For any of you that are interested, I started posting over at my Xanga site also. I signed up for an account over there back in February so I could comment on my daughter’s blogs. But it was such a hassle I just didn’t post there. But now our second oldest will be leaving in a couple weeks so I wanted it up and running. You can now comment freely on Xanga without having an account, so that makes it a little easier. My blog over there will be mainly to communicate with my daughters and keep them informed of what is going on here in the mid-west. So, it may be a little mundane! I will put it on my blogroll for those of you that are interested.

Another cloudy and rather dreary day here, but there is a nice breeze to go with it. A friend of mine here in town graciously pulled up 20+ Rose of Sharon out of her yard for me…so I planted those all yesterday while it wasn’t raining. I hope they will form a nice hedge in time. The flowers are so pretty in August when they bloom. So, that nice rain we had this morning really helped them out and me too, so I wouldn’t have to water. They all looked great this morning!

The garden is finally taking off. This rain is doing wonders. I think we will have a pretty good turnout of veggies this fall. I’m so excited!!!

You all have a great week-end!

Another gardening update…it is doing well, if the wind doesn’t blow it all away! LOL I was hoping we would get a little rain to go with the wind, but so far that hasn’t happened.

All my tomatoes survived having their leaves eaten off by our mysterious garden visitor. So, now I have 21 plants doing well. I even planted four cherry tomatoes so my youngest two could go out to the garden and ‘graze’ when the mood strikes them. My oldest two will know how lenient I’ve become that I even did that!

I’m so thankful that as I get older I’m becoming more relaxed in so many areas. It has really been a blessing to me and I think I am enjoying life more now that I’m not so uptight about all the little things you really don’t have too much control over anyway!

But, back to the garden. My son and I planted more lettuce; another row, onions, peas and cucumbers last week. They are all coming up. We put up lattice work fencing for them to climb on, but the winds last week took them down. So yesterday, we put them up again with reinforcements. So far they have withstood the gales we have been having for the past day or so.  I am pretty excited about the vegetable garden at this point. I was at a friend’s house today and she was showing me some plants that grow in the yard here. I think she called them Sheep’s Sorrell and Plantain. Well, I’ve been ‘weeding’ those out of my garden for years. I never knew they were so tasty! So, instead of tearing them out and using them for compost, I think I will add a little to our salads. Won’t my children be thrilled? LOL

I also transplanted three shrubs yesterday. Thanks to our neighbor’s dog watering my shrubs I’ve already lost one and it looks like a second is about to bite the dust. So, I planted two new Alberta Spruce and moved the older Emerald Green Arborvitae to the west side of the house. My roses are also coming out of the slump our late freeze put them in. I trimmed them back pretty good and they are all growing. If they can survive the neighbor’s grandchildren across the street until I get the fence up they will do alright.

My son and I have made some progress on the patio. He has done most of the picking to loosen the dirt and the carrying of the slabs of cement. So that has been a huge help. I used to do all that myself, but I just don’t have the strength anymore. A couple more summers and we should have a nice sized patio?! It always seems like that kind of work goes so slow. But, I have already enjoyed it in the late evenings when my work is done. My gardenias should be blooming again soon so I will have their sweet fragrance to help along with the daydreaming!

How do your garden’s grow?

This will be more of an update post since I haven’t posted for awhile. Thanks to all of you that check here every now and then and see what is going on.

My garden is doing very well. No more eaten plants! Hooray! We had a little bit of Romaine lettuce on our sandwiches. It was sweet and tender. I start thinning it by pulling the close plants up by the roots and leaving room for a bigger head to grow. My potatoes are doing fantastic…they all came up. I even have four red cabbage and four brussel sprouts that survived the attack of the animal. They are growing quickly. I finally had a chance to plant my tomatoes this past Monday as well as some of the pepper plants. I still have a few tomatoes and peppers to plant, but the majority are in and taking off. It is amazing how quickly they grow after they are planted!

