Ghetto Gardening 2015
It's rain-ing, it's pour-ing, the orange cat is snor-ing. His yard's got wet but he don't fret, he'll just sleep all morn-ing..." (Original Song)
12/9/15:
Precipitation! Finally, and in big, splashy amounts. The soil and the roots of my plants are soaking it in. But now it's a situation quite the opposite from summer and early fall: instead of trying to keep my garden from drying up, now I'm going around dumping excess water from pots and moving them under the eaves of the house to avoid having constantly soaked dirt. I've read that when making drainage holes in containers, it's better to have these on the side of the pot near the base instead of on the bottom, which makes sense. So lately I've been using various kitchen and garden tools to add 3-5 holes of about 1/4 inch wide to some plastic buckets and bowls. These were vegetable pots in the summer, and now contain herb seedlings or late-blooming flowers.
I'm hoping that our rainy days will be balanced by enough sunny hours for the roses to continue having a few blooms now and then. I'd been wondering whether to cut back the tall yellow one, but then it started forming new buds, and last week there were a couple of lovely flowers fully open. The bright pink "Betty Boop" rose is also blooming. This one's planted in the ground in an area of the yard that gets strong afternoon sunlight, which helps it flourish for the majority of the year.
The fuchsias, red snapdragons, yellow daisies, and orange honeysuckle are still flowering fitfully; adding a hint of bright color here and there in a garden now dominated by lush green foliage. My white and purple cyclamen are growing, but the red and pink ones seem to be dying out or going dormant. Could be a light-level, drainage, or fertilizer-level issue, or maybe these just aren't as hardy as the others. I planted bush morning glory seeds in July, and again in October. Some of the older plants are now a foot tall, so I've been impatient for them to start blooming before winter truly sets in. However, it looks unlikely at this point that I'll have any lovely trumpet-shaped blue flowers until next spring.
Clicking on the small images below will bring up a full-size version.
Love the colors of this rose.
Cooking with wild leeks.
Cut rosemary for wreaths.
As I'm moving things around and planning a more compact garden strategy for the next few months, I'm revising my visual representation of the yard from July. The tomato patch is gone, bulbs have been planted, and wild three-cornered leeks have taken over several areas.
This week's garden-related indoor project is to fashion wreaths out of rosemary. There's a thick hedge of it in front of our house. I like to bring in trimmed-off branches and put them on the bathroom shelf and on top of the refrigerator, since they have a fairly strong pleasant scent. Making wreaths for the holidays occurred to me while reading about crafts, activities and recipes on Veronica Setterhall's "Hyperbrain" site. Steve and I usually limit our Christmas decorations to a few strings of lights on the fence and a small tree set up on the front-room table, but I'm motivated to do something different this year.
