash plants they have growing on the premises.

Giant plants laden with veggies.

Hmph. When I grew zucchini, I was lucky to get 5 fruits the whole season.

I still have a lot to learn about desert gardening, but Baker’s amazingly productive garden is proof-positive that summer gardening is achievable. Mine is still in its infancy (I’m crossing my fingers my cucumbers will actually produce).

Some things you can start from seed right now:

- Cucumbers
- Melons (cantaloupe, muskmelon)
- Pumpkin (plant June 15th for pumpkins at Halloween time)
- Sunflowers
- Black-eyed peas

I’ve got a head-start on cucumbers…

beans…

and my very first sunflower…

Sunflowers are getting bigger

My sunflowers are now nearly as tall as my husband.

The birds!

I have so little flourishing at the moment: it’s too hot for radishes, my limas aren’t growing, I’ve had bad luck with cucumbers. I can’t afford to lose the few precious veggies I have to birds! Note the carnage I found this morning:

I’ve covered with some old burlap. Hopefully it does the trick.

Shopping Etsy: Garden decor

The Diamondbacks are playing the Toronto  Blue Jays on May 22nd.

I’ve heard that they are a horrible team, but I chose to go to the game, mostly (as in 100% why) because they are giving away a D-backs garden gnome figurine.

I recounted this to a friend and he asked, “What exactly does a garden gnome do?”

Um, um, um. Good question.

According to Wikipedia:

A garden gnome is a figurine of a small humanoid creature, usually wearing a pointy hat, produced for the purpose of ornamentation, typically of gardens or on lawns. These figurines originate in 19th century Germany, where they became known as Gartenzwerg (literally “garden dwarf”). The application of the term gnome in English is first attested in the 1930s.

So basically, they are garden statues. Period.

What a disappointment. I was hoping they’d been placed in gardens to ward away bad garden mojo, for a good yield, etc. But in actuality, their sole purpose is to be cute.

So in the spirit of well-appointed gardens, here are a few things that might add a little magic to yours:

1.) Happy Buddha, $54
2.) A Trio of Gnomes, $20
3.) Ceramic Mushroom Garden Ornament, $14.50
4.) Garden Herb, $9
5.) Vintage Fawn Outdoor Statue, $30
6.) Allium Garden Ornament, $39
7.) Mosaic Ladybug Stepping Stone, $75