My flowers are doing really well too. I have 3/4 of the garden surrounded with Marigolds and they will be beautiful by mid-summer. I also planted a lot of Impatients in a shaded garden area next to our garage. I hope they take over the entire bed and blossom in the white, pink and salmon colors I chose. That same bed has three red peonies which are gorgeous when they bloom and they smell wonderful too. I would like to eventually have some Hosta plants in that bed, but will have to wait for now. I love color and I will have that…soon!

My son and I even made some progress on our cement patio area. We bought 18 blocks a couple of Saturdays ago and we have been busy getting the area leveled off. A lot of work of course, but we will all enjoy it this summer. I was able to get a couple Gardenia plants at half price at ‘good ole’ Wal-Mart. They are almost ready to bloom again and they have such pretty deep green leaves with almost a waxy appearance. They will smell wonderful too! So, I have great expectations for the patio area. I picture a stone terrace with an abundance of flowering plants in all colors, their blooms emanating such fragrance. What a great place to sit in the early morning hours or evening at dusk. I love these little outside ‘rooms’.

It looks like all my Angel Face climbing roses survived the freeze and snow a couple weeks ago. I trimmed them back to the last green leaf buds and I did that to the small Red Bud in our front yard. Even the larger trees…Elms, Maples and Oaks are finally starting to leaf out. It was looking rather bare around here for May!

Well…I hope all your gardens faired as well. And what a blessing with all the rain we have been having! The plants are just loving it. So, the Garden Grows On!

I bought my tomato and pepper plants on Monday. Yes, it had snowed over the week end, but the rest of the garden was covered and thankfully, my family remembered to bring in my potted plants when the snow hit. So, maybe winter is finally over and we can get down to the business of gardening! I sure hope so!

I’m trying a new method for my tomatoes this year. I already described it in another post, so I won’t go into it again here. But I’m pretty excited about that. I hope to get the ‘cage’ up this week end. I bought sixteen tomato plants, four green bell peppers, four yellow bell peppers, four jalapeno peppers and four cayenne peppers. I also bought some more marigolds to go around the garden. I think my husband measured the garden at 30′ x 40′ so it will take a few to make it all the way around. But I think they help a lot for pest control and they are so pretty.They do really well in the heat and sun too…great for the area we live in! At some point I hope to get into saving my seeds from the year before and planting them in a green house in the spring. But, that is not an option at this time, so I go with the plants.

My lettuce is doing really well, along with the spinach, endive and the mescalin mix. I pray those rabbits, raccoons or whatever got the cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower have found somewhere else to eat! My beans are also coming up…so things are looking good.

On the other hand, my climbing ‘angel face’ roses are not looking so great. They were hit hard by the cold, freezing temperatures last week. I’m going to check them out today and see if there is any hope. I may have to sing them a song or two! Maybe the promise of a fence soon for them to climb on will give them hope!

This is going to be another gardening post, but I guess it’s that time of year.

Yesterday…I went out to plant seeds into my garden, to go along with the 40+ plants I had planted the day before. I was not happy to find 13 cauliflower GONE and all but about 9 cabbage broken off at ground level, the leaves scattered around.’Was not happy’ is putting it mildly!

In all the years I’ve gardened, I’ve never had a fence around it or had problems with aything being destoyed. Yes, I’ve had occasional squirrel theft or rabbits munching on lettuce, but I was willing to share as long as they weren’t greedy. But, yesterday this was a little much. I did proceed to plant my seeds…mostly lettuce and spinach…so if it was a rabbit, or a family of rabbits…they will be thrilled.

But, I’m tending to think the damage was by the neighbor’s dog. The dog is very friendly, but never on a leash like it is supposed to be. I’ve had one shrub die already because of his ‘attention’. The large dog footprints in my garden, some right in the middle of a plant, made the dog rather guilty in my mind.

