My Garden this Year....

A good friend of mine who lives on the east coast recently wrote me a letter in which he asked how my garden was this year, he imagined that it was large and flourishing with ginormous cabbage and flooding zucchini.  Because of course, this is the garden that lives in my mind and so the garden that he would expect me to have.  

In reality, I'm only growing a few pots of things on my porches this year.  I had grand plans of getting the large garden space dug in this summer and planted with a crop of clover or rye or something to till in before the frost, but that time and labor involved has yet to manifest!

Nasturtium; calendula; green onions

On the steps up to the door, I have a pot of calendula, one of nasturtiums, and one of green onions.  The calendula are ones that I grew from seed, and I have been super-pleased with the amount of blooms I am getting off of them.  I pick crop after crop of 15+ flowers on the four plants there.  In the past number of years, I've bought calendula seedlings from Calypso's plant sale, and have not gotten as many blooms...  So, note to self, not only is it more economical it is also more productive when I grow my own plants from seeds :-)  Lesson learned. 

 

 

 There's also a pot of nasturtiums, bought as seedlings from Holm Town Nursery -which is conveniently located near my work.  I've been making nasturtium infused vinegars, eating the flowers on salads and pastas, and just yesterday made a batch of pickled nasturtium seeds to stand in for capers.

The giant green onions are transplanted from the ones that were in a jar of water in my window sill for months, that were re-grown from the root end clippings from grocery-store green onions.  The idea for this came from Pinterest! 

parsley and sad tomatoes

 Two potted tomato plants and three pots of (grown-from-seed) parsley.  The parsley has also been wonderfully productive, and there are many bunches of it hanging to dry in the kitchen.  There's a number of green cherry tomatoes on the two plants, and a couple are getting orange!  I ate a very orange one this morning and it was delicious.

Rained-on wildflower garden

This is my little wildflower patch.  I should have taken a photo of it a couple of weeks ago in its height of beauty and before it fell over in the rain.  But I didn't.  This is the little patch of earth that I dug up the grass-sod off of before I left for Kripalu and I scattered the lots of seeds into.  The lupines sprouted but were outpaced by the faster growing annuals.  They are in the understory of the flower patch.  The seed packet said that the perrenials would likely not flower the first year, putting all their energy into their roots.  So hopefully they will come back.  The black eyed Susan's didn't flower either which is disappointing.  But the icelandic poppies, the bachelor buttons, calendula, and the wildflower mix are flourishing.  They are supposed to be all re-seeding annuals, so hopefully and we'll see what comes back next year!  I'm being very very good and resisting the temptation to harvest all the calendula (for medicine) and bachelor buttons (for a pretty addition to a flower facial steam mix) in hopes that they will go to seed and come back next year...  Eventually, this whole section of lawn in front of the generator shed will be a flower garden...