Highlights of the garden in spring

I've been slacking on my blogging lately. Life has gotten in the way this year, with the loss of a dear friend, my mom's and husband's health issues, and new responsibilities at work. So instead of my usual habit of chronicling every little thing almost every week during the growing season, I'll post a spring highlight reel.

When we last left off, it was mid-April, and the daffodils were blooming. Next to bloom was the crabapple tree near our front door. I wish I'd noted the variety--it's gorgeous. These were taken on April 28.





Fast forward to May 8, and a bit more is stirring in the garden. Bog plants are coming back from their winter sleep:



Mixed border is greening up:





By May 15, a little more is happening:



And we have some flowers! The irises are blooming:









My favorite iris and the only one I know the name of: Batik.



And so are the daylilies:



There's even a little activity in what I pretentiously refer to as the potager (inside my head anyway. I'd get laughed out of my own house if I tried that out loud). The garlic I planted last November is doing well:


And the lovage, rhubarb, and walking onions are thriving:





In late winter/early spring, I cleared some weedy mess and expanded some beds:




In June, the soil starts warming up, and the garden transforms quickly.

By June 7, the mixed border is getting bushier:





And lots of stuff is blooming - like larkspur and snapdragons:


And Canterbury bells:



And delphiniums:




The pond plants are getting bigger - and we have a bench now:



Vegetable seedlings are transplanted into the "potager":



And this morning, as June comes to a close, everything including the weeds is growing, often an inch or more a day. I'll give today's pictures their own post, because just like the weeds, I can't restrain myself this time of year.

First garden pictures of spring

These pictures were taken just over a week ago, on April 14. I should have grabbed some new pics this weekend, because this time of year the garden changes amazingly quickly. That clematis that was 4 inches high on Wednesday is 8 inches high by Sunday. Buds open, blooms fade, perennials break ground, and the !@#$% grasshoppers hatch and start chomping. Yes, this has happened. We have tiny nymphs about 1/4 inch long. They're almost cute. They'll be a horrible garden-eating plague in less than a month. Ah, spring...

OK, back to the pictures, none of which contain grasshoppers (yet).

Look! Green! It's so exciting to trim away the brown, dead foliage and discover green treasures underneath.

Living in a place with a short growing season has made me appreciate anything that blooms early--like these daffodils and grape hyacinths.





We planted this apple tree our first spring in Flagstaff. I think it's a Fuji. This year it put on a lovely display. No clue if we'll actually get apples. As soon as it started blooming, we had a hard freeze (because of course we did), but it's still lovely.




We have crabapples too, which are a bit hardier in our less-than-optimal climate. Mine have survived on way too much neglect. This year I've resolved to actually water them regularly. Still, the blossoms are beautiful:


We even have a few (very few) edibles already, mostly chives and onions. Here are the walking onions that survived last year's horde of grasshoppers (grasshoppers seem to love anything in the onion family):


That scruffy thing to the left is a leek I planted last spring and forgot to harvest. Some garden handout I read when I moved here said that leeks are, "not adapted" for our climate and/or altitude. Good thing plants don't read garden literature.

I planted garlic last fall. We had a very warm fall, so it sprouted in about November. I worried that our cold winter temps would kill it, but nope. It's standing tall, at least till the grasshoppers show up.


And finally, there's the pond. All ten fish (6 goldfish, 4 koi) survived the winter - hooray! They've starting coming out of hibernation in the last couple of weeks and seem to be doing fine. I've had a heckuva time keeping debris out of the pond (gotta love windy spring days), but it's starting to look tolerable. The day I took these pictures, it was full of algae (blech), but here's a pic of an area onshore that's starting to look spring-y. Just ignore the nasty algae-covered water in the background. It looks better now.


Spring is springing!

Pleasant surprises: a garden's greatest gift

It's nearly summer, and I spent Monday night worrying about frost. According to the forecast, the overnight low was supposed to be 32. Our average last frost date is June 15, but like a lot of gardeners, every spring I convince myself that that date is a worst-case scenario and of course it won't happen this year and the one good thing about climate change is that we'll all be a zone warmer and sure I can fit another six pack of tomatoes in. Yes, we gardeners are often delusional.

So it was with some trepidation that I got up Tuesday morning and ventured out to water the garden before work. I expected curled, frost-blackened leaves. I expected to mourn the untimely passing of  my tomatoes, basil, peppers, squash, and everything else I shouldn't have planted so soon. I steeled myself for the carnage. I stepped warily over the threshold and into… paradise. The morning was cool, the air perfectly still and fresh. And there was no sign of Jack Frost nipping at my nightshades. Something else was missing too--the hordes of grasshoppers that have plagued my garden since the nights started warming a few weeks ago. There were a few hopping here and there, but the Biblical plague was MIA. I can only guess that it must have been cold enough to drive them back--but not cold enough to damage tender summer veggies.

