Garden Update

The weather has been erratic in the past few weeks, torrential rainstorms alternating with blazing hot muggy weather.  Everything is growing at a snail's pace.  In theory, all the little plants are putting their energy into establishing a good root system but at this rate but everything is very runty still.  Here is one of the tomato plants I grew from a seed.  I have no idea what sort it is as I had 15 or so packets of so-called "heirloom" tomatoes (which means they are odd shapes and colors but are alleged to be extra delicious).  

In the spirit of science, I am planting tomato seedlings in three different ways.  The raised bed above  is one way.  The second way is to "keep them in pots of ever increasing size":

Because of what some random person said on a tv show, I clipped off the lowest branches on both these and buried them up to almost the top. (So they were about 8" tall and now they are 2" tall.)  The idea is that the stems will produce more roots and then that will end up generating more tomatoes. Right now it just seems to mean that the plants are extra runty. The final trial will be with tomato sprigs stuck into the straw bales in the front yard.  So far, I'm not sold on the straw bale method as the only plants growing great guns are all the grasses and random plants that grew from seeds that were in the straw--which was NOT supposed to happen.  I think most straw ends up as bedding for large animals so the people that bale straw around here don't care much what gets mixed in.  It'll be raised beds in the front yard next year...

Another experiment is growing dahlias from dried up tubers.  Full dahlia plants are ridiculously expensive here but you can get big bags of old withered tubers for pennies.  So I bought 20 or so and soaked them in water and then, once plumped up, stored in a bucket with cedar chips until the weather was warm.  About a month after that, some of the tubers started producing a bit of greenery---about a 50% success rate. Again, if they don't get it together, there won't be any flowers by the end of this summer.  But unlike tomatoes, these tubers can be stored in the basement and grown again next year and the claim is that each year they get hardier and more productive. 

Below is a gaggle of dahlia pots.  I have no idea what colors the flowers will (perhaps) be so if they are hideous, I'll be pretty ticked.

Potato time:  As promised these tubers are putting a lot of energy into their leaves and I piled up dirt around the leaves every time they got a few inches taller.  Now the dirt level is pretty much even with the top of the bags they are in, so I can just forget about them and let them do their thing.  Once the leaves turn yellow and collapse in a few months, it's time to dump out the bags and see what has been created.  I remember Thomas and I tried this at least 24 years ago and we got about 6 TINY potatos, each about the size of a pinky fingernail and he was THRILLED.  I had to cook them up right away and he had them as a (very slight) snack. I'm sure his teachers heard all about it the next day at school.

A few weeks ago I tossed thousands of lettuce seeds into the raised beds to fill up the spaces between the other plants.  The seeds were years old as I bought a big box of random lettuces to use in the Lettuce Grow during winter months.  Since I can only use 2 or 3 seeds of each kind every two or three months, most of the seeds wouldn't get used for decades. So I decided to toss them all into the ground to see if any were viable. It looks like about 75% sprouted. You can see the cluster of seedlings in the upper left section of the photo.  

I don't remember what I put in each raised bed so it will be a surprise--assuming of course they aren't eaten by something else. We don't get slugs but we do get a LOT of possums, birds, squirrels and raccoons--and raccoons are famoulsy wasteful eaters just wrecking stuff for fun.

Here is new growth on the fig tree. The thing produced a few leaves in January (it mistakenly thought spring had arrived) and when I put the thing outside in March, the cold nights seemed to damage them.  Then nothing happened so I figured the tree was a dud.  But yesterday I noticed TINY leaves starting to grow and today they are already 3-4" inches across.  They are famous for being fast growing so now I am a believer.

And here are our strawberry plugs in the Lettuce Grow.  As is always the case, the plugs look like they are doing nothing for weeks when first put into this thing and then suddenly the they grow at a fantastic rate.  And, as I wrote before, it's the best sort of gardening as, so long as the water level doesn't drop too much, you do NOTHING to care for anything: the timer does the watering and it only needs fertilizer added every month or so--just three scoops of  both Fertilizer A and B.  (I can't remember which is which, but one is for plant growth and one for root growth.) They all have kicked into gear but that one in the middle is really going to town.

This is clematis, peony and creeping Jenny corner. The clematises are extremely happy on the fence but nothing I tried would grow on the ground--all kinds of annuals and roses just up and died. The ground is very dry as it's near the house and fence and so most water seems to get diverted away.  Also, it gets morning sunlight only and is in total shade after noon. Last year I tried peonies with creeping Jenny and they were thrilled: everybody settled in happily and this spring I could see all the plants were putting out twice as many shoots. Then those idiots who removed three trees a few weeks ago walked all over the beds and stomped on the peonies as they were just 1" tall and dragged tree branches across the clematis plants on the fence. I can't see why they did that since they had to go out of their way to walk into that corner, but there you go. So I am surprised anything is alive here.  Only two peonies had flowers a few weeks ago and one of the clematis is 1/3 its size this year but at least everything is alive.