So, I did call the police yesterday and report the owners, something that I’ve been threatening myself to do for the past 6 months. For some reason in our little town, you have to get the dog control officer through the police station. I do hope the problem is solved.

Now, what should I do with the owners of the dog coming over and letting their three children play on the swing set while their dog was running through the garden?! I’ve never talked with these people, don’t know them and our swing set is postitioned very close to our house. They had to walk a ways up into the yard to get to it.

Now, THAT’S AGGRAVATING!

That may be a strange question for some of you…but those of you that garden and enjoy it probably don’t think it too odd.

I was thinking about this because of my son’s reaction when he was helping me plant some shrubs the other day. I should say transplant. I ‘talk’ to my plants often as a matter of fact. No, I don’t think they are going to answer me back literally…but they do ‘answer’ in their own way. I think that a ‘happy’ plant responds by growing. They are happy from being watered, fed and put in a good location. I know I’ve read studies about plants that had certain kinds of music played for them and how they have responded. And yes, I’ve been known to ’sing’ to my plants too! No, I’m not a fruitcake…and that is how my son was looking at me. But for me, gardening is a kind of ‘give and take’. I plant, water, feed, provide a good location and the plant responds by growing, giving me shade, beauty, fragrance…whatever I’ve planted that specimen for.

Gardening gives me pleasure…a time to relax while doing the work of it and then reaping what I’ve sown when I sit on my stone terrace in the cool of the evening…smelling the roses and herbs…making a salad from the vegetables that I’ve grown. It is one of those simple pleasures of life…there for the taking if you only want to put a little bit into it.

I’d had a couple comments here on gardening when I’d asked about other people’s gardens. I was rewarded with two great blogs on gardening. They make my gardening look pretty simplistic. They were very enjoyable reads. Since I have only just checked out these blogs, I won’t provide links as of yet since I don’t know if that would be agreeable to them. It was just nice to read about what other people are doing in other areas of our world and I learned so much!

I have been gardening for awhile. I’ve had a garden wherever we’ve lived for the past ten years. Moving so much has made it more difficult because I’m always getting a new plot ready…but I have had great success anyway. This is the second year here for a garden, but I moved it to a more sunny location at the end of the yard. So, in essence, it is another first year. I did move a lot of the dirt from the smaller plot I had last year to the larger plot and I did a lot of composting over the winter. The soil looked good when my father tilled it…but ‘the proof is in the pudding’ so to say and I won’t know how good the soil is until mid-summer.

I do hope to be here for awhile and get more into organic gardening. I don’t use any pesticides or anything like that anyway. But, I don’t know what has been on the ground here. So, it will be a few years before I can say I have a totally ‘organic’ garden. I would also like to start saving my seeds for the next year.

I also love to plant shrubs and landscape my yard. I’ve built rock walls and paths in previous houses. Both skills I learned from my grandfather. He did beautiful work and was a real craftsman in so many different areas. I do hope to get started on my stone terrace here fairly soon. This one won’t be true stone, but I think it will look great anyway. I’m planning a herb garden next to it and hope to practice some of the things I learned in a herb class many, many years ago! I also have plans for a rose hedge next to the herb garden, mainly because I hope to use the rose hips in different things. But, I will have to read up on that some more!

The climbing roses I planted last spring made it through the winter very well. I need to get the picket fence up that I started buying last summer, pieces at a time so it wouldn’t cost so much at once. I do a lot of projects like that. Sometimes it is very frustrating when I want to get something done…but I think it is also much sweeter for me when the project is finally done because of the anticipation of it. Kind of like Christmas morning when you are a child.

But, I’m going to close this post because all this talk about projects is making me worn out!

I don’t see many people blogging on gardening…one of my favorite topics, as you all know by now. Maybe I’m just not checking out the correct blogs for gardening! So, if any of you garden, please let me know and share what you do or plant.