I don't think I've ever enjoyed watering as much as I did on that cool, perfect almost-summer morning. I even had a pair of hummingbirds for company. Mornings like this are why I garden: why I spend weekends shoveling manure, why I fight my way through gale-force winds to plant and water and weed, why I strain my back moving rocks to build raised beds, and why I spend half my salary on soil amendments and irrigation supplies and plants. My time in the garden was short--I do have to work for a living, and I had an 8:30 meeting--but that half hour or so in my own little paradise let me start my day with beauty and peace. 

Scenes from an almost summer evening

I took a short stroll with the husband this evening and took a few pictures of the garden and the neighborhood. I love how familiar plants and places can look different depending on the light. These were taken at dusk on this beautiful almost-summer evening.

In this light, the garden almost looks like the lush oasis I keep trying to create here in the land of sun and wind and late frosts. The dry creek bed could almost have water in it--instead of the leaf litter I need to clean out before the monsoons start.

Looks like the hollyhocks are about to bloom. 

I like to mix ornamentals and edibles (yay for cottage style!), so here we have the not-so-photogenic tomato cages mixed with an apple tree, some bachelor buttons, the aforementioned hollyhocks, and a Ketchup and Mustard rose.

Yep. There's that leaf litter I need to clean out of the dry creek bed. In the right foreground is a piece of garden art I picked up for a couple dollars at a garage sale. I'm experimenting with using it instead of a tomato cage. If my tomatoes don't freeze Monday night (it's supposed to be 31--*sigh*), we'll see if it works.

Here's the M*A*S*H* sign my husband made me for Christmas a couple of years ago. We had to relocate it this spring, because it was sitting in the middle of what would become the pond.

This is our grasshopper preserve, otherwise known as the front pasture. If you'd like about a million grasshoppers, bring a big net and take a walk through it.

Just a beautiful night in the neighborhood.

 One of my favorite things about summer nights here in Flagstaff are the cloud formations. It isn't even monsoon season yet, and we get to look at this gorgeousness.

One of many things I love about gardening is that it puts me more in touch with the seasons. The same small plot of land can have many personalities depending on the time of year. I might not ever notice that--at least not in detail--if I didn't garden.

Putting in the garden

I can’t remember the first time I heard the expression, “putting in the garden,” but it was a very long time ago. “I’m going to put in the garden this weekend.” “It’s almost time to put in the garden.” Once I got some experience as a gardener, that expression seemed weird. Yeah, I would, “put in a garden,” but that usually consisted of building another bed, cultivating a new area, or some similar activity that would significantly increase how much watering and weeding I had to do (Note to self: what seems like a great idea in March is usually a pain in the posterior by August).

What people usually meant by, “putting in the garden,” was, “planting the vegetable garden.” The entire thing. Usually in a weekend. Once I moved from Portland to Southern California, I stopped hearing this expression, since gardening is truly a year-round activity in SoCal (except when the outdoor temperature is approximately 1582 degrees, and you will spontaneously combust if you open your front door--but even then one gardens in the evening, once the porch cools off enough to not melt one’s flip-flops to the soles of one’s feet). But now that I live on Hoth in Flagstaff, I once again hear people talk about, “putting in the garden.” And now I understand why. I planted a bunch of stuff in March (first warm spell = delusional gardener), only to watch it freeze/rot/get buried in snow. I planted some more stuff a couple of weeks ago. Some of it froze. My poor potatoes--planted during the aforementioned March warm spell--have frozen twice. Yet they are sprouting once again, brave little tubers that they are. And believe it or not, we haven’t quite reached our average last frost date, which is June 15. I really need a giant hoop house to cover my entire yard.

Based on what everyone tells me, Memorial Day weekend is the official time in Flagstaff to, “put in the garden,” so that’s what I’ve been doing. Last year we started building a potager (note to self: what seems like a good idea in October will probably seem absurd the following summer, when the grasshoppers are eating everything and I’m watering 219 times a day). It’s not finished yet (obvious from the pic at the beginning of this post), and it doesn’t look like much, because it’s mostly filled with newly-planted seeds and newly-transplanted seedlings.

