Hi, friends. In the midst of all my packing and unpacking and painting I have still found time to procrastinate with tend to the garden at my new house. The bathtub is moving along nicely:
little green things
That green stake on the left in the bathtub (am I ever going to not cringe when I type that??) is a metal tomato stake that is awesome: there are three prongs so it's sturdy and you can keep adding more on the top as your plants grow. Although looking at this one, I think I put it in upside down. Oh well, still works! Tomatoes are heavy and I always underestimate how many stakes I will need to hold the plants up. In fact I only got three of the metal ones - on the left are two stacked and one is already being engulfed by plants on the right - because I couldn't imagine needing more than that when I ordered these in December. Maybe someday I will learn.
And look! Tomatoes!
The inside of my house is entirely this shade of blue and unfortunately it extends to the back steps as well[/caption]
These are Dr. Walters that I chose solely based on the name. And...they were not so tasty. They weren't sweet; in fact, they were almost sour. Since when are tomatoes sour? I don't know if sour is the right word, but when I tasted a slice my mouth kind of automatically puckered so sour it is. My first thought was bitter or acrid but I think acrid is too strong a word. They still tasted like tomatoes, just not sweet ones. Anyway, these are both from the same plant, one that has had a hard time of being moved around and gotten quite dry - I'm actually surprised it survived the multiple moves. All that to say that with my very unscientific method I'm not sure if the sourness is due to poor conditions or if that's just what Dr. Walters taste like. I still have some Dr. Walters in the tub and also at my other garden in the ground and those plants are a lot healthier. Once those ripen I'll have to see if they have the same pseudo-sour taste.
Bear with me while I pat myself on the back for planting things that are not vegetables. On the other side of the broken concrete that I call my yard I planted some flowers. Yes, flowers! And not even edible ones! Greensgrow is having their big summer sale - as are a lot of garden centers as they clear out the summer stock to make way for fall - and so I grabbed some pretty things for my garden. I plan on planting fall vegetables like chard, kale, spinach and arugula and some bulbs for the spring but I'm still in the process of cleaning out all the overgrown foliage back here and wanted something nice to look at in the meantime. Here they are!
mini flower garden
From left to right we have: hibiscus, sunflowers that I started allllll the way back in May at the container garden workshop but just put in the ground a few weeks ago, daises, a butterfly bush, black-eyed susans and a little harebell. The honeysuckle on the fence is my neighbors' but I'd like to plant some of my own, too.
This thing that I am battling with to clean out is wild morning glory, and I've dug up the little bed above at least three times pulling out morning glory's thick roots. Wild morning glory is very different from the nice climbing morning glory: the wild one is a horribly invasive weed. It is TOUGH and the roots go on forever and have a horrible smell that I can now smell in my sleep I've spent so much time pulling them out. Everything I've read says to just use a weed killer because THAT IS THE ONLY WAY but I'll battle the roots a bit more before I resort to that. Maybe I'll take a picture of the huge pile of roots I pull out every other day if I'm not too defeated by the whole thing.