"A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken."
–James Dent
7/25/16:
There's so much going on in the garden right now! I'll just focus on a few things for my usual short summary here.
The most interesting progress has been with summer crops. It seems only yesterday that I moved little pepper seedlings into bigger pots and set them out in the brightest area of the yard, so I was happily surprised to see that I already have a few full-size peppers. One is even turning red. The tomatoes are also growing rapidly. Now there are not only flowers, but small fruit on two of the plants (not sure yet if Beefsteak or Cherokee Purple). There's lettuces and radishes ready to pick every 10 days or so. I've been re-seeding after harvesting, to hopefully maintain a year-round yield.
Clicking on the small images below will bring up a larger version.
Hot pepper plants.
Tomato growing progress.
One of my many colors of geraniums.
Last week I mentioned having extra time coming up to devote to gardening. Steve and I spent 4 days (of the 10 in a row we were off from work) on a camping trip, but I got lots of watering done before leaving, and once back at home on Saturday and Sunday, I gave many plants the attention they've needed for a while. It was great to take a few hours a day to carefully study all of my green growing things: to delight in the beauty of a simple geranium flower, or to observe how well my disease- and pest-prevention strategies are working. Seems like the milk solution is preventing black and yellow spots on the new leaves of the rosebushes, and I haven't seen aphids in a month, which is awesome.
I noticed that most of my seedling pots were empty at the moment, so I re-planted columbine and cilantro seeds. Neither of these sprouted easily or survived well enough to produce more than a couple plants when sown before, but I think if I am attentive to them, watering and fertilizing frequently, these plants could be successful.