Photo 1: The bed on the left is seeded with winter squash, bush beans, sunflowers, and nasturtiums. The bed on the right contains peas (they’re the tiny green things at the base of the metal yard art covering the ugly satellite dish pole in the corner) and fennel transplants plus sunflowers, zucchini, and marigolds. The half-built bed along the chain-link fence has two hills of winter squash. Why wait for a bed to be finished to plant in it?

Photo 2: The bed on the left has purple cabbage, cilantro, and a lone fennel plant that wintered over, plus seeds for radishes, beets, more cilantro, and basil. The righthand bed contains my poor frost-nipped potatoes, seeds for bush beans and zinnias, and a lone calendula seedling, the only one of my winter-sown calendulas to survive the first grasshopper invasion of the year. The bed by the fence contains lettuce, chard, a currant bush, onions, blackberries, a boysenberry, and seeds for zinnias, cucumbers, milkweed, and basil. Oh, and I think I threw in some garlic too.

The delusion image in my mind is much prettier than the reality shown above. Imagine those beds overflowing with grasshoppers beans, squash, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, parsley, dill, basil, marigolds, sunflowers, chard, lettuce, parsnips, onions, garlic, blackberries, zinnias, and calendula. Hopefully some of that will actually happen, and I can post pictures here so there is evidence that it’s actually possible to grow stuff in this bizarre land of late frosts, grasshoppers, howling wind, grasshoppers, lousy soil, and grasshoppers. In the meantime, I will bask in the warm glow of sunburn accomplishment and enjoy my fantasies.

Does anyone have a flamethrower I can borrow? I think I hear grasshoppers...

A gardener's spring staycation

I decided to celebrate my birthday this year by taking a few days off. We talked about taking a short road trip, but then I saw the weather forecast: highs in the 60s and almost no wind. Hello, gardening staycation! I have spent the last 5 days digging, planting, shoveling, and pruning. Only a gardener would consider that a vacation.

So what do I have to show for the last 5 days?  

• The pit in front of my house is now a little deeper. This pit will eventually become a pond, assuming my back doesn’t completely give out before I get it dug. Impressively ugly, isn’t it? A side note: never take garden pictures at midday. The light makes everything look like a postapocalyptic wasteland, My yard isn’t really this ugly, even with the icky pond pit.

• I planted a bunch of stuff--pansies I overwintered in a sheltered corner, delphiniums I started from seed last summer, stargazer lily bulbs, phlox and daylilies bought bareroot from Big Lots, blackberries (‘Navaho’ - thornless and they don’t need supports - woo hoo) bought bareroot from Sam’s Club, and Rudbeckia and milkweed (also bareroot from Sam’s Club).
• We have 2 new raised beds in the kitchen garden we started building last fall. This afternoon’s task: unload the truckload of topsoil/manure mix and start filling them.
• We set 2 more fence posts to finish the fence around the aforementioned kitchen garden.
• I pruned a bunch of trees and shrubs.
• I did the first outdoor seed sowing of the year--beets and radishes. Now if I can just keep them watered till they germinate and get tall enough to mulch, I might actually have something to harvest.
• And speaking of watering, I’m learning how to install drip irrigation. Without it, watering my high desert oasis will be a full-time job. I think I’m figuring it out, but installing each t-connector and elbow seems to involve a lot of swearing.
• And finally, I scored some cool garden art for very cheap at a yard sale, including the perfect piece to disguise an ugly metal pole. Said pole used to hold a satellite dish and is inconveniently located in my new kitchen garden. Soon it will be covered with a cool wrought iron piece and a bunch of morning glories. I’ll post pix of that piece soon. In the meantime, here’s a cute frog from the same sale. It cost me all of $1. The husband says it looks like Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard. I think it looks more like Jabba the Hutt on vacation in Florida. Boss Jabba will grace the shore of the pond--if I ever get the damn hole dug.  

Being home for several days in a row has given me a chance to watch the subtle changes from day to day as spring starts to take hold here in the Arizona highlands. Some of the crocuses are blooming, and I’ve watched the daffodils go from barely peeking through the soil to a few inches high. One is almost ready to bloom. Last year’s bargain basement mums from Wal-Mart are mostly coming back too. The green onions growing on my front porch in containers have sprung back from their winter pout (heck, I’d pout too if I were covered with a foot of snow for 3 weeks), and my bee balm is trying to take over an entire half whiskey barrel.

And no, you’re not drunk; that barrel in the back of the container grouping really is crooked (or if the barrel looks straight, then you are drunk).

Tomorrow the fun ends for a few days, because it’s time for me to go back to work. But the days are getting longer, the nights are getting warmer, and spring is springing. Hooray!