The 3rd annual veggie garden

So...it's that time of year again to start growing veggies.  We didn't start our veggies from seed this year indoors, we just bought plants from Home Depot (on sale!) and Davidson's Nursery here in town.  We planted a lot of tomatoes.  Mostly roma, because those are my favorite, and a few small round tomatoes.  I'm really hoping we get a lot and I can make salsa and spaghetti sauce!  This bed here has corn, tomatoes, and peppers.

This other bed has basil, cilantro, parsley, rosemary, onions, green beans, and a cucumber plant.  My question is "how do you know when onions are ready to be picked?"  The stems on ours are getting quite long and I'm afraid to dig them out yet!  I guess I'll have to google it soon and find out.

Here we've got red, yellow and green bell peppers and one jalepeno pepper.  I'm itching to be able to make my own salsa with stuff from my garden this year.  Please Oklahoma summer heat, do not kill my plants this year!

I like cucumbers and I kind of wanted to buy a viney plant and see if it's going to take over my garden or not.  I'm hoping it doesn't, but I'm thinking I'm going to buy a little trellis or something to teach the vines to grow up and not crowd the beans I planted next to it.

Speaking of beans, here they are!  We planted two rows of green beans to get started with this year.  That way, if they grown and produce, we can plant a second harvest.  Or if they just grow but don't produce anything, I haven't wasted a bunch of seeds for nothing.  Beans really do grow fast, as I just took these pictures last week and the beans are seriously like 3 inches taller.  Now I understand why in science class growing up, you always planted beans to study the parts of a plant.

This should be fun.  When we bought this cherry tomato plant, it already had a bunch of green tomatoes on it.  Now it has a lot more, but none of them are ripe yet.  It's a small plant, but heavily one sided and it fell over the other day.  Luckily, the stem didn't break, but this baby is already staked and reinforced.

We also did plant some tomatoes by seed so we could have a second harvest later this summer. We planted in three spots, so after we weed out the puny ones, we should have three hearty looking roma tomato plants.  We also just put sprinkle out a bunch of seeds and weed them down to just one as they grow.  Although, I think I've finally learned this year that we could get away with just putting down like 4 seeds in each little spot and weed from that.  Almost always, all the seeds end up sprouting so there's not really a reason to put down 20 seeds in one area.  Anyway.

Woo hoo! And corn!  Now, if you remember last year.....our corn was awesome looking and super fun to watch grow.  Unfortunately, we didn't get to enjoy any of it and ended up digging out and throwing away all four plants because ants started making their homes in the husks and stems and completely destroyed them. It was super gross and disgusting and was not worth fighting for.

This year, we planted 8 corn.  And again, probably needed to only put 1 corn seed down in each spot because obviously each and every one sprouted and I've had to go out there twice and weed it down to just one and dig out the seeds.  Silly me!

And finally our basil plants!  Yeah I know we had a huge bush of one basil plant last year and now I've planted three and will probably (hopefully) have three huge basil plants this year!  Basil is awesome. It's the perfect garnish to any italian dish.  Fresh basil with mozzarella on tomato slices is the perfect summertime snack, appetizer,  or light dinner.  And the pesto I made last year is still in my freezer waiting to be used and the basil and dried is used often as well.  So, what do I plan on doing with this bounty of basil this year!  Well, share it with my friends and neighbors of course!

All in all, I'm really excited about the prospects of the garden this year.  We've had good rain so far and everything is growing great as of now.  I hope that we have a mild, only sorta hot, summer and get some rain every now and then and things will really start to grow!

New Growth...the GOOD kind!

We planted some new stuff in our garden this year to help it fill out more and fill in some spaces with year round evergreens...and I just realized I didn't take a pictures of those plants.  Oh well, we planted three gardenia bushes along the back behind the rock , which you can barely see in this picture and then we transplanted some yellow flowers in front of the rock.

My hydrangea is looking so much better and bigger this year and may actually bloom for the first time in 3 years!

Here is our brand new rose.  The "Eyeconic Lemonade".  It's a small to medium sized rose with only about 15 petals.  They are a light yellow with an orange center and it smells amazing!

This is the "Trumpeter" and has a really nice scarlet orange color. It doesn't smell or anything but it will get you with it's thorns!

And here is the "Ebb Tide" rose that has about 35 petals per rose.  It's smells really nice too, like spicy cloves and has a deep plum color, or fuchsia color. 

Here are the hellebores plants that are overtaking and are almost bigger than the holly bush behind it that is supposed to be the focal point.

Here's what it looks like from the sidewalk.

And the side...

 And upclose and personal...

And the long and little side garden that gets all shade.  This area has issues and always looks unbalanced and boring.....

....but it's the perfect space for impatiens!  This was in 2010 and each one of those mounds is ONE flower...no joke!  I tried this last year and it didn't work because of the heat.

I love me some coleus and potato vine!

New growth, but not the good kind

Remember last week when I mentioned that the seeds from all the trees had found their home in my yard and garden, and that it's impossible to get rid of them all and that the only way to get rid of them is to wait for them to start growing and then pull them out.

Well...

We've had a lot of rain lately...so I have lots of tiny sprouts EVERyWHERE!

They've made my yard look fuller and greener...

They're in my veggie garden...

They're in my front garden

They're in every nook and cranny around the hellebores...

And here's a really cool close up shot...

Maybe after all the rain stops I'll be able to start pulling them all out...

A Spring Snow

Yeah... it really didn't snow.  However, these darn little seeds from trees sure do make a light dusting of "snow" this time of year.  And lucky for me, the way my house is oriented, they come swooping in, swirl around like a tornado and just keep piling up in my garden beds.

I have already gone out there twice and actually swept it off the sidewalk and even out of the dirt and filled an entire brown paper bag.  

It's impossible to pick out every single seed before it starts to grow tiny trees everywhere.  I experienced this last year and the only thing you can do is get out as much as you can, then wait until they start growing and are about 2 inches tall so you can get a good grip on them....and then start pulling them all out.  One...by...one.

It can be a little therapeutic.

I actually remembered to plant tulips last fall and I love them!  They are your basic pink and they are the first thing I notice when I look at my house.  Every time I look at them I remember the tulips at my house in Ohio and a particular picture of my Dad and I standing behind them on the day of  my First Communion.

We've also got our "Ebb Tide" old fashioned purple rose that is blooming like blooming is going out of style!  We might have...okay we did...forget to cut it back really short before it started sprouting a lot of new growth so now we have a really tall rose bush (for this time of year) with TONS of buds on it.  

                                      

It'll be fun to see it in full bloom, but I doubt it will be able to hold itself up.  We've already have to cut one "branch" off because it just sorta fell over.  These old fashioned roses are cool because they have lots and lots of layers!

Here is an up close of our Hellebores plant.  These plants are awesome!  They are basically evergreens and are the first plants to bloom in our garden,as early as February!  The color fades on the flowers a bit as the weeks pass, as this one used to have a deep reddish purple color, but they keep the flowers until early summer.  

The common name for this plant is called Lenten Rose because they bloom around the beginning of lent.  They are the ultimate shade plant, are perennials, can be divided, and are quite unique.  So if you're looking for some evergreen flower interest in your shade garden, I would recommended Hellebores.

And here is our impulse buy but-we've-wanted-them-for-a-long-time backyard chairs from Target.  They were on sale so we just HAD to get them.  They are very comfortable....

 ...and they stack!

We got lots of other stuff going on in our gardens, but that will be another post for another day!  What's going on in your neck of the woods?