Weeds & Seeds Swap

This weekend has been a battle with the little insects that think of my plants and flowers as delicacies.  We have had a very wet spring and early summer, so the slugs are thriving and the mosquitoes are biting.  I thought we were doing a pretty good job keeping up with these little critters, and then I went and looked at the only rosebud that is on my struggling rose bush.  It’s struggling because I decided to transplant it this spring, and didn’t do it with much tender loving care.  In spite of that, it has forgiven me, and new green leaves and shoots are growing each day.  I am hopeful that there will be pretty red blooms starting soon.

I went outside and saw the first rosebud today, and all the way down the tender new stem there were aphids, not just a few, the whole stem was completely covered.  So I came in and put together a solution of water and white vinegar, and sprayed the little bugs…I think it is supposed to kill them…and strange as it sounds, I don’t like killing anything, even little aphids, but it’s the rosebush or them, so we are going to give this natural solution a try, and see how it works.

I’ll let you know.  Hope you are having a wonderful 4th of July weekend!

I love animals, and think Deer are among the most beautiful and gentle looking creatures there are.  We see them frequently around this area as it is very wooded, as well as bears, raccoons, squirrels, and you name it, we have it!

My tulips are beginning to put out their buds, and when they flower I’ll be doing what I can to keep our cute but rascally squirrels from eating the flowers.

Deer are not a big problem for me unless they are making their way down to our lake during a drought, I believe I shared a story on this blog once before about how they came down from the woods on the way to the water and ate every one of my beautiful orange triple-flower Day Lilies. That was a major but rare disappointment, at least here on our property.  But deer can be real pests in many gardens…I have watched them grazing in yards and gardens very early in the morning when driving, while the homeowner/gardeners are still sleeping and unaware.

They are beautiful, but also do their part spreading Deer ticks that cause Lymes Disease, a disease that started here in NJ if memory serves me correctly?  Definitely somewhere nearby in the Northeast. It is quite common here, as are the ticks, I’ve found them on myself and my dog on a number of occasions.

“Deer Off”® is an organic/natural repellent that you can safely spray on your plants and in the gardening area to keep Deer away, after all that work, a deer repellent like this will save you from waking up to a great disappointment like the people that I just mentioned must have found.

havahart.com has a wonderful Havahart® Deer Off ® II Battery-Powered Sprayer that has a patented Dual Deterrent System™ formula that provides both scent and taste barriers to repel deer, rabbits, and squirrels…so not only will it take care of the Deer, but those squirrels I was telling you about that like to eat my tulip flowers.

Happy Earth Day, well actually it’s Earth Night at the moment!  The day has gone so quickly and been a busy one.  I’ve updated some things on this blog a bit, and hope you like the changes and new resources available to you.

My mother was a much better gardener than I will ever be.  I approach my garden with a feeling that it’s going to grow just fine, an air of confidence, and find myself challenged at times by it as the season goes on, while my mother would approach it with humility, always meekly saying “oh, I probably won’t get many tomatoes this year” or whatever the crop happened to be that was on her mind at the time, only to have more than she could handle by the end of the season.The first garden I recall from childhood was a plot in the backyard, it seemed huge at the time, but really the space was rather small.  Still, it had a nice yield at the end of the season.

I remember the pole beans Mom would grow, being so curious about how the beans climbed up those poles that my Dad put in the garden.  There were three tall sticks tied together at the top, similar to the picture below, and at the base, the seeds were planted, which grew and climbed up the stakes to the top, and provided beans throughout the season.  There were a few 3-pole groupings in a row, and since I was small, they seemed very tall!  Mom always told me that the difference between Pole Beans and Bush Beans was that that pole beans provided beans for a longer period of time.

Personally, I’ve never grown pole beans, have always opted for the bush variety as they look better in the area where I plant. My only “pet peeve” is those little cut worms that enjoy my garden so much, I have to make sure the soil is clear of them before planting my beans, they seem to especially love the thick, juicy bean seedling stems.  Sometimes I start them with a small paper cup around the seed-in-soil with the bottom cut out of the cup as those little guys usually snip the plant close to the surface.  There is nothing more delicious than vegetables from the garden.

By the way, if you have a large enough container, you can grow beans this way on your deck or wherever your container garden is on your property.

What kinds of beans have you grown in your garden?

Sometimes when you’ve been working a blog for a while, great posts get lost at the “bottom of the blog”, and need revisiting, so with gardening season arriving for some of us, and always around for other lucky readers, I thought I’d point out a few helpful posts:

• Gardening in Containers - this post contained some thoughts and ideas for those who don’t have space for a garden, or just like the idea of gardening in containers.
• Keeping Deer Out of the Garden - another post with some ideas and a helpful article, we have only had trouble with deer during droughts when they try to make their way down to our lake.
• Tropical Climate Gardens - for those of you fortunate enough to be able to grow tropical gardens, this is another helpful post.
• Vegetable and Organic Gardening eBooks that you might find helpful.

Do you have any favorite gardening articles or posts to share?  Please let us know in a comment!

