2024 Garden 5: seedlings and growth!

The veggie garden just grew a lot -- because I put in all my seedlings/starts! It's finally consistently 50 and above at night, so I think they'll be okay. Last year I lost all my tomatoes to a late freeze, so this year I'm appropriately paranoid about paying attention to such things.

I rearranged the bricks of the overall garden to form some steps in the paths between beds. I still don't have enough bricks, but I don't care enough to go buy any. I'm sure I'll find some this summer. (I got all these bricks from a neighbor a few years ago when she redid her front walkway!)

On the far left outside the fence, I put in some perennials that I moved from elsewhere in the yard. The fall leaves had already blown over and piled up there over the winter (handily killing the grass in about a 1-foot-wide strip), and I thought it was a good way to encourage pollinators to the area! So I've got multiples of Shasta daisy, bee balm, rose campion, and okay okay I bought a nice native echinacea and native lobelia cardinal flower. OOH, it's going to look so GOOD and be HUMMING with activity!! I hope.

On the right near the fence, you can see my two Cavendish strawberry beds. I plan to move some of the new runners over to a different bed this summer (start a NEW strawberry bed with fresh plants), and take out these old plants (they do have a life span, after which they don't produce as much) -- making way to rotate other veggies into these two beds next summer.

(Can I just add, it makes me happy to think of Cavendish strawberries because the variety was developed in Nova Scotia and I've been to Cavendish, PEI! So they remind me of the Maritimes, hee hee! A bunch of strawberry varieties originated in Nova Scotia.)

The snap peas are coming along nicely. I don't have much to add other than this year I'm also trying to be better about weeding the weeds right away.

More homegrown goodness after the jump!

A puzzling week or so

We've been doing puzzles lately! Thanks to an informal puzzle exchange at yoga (gotta love yoga), I swapped out a couple puzzles. Everyone's been working on them on our big dining table. I love how it becomes this mini-obsession for all of us as we walk by. ^_^

This one was FANTASTIC because we could all claim a little box section to do, put it together, then slowly join them. For once, I didn't mandate that the edge had to be done first. ;)

More happenings after the jump!

Sewing is going to the Dorybird sewing blog

Hey everybody! Just a quick announcement: I'll be posting new SEWING PROJECTS back on my Dorybird sewing blog! Why? Because I want to! :D

I still have lots of sewing backlog from 2022-2023 to post over there, but I'll do it as I'm able, so it will be a fun occasional surprise of yesteryear for you. You can always click the year tag in the right sidebar to see everything I've made that year.

I just posted a shirt I finished today, and if you've been clever and awesome and wonderful enough to sign up for my newsletter (again, blue box in the sidebar on either blog, just do it!!), you should have gotten that post in your email along with the one from this blog.

This Creative Path Blog will continue to be the home for all the other creative things I'm up to! Yay!

2024 Garden 4: Peas, lettuce, fruits!

Well well well! We've had a lot of rain and both warm and freezing weather, and my little crops are coming along!

Look look! I think these are lettuce starts! (Or was that arugula? I forget what I put where, oops.) My carrot seeds don't seem to be doing anything (yet?).

I removed the (very low) netting from the snap peas, and put the cages back for them to grow up. It seems to me that critters and birds like to eat the pea seeds, but once they sprout, they leave them alone. Maybe? I'm still glad to grow everything in my (mostly) protected new garden area this year!

Pretty! My existing raspberries have leafed out (and some transplanted ones in the new garden) -- last year's canes -- and in the background is my lovely peach tree! We've gotten peaches in the past, but they don't ever get to the edible stage before something happens to them. Hopefully this year?!

I'm tending some Seascape strawberries that I successfully dug up (to make way for a new type, Mara de Bois!). Some are in a pot on the deck, some are in pots in the front yard, some are around the edge of the upcoming tomato bed, some are packed up to give away. Yeah, I don't have that much of a plan, but I'm keeping everything alive! :)

2024 Garden 3: Black Raspberry Bed (and More)!

This week has been both a) school break week, which means a vacation from routine, and b) super nice weather!!! Which means: GARDENING! I've done a lot of yard tasks while enjoying the sunshine and it is finally starting to feel like Spring. :D

I've had a very chill week, including lots of relaxed outside time with Kelly while our kids hung out together. Yay! Sometimes school break has felt like it drags on, but this year it's rolling along quite nicely. I had a few ideas and goals of things to do this week, and while I've done some of those (baking, volunteering, yoga), most days the weather has drawn me out into the yard instead. Since it's back to clouds and cold outside today, I'm going to do a little sewing. Which, yes, was on my list. ;)

Anyway, the garden! I've been meaning to rethink a bed in the front yard and prepare it for THORNLESS black raspberries when they arrive in the mail next month. SO, yesterday, I worked hard on it!

See below for key

I initially created this bed out of my empty lawn (woot!) not long after we moved in. It used to house a giant azalea that I then moved, mostly because voles got under it :( and it wasn't thriving. After that, last summer I had a raised bed of snap peas in it (yes, within the bed, perpendicular to the raised bed in the photo), and while those did okay, it was an annoying configuration for harvest. Too many perennials in the way! Plus it was pretty shaded.

When I impulse-bought the black raspberries a few months ago, I decided to try them in this area, but the whole bed needed a redesign. So I think I have it now! Check out the photo and follow along:

1. This is parsley that has come back from last summer! I kinda wish the cilantro had come back, but I'm not that picky; I'll just put in more.

2. Some rogue strawberries that I put in way before I had plans for "actual strawberry production". They sometimes fruit, sometimes get eaten by critters; I don't really care and I'm leaving them. I can always propagate them and move elsewhere!

3. OK, the middle area is where I plan to move my RHUBARB in the fall, and add a couple more rhubarb plants soon if possible. I have one rhubarb planted in shade (oh well, my mistake) and it's very meager, so even though THIS bed gets partially shaded, it's less shade than where the rhubarb is now.

4. Little narcissus daffodils! And some coral bells. Just some general perennials that I can always move if I feel like it.

5. A lovely peony lives here! It had come with the house and I plopped it in when I first made the bed. Keeping it!

6. This rock (and the white rectangle paver) are my step-stones to make future raspberry picking easier.

7. I was going to make the raised bed wider, but then remembered/discovered that a really nice, variegated, pastel cool tone blue-green fern lives here!! (I say "discovered" because I knew it was in that general area, but when I set up the empty raised bed boards weeks ago, it wasn't coming up yet. Yesterday, all the fronds were coming up inside the raised bed!) So I'm keeping the raised bed out of the fern zone.

8. You will laugh at me, but in the fall, I had a big pile of nice compost-y dirt here, left over from where the raised bed had been. While gardening, I pulled out a start of some shrub -- and not really having a place to plant it, I stuck it in this dirt. Well, it's growing! I'm not even sure what it is, but clearly I thought it was worth saving, so I'll see what it is when it leafs out, and deal with it then.

9. These are some volunteer "wild Rhode Island onions", some chive type thing that's everywhere.

10. This pot is holding up some of the raised bed for now. It's an old dead houseplant fern.

11. The black raspberry bed! It was going to be the full width of the boards, but then I remembered that the row really doesn't have to be that wide. And then I had the fern pop up (see #7). So I narrowed it (in a hopefully temporary way since it looks pretty dumb, ha ha!) and actually that was good because I didn't have a lot of the excess compost-y dirt. What I had, fit nicely in this bed! At some point I'll adjust the boards and make it look better. I've just been moving and re-using this same compressed plastic raised bed for yeeeeears now! It makes my crazy projects quick and easy. :)