i wonder...

This bean teepee has been a wonderful tool as far as being a visual guide in the planning of paths and borders of my backyard garden, which I plan on filling up one step at a time. I have decided the placement of a garden gate/arbor/fence/path based on the teepee. It’s also helped concrete plans for a new pecan tree to center my two apples that need to go in the ground this fall. This will be west of the area and will add a little shade and texture to the edible landscape.

I recently read a blog post regarding garden plants you can buy at the grocery store. The two main plants mentioned were pineapple and ginger. I have wondered for years what type of ginger plant we get our yummy grocery ginger from. It’s been hard to find any information online, it seems like the butterfly ginger might be it, but I’m just not sure. I thought the best way to be sure would be to buy the rhizomes from the grocery store and plant them and see what happens. I extended the bean tee pee a bit today and did just that. I added a bit of white dutch clover seed in the bed. I started wondering, why everywhere I go that has been a long-time established yard has the clover it in, but my “yard,” that was cleared about 25 years ago and used as a cow pasture until about 5 or 10 years ago, had none. I started researching the white dutch clover and found out it’s a nitrogen fixing cover crop and some folks even have it as a lawn! I can’t imagine summers spent not making daisy chains from these flowers so I went online and purchased a large batch of the seed. I’ll plant a little patch here and there and hopefully it will establish itself well enough to stick around, like it seems to do everywhere else.

The sunflowers I planted have made quite a nice little stand next to the strawberry planter. I plan on painting the cinder block with a little moss/buttermilk mixture. It might only grow moss on the shady parts, but it will still be a project for my husband to laugh at!

Still, this little area has sparked my imagination a bit and I thought I’d place little objects my daughter could find, and be curious about. I found this little chair at a garage sale this week and thought it’d work great in the garden someplace incase a gnome needed a rest…. dill grows in this blue container and I planted rudbeckia seeds in the tool bucket I found at the same garage sale. The cardboard is in place until I can get out in the heat again and fit some corsican mint in the mix.

i planted these coreposis from seed this spring, and they are finally blooming. I love coreopsis ALMOST as much as the bees & butterflies do.

for some reason, i thought it would be a GREAT idea to plant pumpkin and watermelon seeds together. never again, for the pumpkin is outgrowing the watermelon by leaps and bounds, spreading and crawling everywhere it can. good thing the leaves are absolutely gorgeous!

but i think the watermelon are still giving it a strong go.