After a cold and very wet winter, and nearly four months of non-activity thanks to my broken hip, my gardens were all a total wreck. I have way too many gardens to care for in the first place, but when they're ignored for so long and get rampantly out of control, they scare me to death... oy...where to start??? where to start???
To put it into perspective - we technically have seven garden areas - a back yard and steep hill at each house, a side yard, container veggie garden, and front patio/yard at the main house; and a front yard of raised beds and rose garden at the studio house. Martin has been spending a huge amount of time whacking down the big weeds in the back yards (has filled ten 90-gallon waste wheelers and has barely scratched the surface), our gardener has been clearing out the raised beds and cleaning up the front patio space (five waste wheelers for him), and I've been dealing with the containers (a paltry two wheelers for me... and those mostly dead dirt!)
I have the container veggies all wrapped up, and am happy to say they're all growing well and making some serious progress. I've planted pole & bush beans, roma tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes, Japanese and regular cucumbers, zucchini, strawberries, parsley, sage, chocolate mint, and lemon thyme. I'll take some pictures out there tomorrow and post them in a few days.
The front patio is about 50% done - a dozen containers have been "revived", and several others have been cleaned out, had their dirt "refreshed" and are awaiting plants, and several more are still waiting to be cleaned and refreshed. I bought some beautiful shade plants at Mid-City Nursery on Friday and requested their delivery today, hoping to spend the weekend getting a barrel planter ready for them. As it happened, this past weekend was one of the windiest in recent memory, and no way was I going to subject my asthmatic self to that environment, so nothing got done. As promised, everything showed up on my doorstep this morning, and now I'm scurrying about trying to get planters ready. As it further turns out, Monday is our go-out-to-lunch-and-do-the-weekly-shopping day, so I didn't get started with anything until an couple of hours ago. There's nothing on the schedule tomorrow, so everything's going to have to wait until then.
In the meantime, I took some pictures of some of the flowering plants on the front patio just to have something to post for all of my ardent readers!
Lily of the Incas...
Italian Heather...
Columbine...
A Hosta named "Francee" - a gift from good friend John Eater a few years ago...
An Amaryllis I found living in a paper bag in the garage for goddess knows how long... I decided to go ahead and plant it and see what happened, and THIS, amazingly enough, is what happened...
Petunia, the Patio Pig, sporting a lovely new royal and gold variety I've never seen before...
Stay tuned... lots more to come!
