gutter garden

This old piece of rain gutter makes an easy and inexpensive planter

 It's nice to have strawberries, lettuce, herbs and peapods right outside my front door.

Strawberries hit the deck

Besides the strawberries in this brown planter I'm growing peapods in the parts that are up against the rails. The sides of the deck make a nice trellis and I had a bit of extra space in the top for some lettuce.

I purchased the strawberries in the red jar locally but they have big leaves and very few berries. they just aren't a variety that I like much.

 

The strawberries in the brown jar were raised here where I've crossed three different varieties to improve the number of berries, disease resistance, length of growing season and cold hardiness.

Unfortunately I didn't take notes of which ones I used to come up with them.

Garden Photos

A few tulips for the tea table.

A few tiny plants from around the yard that need a little extra care to get off to a good start.

The tulips are much shorter and smaller than other years, I'm blaming it on the weather but I don't really know for sure.

Most of this years landscaping consists of taking the plants I find around the yard and arranging them into more formal flower beds. I build the "bones" of the garden out of free stuff and then add nicer plants as we can afford them.

Container Veggie Garden

 So far we've planted peas, carrots, onions and cabbage. We use the tallest plants in the center and graduating the heights finishing with lettuce around the outside edges.

We add the fairy garden bits to keep "critters" from digging up the pots once we've got everything in.
It also makes everyone laugh and the garden more fun to be in.

 There's so much heavy shade in my yard that keeping the plants mobile is the only way to make sure that they'll get enough sun each day.

In these pots we've got lots of strawberries, chives,lily of the valley, violets and lillies as well as hosta and a few other things. Most of it has just been moved from other parts of the yard and the pots had been given to me so you just have to feel good about a project like that.

Front Yard Tulips

  It doesn't look like much yet but these tulips mark what will be the front edge of the garden.

For the summer we've planted a few sunflowers in between the bunches of tulips and other flowers. It helps fill us the yard and the birds really enjoy them.

We had a lot of fun cutting and arranging the tulips today and plan to draw and paint them tomorrow.

The Red tulips came out of the rose bed on the other end of the yard and I put them with the purple to send to my favorite red hat lady.

We're still trying to move the red tulips which years ago became tangled up in the rosebushes. For now we're just content to cut any of the flowers that bloom and enjoy them in bouquets.

House Plants

Now that I'm putting some of the garden seedlings outdoors I'm getting a bit silly with houseplants left behind.

Cute, new planter for the deck

What's really funny about this was that it just happened to fit the area I'd painted flowers on. There was no plan. It just worked out.

I planted it with a strawberry and some violets.

Starting Plants Indoors

 This time of year they're really stretching for the sun and need to be turned several times a day to keep them growing up straight. it won't be long before a lot of them are ready to go outside. I'm in the process of beginning to harden them off now.

I'm planning on keeping a lot of my things in pots this year to make sure I can always find a sunny spot for them. (difficult because I've got 3 very large trees in my yard) It will also make meal prep easy if I can just take a pot of lettuce to the kitchen when I'm making salads.

So far this is the part of the garden that lives in my Dining room:

Sunflowers

purple bunching onions

purple carrots

red carrots

mixed lettuces

Trash to Trellis

The top 3 photos were taken May 16, 2015 to show you the completed project.

Changing the color and theme of the birdhouses from this point made a lot of difference, don't you think so?

Continuing to add things was vital to making the project "sing".

There are a couple of other posts about this project and you may want to see them too.

Art hits the deck

I plan to keep adding the flowers that grow here until I run out of space. The next things to add will be the tulips and lilacs.

Container Garden

We're still in the planning stages here so the first step is beginning to fill the planters that we'll be using this year...most of which have been given to us. The nice thing about that is that since there's no cost there we can afford the best plants, soil mixes and seeds to feed our bodies and souls.

The flowers we grow are the basis of the drawings and paintings that decorate the merchandise in my zazzle stores and of course any money I make with them goes back into my garden.

The fruit and veggies feed us, our friends and families. Someday there may be enough to share with even more people or to trade or sell to get more of the things we need to keep this place going.

The weather was beautiful today, a neighbor visited for tea and we started arranging the outdoor furniture to make things even better.