Garden Update

I've been somewhat remiss in my posts lately because I haven't had time to do it exactly the way I wanted to. But I'm getting so far behind and I did promise an update on the garden, so here goes.

Notes on the previous garden post: Mom was right, what I thought was callas was indeed hostas and the white and purple flowers are money plant. The flower I thought was a snowberry was actually a salmon berry. I have decided most of the stinky bob must go. I pulled out over 300 plants from my periwinkle a couple of weekends ago.

Things we planted that sprouted: lettuce, spinach, peas, onions, potatoes, wildflowers, squash
Things that never came up: tomatoes, basil (apparently we're not very Italian in climate here.)
Things that sprouted but we lost: dill, sunflowers, chives. Something ate the sunflowers, the dill and chives were just unhappy once they sprouted... too much sun, not enough, bad soil? Not sure.

Wildflowers:

Fringecap


Forget-me-nots


Trillium. I was sooo excited to find these in the woods behind our house. I never could catch one in perfect bloom, but you can see how pretty the color is.


Salmon berries taunting me with their proximity. So close, but right in the middle of a bunch of animal den holes that I have no idea what they are. Maybe rabbits, maybe marmots, maybe 10 pound leg-eating toads.

Thimbleberry.


Zeus, one of our pet slugs. (Cade's finger. He was brave this day. Usually it's Mr. Reid. His slug is named Agamemnon.)


Cultivated Plants:

A pretty peach rhododendron. Whoever picked these rhodes out went crazy, we've got red, fuchsia, pink, purple, white, and peach, and some that didn't flower this year for various reasons. None have been exactly the same color.

Cade's pansy.



Peony upon first bloom.

Nearly done peonies taken today.


Original garden taken about a week ago.


Secondary garden taken today. Since the tomatoes didn't come up I decided to try them in a different patch that I find has more sun than my original garden spot. I bought these brandywines last week. Can't wait to try them, one of them already has blossoms forming. I also planted some bee balm in here (before I decided to move the veg patch here) and today I experimented with some peas I had to weed from the other patch to fight crowding. The ones with the most intact roots were moved to this bed and given a good dose of fertilizer. We'll see, not expecting much, but if they do better, I'll know.


Our dinner salad tonight from plants that had to be weeded for over crowding or because they were beginning to bolt. There are baby carrots, pea shoots, mesclun blend lettuces, and also a spinach. I added some store bought romaine to bulk it up a little for the fam. It was excellent. We ate it with cannellini beans, and sweet potato shallot pancakes.

Our front yard.

Unidentified plants:



For all the plants I've learned, I've got a new crop of weeds I can't identify.

This isn't actually a weed. It's a bush by our front door. Lots of people have these around here. They're pretty nice when they're blooming.


This is also not a weed. This is growing in front of my camellia. Nice little bush. I probably should know the name of this one, I just don't.

And last but not least the wisteria:



This time of day, around 6:30 or 7:00 pm the sun came right through here like it was meant just for our wisteria. It positively glowed...



Taken today...the very last of the wisteria... =(

Still to come, more pics of the kids and the zoo and fiddling around in the backyard. I've also got video of a slug eating a flower and a bumblebee making little egg holes. Maybe some day if anyone but me is even remotely interested I'll post these, too. (It's amazing how fast a slug can eat, btw...)