Garden Update: May 15, 2014

I love heading downstairs to check on our garden plants, because you just never know what to expect. I am a firm believer that the plants grow over night and things happen while we are sleeping. Perhaps I should video tape them at night, just to see what’s going on!

Our new table is getting crowded, and that is good news! That means that soon, they will be heading outdoors into their new home, in the garden. We are still watching the weather reports, and for now, they are staying safe indoors. We need to make sure that we pass our last frost date and the plants are safe, otherwise, we will have to jump through hoops to cover each one up at night to protect them from frost damage.

We have 18 red pepper plants growing, and they are at various heights, because we love and use red peppers in almost everything we cook.

This is our first year growing peas, so we are anxiously awaiting to see how they do once they head into the garden. I got great advice from my blog buddy Kathy that the peas just need small little stakes behind each one so they can crawl up. We can’t wait to see little pea pods growing one day!  I think that they are the cutest little plant I have ever grown!

I found one of our cucumbers flowering in the basement already. That has never happened yet in all the years we have been gardening, and at least that tells me it is soon time for them to head out into the garden.

Growing cabbage is easy, but they are slow growers indoors, at least that is my experience in growing them, but once they get into the garden, they get their growth spurt.

We are preparing a flower bed for our pumpkins this year, and we decided to start quite a few pumpkin plants indoors so those darn chipmunks would not dig up the pumpkin seeds. Last year, those chippies dug up every seed and ate them, and we had to replant.

If anyone has any advice for our soil for the pumpkins to get them to grow big and produce pumpkins, please share your soil advice with us! The last pumpkin growing seasons we have had bad luck. We tried the coffee ground idea last year and we think we might have put too much grounds into the soil and it killed off our pumpkin harvest.

We are attempting to grow zucchini again this year. Every time we try to grow zucchini, either the chippies eat them, or they grow to a certain size, then die off. We are hoping for a good season this year for these guys!

I know, you would not have believed me if I had not taken this photo, but yes, we are growing beans in the basement!  A few of our bean plants have small beans growing on them!  This is one of the largest beans we have growing under our nice grow lights!  Pretty neat, eh!

Our Juliet Tomato plants are at the perfect size right now, and I bet they can’t wait to be planted out in the garden soon. Last year, we started our plants way too early and they were so tall that they were hard to handle while being transplanted, this year, we did not want to make that same mistake. We have nine Juliet Tomato plants that are enjoying their new larger pots to grow in.

This is our strawberry patch that has come back nicely since recovering from the winter. If you have ever grown strawberries, you know how they can “take over” an area quite quickly. We started off with approximately 20 strawberry plants about where the arrow is in the above photo, and now, they are almost all the way down to the end of this flower bed. They have finally started to flower this week, and they are right on time, as these are June Bearing Strawberry plants.

This is always a good sign that strawberry season is upon us!

Soon, we will have strawberries!

And now for the best part – – our backyard! Remember one of my last posts on how we had lots of work to do to fix all the winter pee spots from the dogs? Well, they have all been fixed and the backyard is in tip top shape! Not to mention, the grass is so thick and fluffy now from all the rain we have been having.

My flower bed is starting to fill in nicely and our Burning Bush is finally nice and green. It is hard to see in this photo, but I also purchased a few sections of this beautiful metal garden fencing to try to keep the deer out and from eating the flowers. I still need to get one more section to complete it.

We are so pleased on how good the backyard has filled in as well as it has as we are in love with the Quick Seed we are using.

My Sweetie arrived home from work earlier this week and was surprised by our new patio chairs & pads. I finally had to toss my old wicker table & chairs a few weeks ago, and we needed something to sit on in the backyard. I love how the new cushions are reversible to a solid red color too!  That is also my new planter that I got on sale at KMart and I think I might plant some nice red flowers in it with something else that perhaps hangs over the side. Any suggestions on what I should plant?