"I grow plants for many reasons: to please my eye or to please my soul, to challenge the elements or to challenge my patience, for novelty or for nostalgia, but mostly for the joy in seeing them grow."
— David Hobson
1/27/16:
It's a beautiful sunny day, and how I wish I could be outside gardening instead of spending the daylight hours sitting in front of a screen! I did manage to prune most of the rosebushes and cut back some ivy and bamboo this past weekend, but there's so much more I'd like to do: Fertilizing. Sowing early-season seeds. Removing dead leaves, mud and moss from everything.
I am happy that I'm still able to devote an hour or so every day to maintaining this blog, taking pictures and working with images in Photoshop, and posting on Twitter. I separated GreenWise Gardening content from my main account, and have begun to curate interesting or helpful information by re-tweeting selections of what other gardeners are sharing.
Clicking on the small images below will bring up a full-size version.
Pruning the roses.
Red snapdragons.
Mushroom growing kit.
The recent rain has encouraged a growth spurt for many of my plants. Bulbs are starting to sprout, buds on the camellia bushes are opening, and the snapdragons are blooming again.
I need to find better organic methods for keeping snails and slugs off of leaves. They've eaten all of the basil seedlings. I was spraying the plants with coffee or garlic concoctions as a repellent. This works for insects when the rain doesn't wash it off, but isn't overly effective against snails. I don't want to kill them if I don't have to, just discourage them from nomming everything. Currently I have clear plastic lids over the newly sprouted lettuces, but this won't work when they get taller... at least my neighborhood is too urban to have deer visiting the yard.
Another project now in the works: I bought a mushroom growing kit from the Grocery Outlet. Looks easy, and it'll be fascinating to see them start to appear! I love mushrooms in a variety of dishes. Perhaps I'll eventually use my home-grown ones to concoct a new recipe, and then post it on the OmnivoreUs page.