What a cold Spring day it is today here in northern NJ, but that isn’t stopping the high tree pollen count as the trees begin to bud, and the growth of my tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinths, crocuses and other assorted spring bulbs.  Many of my perennial herbs are coming up as well.Today I want to share with you a list of plants and herbs in my garden that come up faithfully year after year, and are hard to kill.  If there is a blog post with more information about the plants, such as how to grow or medicinal properties if they are herbs, you can get to it by clicking your mouse on the name of the herb or plant:

1. Sage - This is a perennial, that means that you plant it once, and it comes up each year.  In fact, in spite of the cold, when I removed the pile of leaves I had over this one a week or so ago, most of the leaves from last season were still on the plant…and this is after a COLD winter.  You do have to replace this one as over time it gets “woody”, I tend to cut it back quite a bit for as long as I can and see if it will put out new shoots.  This is a wonderful medicinal AND culinary herb
2. Lily of the Valley - This comes up every spring, it is a little early right now where I live, but in only a matter of weeks the plants will put up their shoots.  I have the pink variety, which is somewhat less common than the white, so each year I sell batches of it on eBay in the spring to thin it down to the nice patch you’ll see in the picture if you visit the link.  It will be interesting to see how it has spread it’s runners over the winter and how many plants will be available to sell.  I love this plant, the smell of the flowers is just wonderful.
3. Day Lilies (Daylilies) -In our front yard the shaft to our water well comes up out of the ground and is capped, around it I have planted Daylilies, the double orange variety, and made a garden in the area.  These bloom later in the summer, and are just beautiful.
4. Comfrey - This one grows in the same garden as the Daylilies, and can become rather large and shrub-like.  It has pretty purple flowers.  It has the reputation for being a hard one to get rid of if you don’t want it somewhere, because even the smallest piece of a root left behind will form a new plant.  I chose to put the Comfrey in the same garden as the Daylilies because the soil is not the best and it takes a bit of work to take over the garden, so I haven’t had a lot of trouble.  I haven’t done a post devoted to Comfrey yet, working through the alphabet backwards for the most part as you can see in the upper right, but will one day.
5. Oregano - This favorite culinary herb is so easy to grow, and I have an abundance of it each year.  I do snip the ends to keep it from flowering for part of the summer, then later in the summer, let it go to flower as the bees just love the flowers, and happy bees are so good for my garden as well as surrounding gardens.
6. Mints - The mint plants are best put in a somewhat contained area, I let them spread and just pull up and use or give away what wanders out of the area it should be in the spring.  I love putting mint into my iced tea while brewing…just clean it well (small bugs like my mint too), then roll the leaves on the stem together between your palms (hands) to release the fragrant and flavorful oils, then put in your steeping tea. I sweeten mine with another herb called Stevia
7. Catnip - another one like Oregano and Mint…in fact all of these plants are “related”, part of the same family, so have similar growing patterns.
8. Lemon Balm - Another like the above, have had these coming up in my garden for so many years now I’ve lost count.
9. Chives - A wonderful culinary herb to add onion flavor to anything.  I use the greens throughout the spring and summer…they are already out of the ground.  Here’s a minor caution for you, each year mine gets pretty purple flowers on it.  My first year with the plants, I clipped the flower tops off when they died, then clipped a bunch of the chives to take in to cut into my salad…not realizing that the flower stems are terribly hard, and inedible.  Be sure when you remove the flowers to take them from the base of the stem so you don’t make the same mistake.
10. Strawberries - I have these in an old antique ceramic-coated wash basin on our deck.  These amazing plants had leaves from last season that remained for much of the winter, and are already putting out their new leaves.  Very hearty, and I look forward to a better crop of berries as we have more sun on the deck since they removed a couple of trees to install our new septic system.

These are just a few of the things that grow on my property, maybe you can share some of your favorites in a comment.

I post regularly to this blog, but today, this post was done as one of the lessons in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge.

Tomatoes are not hard to grow, even in difficult soil you will get something, but the richer the soil, the more plentiful the harvest. We have a relatively short growing season here, and I like quick results, so for the past few years have been growing grape or cherry tomatoes. I only plant 3-4 plants a year which provides my husband and I with more than enough tomatoes.  They seem to do fine in their tomato cages at about a foot apart from one another.

The roots of the plant tend to stay close to the surface of the soil, and though the plants tolerate dry soil to a degree, when there are tomatoes growing on the plants, it is best to keep the soil somewhat moist between rains. I water every couple of days, and in very hot dry weather, daily. I have only once started plants from seeds, it’s not hard to do if you have a sunny place to keep them, or have grow lights. I like to give my local garden shop some business by purchasing young tomato plants.

What kinds of tomatoes do you grow successfully in your area of the Country? We are at about 900 feet in Northern NJ and planting season lasts from mid-may to mid-September, or a little later if we have a mild fall.   I harvest all of the remaining tomatoes at the end of the season, even if green, and put the green ones in a brown paper bag to ripen, which they do fairly quickly if they are mature enough.

It’s actually spring-like today, a little cloudy, but in the 50’s, which is nice…and it’s most definitely time to be planning the garden.  Even though I do a garden blog and like to garden, I must admit that I like to grow things that aren’t to hard to maintain.  The years of being challenged by my garden are over, now I just want to settle into a comfortable relationship with it.  So, here’s to some posts on “Easy Veggies”.

Beets are a prized vegetable, both the beet root and the greens are usable in one form or another.  We look forward to a trip on our anniversary in only a few weekends to Lancaster, where the Amish use the red juice from the beet and some vinegar to pickle hard boiled eggs…without the shell.

• You can use the greens of the beets all year round
• You can harvest beets early, when they are small and sweet, they are called “baby beets” at this stage.
• You can harvest the later in the summer when the roots are much larger.

If you plant rows, you should allow 3 inches between plantings.  If you sow seeds, whether in rows or randomly (my favorite way to plant) plant the seeds about an inch apart, and thin as they grow, up to 3 inches apart.