After a bit of a slow start the garden is coming along nicely. Right after I got most of the veggie seedlings planted we had a week or more of unseasonably hot and dry weather. Even though I watered, my weak baby plants just couldn’t handle the dry heat and I lost a lot of my seedlings. I’ve still got a handful of the plants that I started from seed but I had to replace a lot of them with plants fro the garden center. Ah well, I tried! Some of the tomatoes and peppers have started putting out their first fruits and it won’t be too long before we have something to harvest.
Baby hot peppers
Tiny cherry tomatoes
The beans and cucumbers haven’t started producing veggies yet but are getting bigger and leafier every day.
Cucumbers
Bush Beans
Cotton is a slower grower than the veggies- it doesn’t actually produce cotton bolls until the end of the summer.
Cotton
Aside from the veggie garden I’ve also made a lot of progress in the flower gardens. I’ve been planting almost exclusively perennial flowers so that, theoretically, they will look bigger and better each year. This long skinny bed is brand new so it looks sparse, but hopefully it’ll fill in over time. At the far corner is a lemon grass plant which should get tall and make a nice decoration at the corner of the house. Then there are three lemon grass bushes under the window. My dye studio is on the other side of that window and I’m looking forward to smelling the lemon grass through the window. After that are six lavender plants. They look pretty scrawny right now because I got them in the clearance section of the garden center ($1 each!) but hopefully there is enough life in them to survive.
Lavender Bed
My main flower bed is right off the deck and it has several very nice, healthy plants that came back from last year and the year before. The purple flowers are salvia (gardener’s sage) that I planted last year and the green bushey ones are a really pretty yellow flower which I can’t remember the name of that I planted two years ago. There are also a couple of small carnations and a hollyhock that came back and a lovely clematis on the post. Aside from those survivors, there were some big empty spots where plants didn’t survive the winter. I filled them with pink dainthus that look like tiny carnations, asiatic lilies and yellow foxglove (the last two are still in pots in this picture). In the narrow bed at the front I have culinary sage, thyme, marjoram and lemon verbena. I think that once I get these last few plants in the ground this flower bed will be officially finished and it’ll just be a matter of keeping it weeded and enjoying the beautiful blooms!
Perennial flower bed
When I look back at pictures of this area from last year I’m very happy with the progress its made!
Square Peg Farm 