My Other Garden

So as most of you know, I do the majority of my gardening over at my old house (the brief story of why told here.) But I love plants and gardening so much that I just couldn't bear the idea of not having something to play with on a daily basis. So I improvised and made a mini garden that fits in a small space in our backyard. I keep it up on a table so that the lawn service can get around it easily, and it also makes it a good height for plucking and inspection.

It consists mostly of herbs, but I also have some cat grass growing (in bottom photo) and also some morning glories that haven't gotten any blooms on them yet. We have lavender, rosemary, sage, basil, oregano, thyme, parsley, cilantro, and mint at our finger tips at all times, which is perfect for summer cuisine. I of course also have my trusty Big Red garden stake watching over all the plants making sure that everything grows well.

I'm also growing a growbot... a Mr. Growbot to be exact. Just kidding, but we are growing some cherry tomatoes as well. We have one plant of yellow cherries and another of red cherries- perfect for a little color and flavor on a salad. We also have already had some beneficial visitors to our mini garden:

Our little lady bug friend just stopped by for a moment (long enough to get a photo!), but hopefully there are more from where she came from. Here's why.


Until next time.

-Mrs. Growbot

Better Late Than Never

At least that's what I'm going with. Summer is fully upon us which means great gardening, but also copious amounts of other fun events- which will be mentioned in upcoming posts. But for now, we'll stick to gardening. These photos are actually from about mid June, so things have grown quite a bit since these were taken. However, I thought you might want to see the full progression of summer in the garden (and it helps me remember when things are at different stages through the season!). The photo above is of our very first zinnia, probably my favorite summer flower next to sunflowers.

As you can see above, the garden is really in full growth mode right now. In the first photo, the larger plants are sugar snap peas that we have since pulled because they are spring plants and don't like the summer heat. The smaller plants are green beans. We have planted a second crop of green beans where the sugar snap peas were, but that will be for a later post. In the bottom photo, that huge mass of greenery is our roma tomato forest. There are actually other plants around the perimeter of it (peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, edamame, and carrots) but the romas really took off and took over. There is actually some string wrapped around conduit holding everything in so that they don't totally crowd out everything else. And now for some close-ups...

The top photo is of a breed of yellow zucchini. It was a gorgeous color, but unfortunately shortly after this photo was taken, we got squash bugs that decimated the entire plant :( We will try and replant and see if we have any success this year. The next photo is of the teeniest, tiniest little baby cucumber. Yes, that tiny little spiky green blob with a flower on it is a cucumber. It was probably around an inch long when that photo was captured. Next up are some small green tomatoes, and the photo after that is of our tiny little corn plants. We planted them in the bed with spaghetti squash plants (that were compost volunteers and we originally thought were pumpkins). The idea is that when the corn is taller, it can be a sort of trellis for the spaghetti squash plants to climb up. And now for a blast from the past...

These photos were taken mid June in 2008- my first year gardening. Overall, the layout is pretty much the same, except that we added the roma tomato bed last year. We got a late start on corn this year, so the corn plants in the second photo were much more mature than what we have this year in the same time frame. It will soon catch up. 


Until next time (which will be very soon!).


-Mrs. Growbot