Posts under ‘dirty fingernails’

The hollyhocks did wonderfully this year, though somewhat inconveniently placed in the front bed, where an 8 foot tall spike of fuschia flowers is somewhat…obnoxious.  The tall spikes did their thing, went to seed, and now there’s so very many new hollyhocks coming up there, including (inexplicably) this white one: This is where I’d like […]

Today’s bloom is a showy little strumpet: This is Crocosmia ‘Walbreyes’.

Would you care to guess how many seeds you get from a 53 1/2 lb pumpkin? Go on…guess. 1 cup would be the correct answer. Seems paltry for a fruit this size, but this is one of those super-mega pumpkins, the kind that people grow for massive size instead of flavor, shape and/or seed production.  […]

Holy merde it was hot out there today.  Yeah, we could have gotten out of bed somewhat earlier but then there wouldn’t have been all that sleeping… On the agenda today was filling the new boxes (which Husband did, and for which I worship him), feeding everything, adding support poles where needed in the beans/tomatoes, […]

We did a quick harvest on Thursday before heading out for the weekend, and came up with 39 lbs of goodness from the garden: Of course the pumpkin accounts for 37 lbs of that. We harvested again yesterday and came up with 9 lbs: 5 lbs of which is every fruit from the poor Black […]

That question gets asked around here every day, because every day something new is blooming.  Here are the stellar performers from the past two days: This is “Lady Lucille”: “Strawberry Candy”: “Jungle Beauty”: “Siloam Bo Peep”: “Night Beacon” “Celebrity Elite”: “Double Peach”: “Janice Brown”: “Tuscawilla Tigress”: “Barbary Corsair”: I can’t believe we waited this long […]

New to us this year is this the Kingfisher Daisy, an electric purple/blue annual beauty that should nicely seed the crap out of the area where it is planted: Don’t let the package fool you, 6″ tall might be the norm in temperate climates, but this thing is about a foot tall at the moment, […]

My favorite part of this whole backyard farming experiment is there are no limits to what you can grow. Giant pumpkins that are so heavy gravity causes them to sort of get all slumpy?  No problem. Peanuts?  Actual, honest-to-Zog peanuts?  No problem. Potatoes??  Your very own potatoes?  No problem. You don’t need acres and acres […]

The daylily bed out front is finally getting cranked up, which is mighty impressive considering most of these were planted as bare rhizomes a few months ago. I dunno, I think we have some bare spots, ya?  *runs off to find daylily catalog*

Busy in the yard today.  The abnormal rainy-ness has stopped, leaving a multitude of tasks to accomplish.  The crazed pumpkins were top on the list, as they continue their trek up the backyard towards, well, everything: Only two fruits thusfar but everything on that longest vine there above seems to be female, so we’ll see. […]