The other night, the Wee Girl and I skipped out on our regularly scheduled baseball game, in an attempt to get her some much needed sleep. After getting her off to bed early, I spent some quiet time alone in the garden, with an open window between us. It’s so hard to convey the state of a garden in a post like this. I rather wish I could just wander through and talk about things as I come across them, somewhat in the style of The Edible Garden (which I’m a bit obsessed with at the moment). Or perhaps I could just have you all over and fix you a cup of tea and give you the tour? That would be more satisfying.
The flower garden is amazingly lush and full for having just been started a year ago. So many different shades of green. The columbines are the shining stars of the moment, with the lupines and iris coming in right on their heels. My peonies are still a couple of weeks off, but they are HUGE. Astonishing. Covered in hundreds of buds.
A lot of my time lately has been spent in the herb garden which was wildly over-grown when we moved in and generally somewhat neglected our first year. Herbs are good at fending for themselves and other things were much more pressing. But reclaiming that area is a priority for me this summer.
In the kitchen garden we had many greens winter over…chard, kale, collards. I’ve let them all go to seed as kind of an experiment in natural reseeding and the butterflies are in love with me at the moment. During the day there are just big masses of fluttering bits.
The garlic is mind boggling. It’s up to my waist. Màiri and Galen play in it like a corn maize. All of the other root vegetables have been thoroughly unimpressive so far. Full beds of tiny carrots/parsnips/beets that never seem to change much. Even our radishes, which were our number one crop last year, have only been so-so.
There is a rather pudgy groundhog, who was perfectly adorable and charming when he lived in the drainage pipe up the road, but is perfectly intolerable now that he’s moved into the retaining wall of my herb garden. He insists on eating all of the tops off out pea plants and knocking about all the trellises. We want our peas! boo.
I’m totally in love with your columbines! Where DO you get all these colors? All I have are the native red ones, and purple ones….
Let’s see…well, I have a butter yellow one that’s actually my personal favorite, that isn’t quite blooming yet, and that I started from some heirloom seeds. The purple ones reseeded from a plant that was growing at our last rental home. They weren’t in a spot where they would thrive, so I potted them up and kept them. I believe they are the same variety, but they are on opposite sides of the garden and different growing conditions seem to have resulted in some slight color variations. The mother plant was actually much, much darker then either of them. And the coral ones with the yellow centers (which I have a couple of) came from a farm stand. I would suggest looking into starting some from seeds. I know I’ve seen lots of interesting varieties in seed form.