Anyway, on to this post. My father came over yesterday and tilled the garden for me. (Have I mentioned what a great help it’s been to have my parents living right here in town?) He worked on it for several hours and now I have probably about the best garden area that I’ve ever had. I’m so excited to start planting!! I did plant some Yukon Gold potatoes yesterday, just one row. The garden is big, but not big enough to get everything in it! But, I’m ahead of schedule and that makes me really happy! I’m hoping to have everything in before we have some spring rains.

I was reading in an organic gardening magazine last summer and I’m going to try a new way to grow tomatoes. I’m going to erect a wire ‘cage’ of sorts at each corner of the garden and then plant my tomatoes around the outside of this cylinder. I can probably get about six plants around the outside of it. Then I put my compost material on the inside of the ‘cage’. I use salad scraps and fruit scraps, but no animal anything. Sometimes I do use farm eggs, for the shells, but I wash them first. I also put our grass clippings on the garden and I will put this in the compost bin too. The article in the magazine said this compost in the middle keeps the tomatoes roots cool and moist…plus I will have someplace to put it. I usually put the grass clippings between the plants and this keeps the garden moist and I have virtually no weeding! I love that part!! It also helps our lawn and of course I don’t put anything on the lawn since I mulch the garden with it.

So, I’m off and running on another spring and ahead of schedule too! That puts me in a great mood!

To those of you that visit MInTheGap’s site…http://www.minthegap.com…you may have seen this header before if you check out another blogger there. Stephen Kingston comments at MInTheGap and he has a very interesting blog at http://safle.org/ I have learned a lot from some of his posts.

Anyway…the first time I visited Stephen Kingston’s blog, I commented on how much I loved the header. I thought that it might be a picture from the area he lives in. But, he said it came with the theme he chose. Well, I was looking at some different themes the other day and low and behold, there it was! I was wanting something a little different and more like spring and this theme fits that. I really do love the picture. It does seem like ‘morning breaking’ with the muted sunlight and mist. So, I hope you don’t mind Stephen!

I have been doing some of the gardening that I blogged about the other day. Transplanted 8 shrubs today and yesterday. They all made it through the winter…last spring was when I planted them. I also dug up an old tree trunk, so I can expand the garden by a few feet on two sides. I planned the garden yesterday…on paper and now I’m really excited about getting some plants and seeds in! I also planted some grass seed. We are expecting some weather tonight in the form of thunderstorms and rain. So, I’m hoping it won’t be too bad and everything will survive!

Because of the beautiful weather outside, my blogging may take a back seat for awhile. Atleast until the weather becomes too hot to be outside! But, I will try to check in here every now and then, and visit you all too. Have a great day!

This is one of my very favorite times of year! I have probably mentioned that before. I start going through my plant and seed catalogs, planning what I’d like to do in the yard. I spent a peaceful 1/2 hour this morning walking with my toddler, just wandering through the yard, making plans for new plants.

My plans for this summer include moving our driveway to the back yard…off the alley. We may need some heavier equipment for that. I would then like to start a ’stone terrace’ off the stairs my husband put in last fall. Home Depot has a neat little form that you fill with quick crete, or a cement mixture and it makes it look like bricks or flagstone. I’m going to do the flagstone look. That way I can work on it a little at a time. I’d like to get my picket fence across the entire front yard so the roses I planted last spring can start climbing up it. I would like to make a small herb garden off the terrace where I would have easy access to it. It would also smell lovely! I also have plans for a Wisteria arbor near the terrace and a row of hedge roses that are good for rose hips…eating and pot pourri!

I also have a much larger vegetable garden this year and I have the seeds to start planting that. I would also like to put in a hedge running along it to give us some privacy from the alley. I have planted a Chinese Elm hedge in past years and it does very well, grows very quickly. It’s very inexpensive too! Always a plus!

Those are my major plans and I will keep you updated as to how many of them I get accomplished! Maybe at some point I can post some pictures so you can see the ‘work in progress’.

What are your gardening plans?