Lookee, lookee! Something new is on my sidebar. It’s a list of all the plants in my garden. Click there, or click here, and take a look!
It’s a work in progress, and as I add new plants, so will I add to the list. But at long last, I finally got off my tush and, well, sat on my tush, and typed up the list of plants. I’ve only finished adding scientific names for the Texas-native plants, but I will catch up on the others. Any other errors are purely accidental!
I’m a bit behind in reporting on what I learned at the Organic Vegetable Gardening 101 class at Natural Gardener on Saturday. We’re painting our house, and it takes a very long time, as we’re doing it by ourselves using brushes only. Oh, how my muscles ache. Give me weeding and tilling over exterior painting any day! On the other hand, it’s looking good, despite the slow method! I’ll share a picture at some point, when we’re further along in the process.
So… veggies! By the way, I took this class with Caroline of The Shovel-Ready Garden and Cat of Amlo Farms. They are delightful! I see in Caroline’s blog that while I took more notes, she took more pictures, haha! Well, I’m a farming newbie — I had to pay close attention! So I recommend visiting Caroline’s blog for additional information about hoop houses and many excellent photographs.
The class, taught by horticulturist Rosina Newton, covered a lot of the basics of starting a garden. A big part of her lecture was on soil preparation. It was particularly interesting to hear how much they mix into their soil, versus the simple mixing in of compost that I did for my jack-o-lantern pumpkins. For their vegetable garden, they mixed in:
They also water in with liquid seaweed and then regularly fertilize. In Texas, we need to mulch – pine straw is recommended. Rosina says, “Never leave bare soil.”
Rosina recommends fertilizing every 4 to 6 weeks with an organic fertilizer. Fertilizers are labeled with three numbers, which in order identify ratio of Nitrogen : Phosphorus : Potassium (N-P-K). FYI, they are absorbed in a 3-2-1 ratio. Nitrogen helps with green leafy growth; phosphorus helps with roots, blooms, and fruit; and potassium helps with plant vigor, stem strength, and disease/pest resistance. For my pumpkins and melons, I chose Rabbit Hill’s Buds ‘N Blooms fertilizer. So if you never knew what those numbers mean, there ya go! Choose your fertilizer based on your garden needs.
Other tips:
There was other information about dealing with clay soil, sheet mulching to deal with Bermuda grass, and using row and shade cover. I’m not adding that here, but if anyone is interested in what was said, I’ll be happy to provide it if you let me know in a comment.
Here’s a bee that captured my attention while they were planting during class. I love bees!
This was an interesting side note from Rosina – apparently it has been found that ADD/ADHD is linked to a magnesium deficiency. And what is the first nutrient to deplete from the soil? Magnesium. Could there be a correlation in regard to diet, she wondered? In any case, it certainly won’t hurt to make sure your veggies and fruits get fertilized and replenished minerals. Epsom salt adds magnesium, fyi. Apparently there’s info on the package about how to use in a garden.
With trusty Googling, I read that symptoms of low magnesium include light or restless sleep and daytime sleepiness. That’s me to a tee – I’ll need to see what my energy levels are like on days where I do or do not eat nuts, spinach, oatmeal, or bananas.
A final note — Rosina’s helper added this message, which I’d like to pass on: “Teach children and others to be caretakers of the soil, for the next generation.” So many kids never venture outside, much less learn to garden, in this era of technology. How will they protect the Earth, if we don’t teach them to love it and nurture it?
There’s a Master Gardeners organic gardening class on Saturday. I might try to go to it, too.
My last post was atypically serious for me, so I feel the need to cleanse with a standard “ack, my garden” post. Bit by bit, the pests are starting to find my garden. What if they tell their friends?
I knew what those ants on my pumpkin vines were up to, so I was prepared mentally for yesterday’s discovery, if not emotionally. The aphids had found the pumpkins. I thought about reaching for the soapy water, but the affected leaves were few, so I removed just those leaves and stuck them in the soapy water instead. I know I can’t continue to do that, but I wasn’t worried about affecting the plant — people sometimes pinch off whole vines in growing their pumpkins. One or two leaves shouldn’t be a problem. But there will be more aphids, so I best prepare the soapy spray.
Today I got up to check the garden and found that something had chopped off a large section of one of the corn plants. This was no grasshopper, unless it was the big dude from the other day back to seek revenge. What might it be? Opossum? Dog? No evidence on the ground to help me solve the mystery.
The garden’s not too far from my bedroom window. I need a spotlight and a switch inside the house so that I can spy on the garden from time to time during my insomniac moments in the night (brought about by the cats attacking my toes and dogs who are either thirsty or need to go outside having drunk all their water). Perhaps a bright light will help me catch the culprit in the act. Of course, if it’s not mammal-caused, then perhaps it won’t do me a bit of good.
Most of the corn is fine and healthy. But a few seedlings stay small, victims of terrible regular feasting by a vicious corn-eating monster. You thinking what I’m thinking? Grasshopper.
NEWS FLASH: This just in. Either the evil grasshopper from two days ago came back to the garden, or I found his cousin, who jumped up to the trellis wires. He expected me to run and get my camera, I know, but instead I removed both my flip flops and sandwiched him in between. Gruesome, you say? Did you see what he did to my poor corn plants? Remember, he makes babies. Or she. Or it. The Thing. No pictures. I’m not that gruesome!
I noticed that two of my pumpkin plants are starting to show strange discoloring to their leaves. I don’t know whether this is normal or some sort of powdery mildew or other disease. Only some leaves are affected, and only two plants. What does this mean? Or am I showing my newbness and those are perfectly normal pumpkin leaves and all pumpkins do that?
While I was taking pictures, this black bug flew down. What is he?
The leafminer flies are frequent visitors to the plants. Though the damage of their larvae is slight, it’s unsightly. Not slightly unsightly, hoho.
I’m checking the plants daily for more evidence of squash vine borer eggs and for more of those little unknown red bugs. The closest thing I can come up with on identifying that bug is flea beetle, but there don’t seem to be any pictures to support this.
I know it’s only going to get worse. But I’m still going to do my best to keep all these and new pests at bay! <breaks out the boxer gloves>
And the mistakes I’ve made, SO FAR.
Here’s what I did wrong. I’m going to be happy that this list, as far as I’m aware, is short.
1. I grew cantaloupe from the seeds of store-bought cantaloupes. To be fair to myself, I didn’t know any better! So don’t do the same thing — sure it’s tempting, but hybrids, if you bought one from the store (most of them are hybrids, apparently), will give you heartache or at least some stress. Read on to find out why. To those I gave seedlings, I will report my findings as I find them out, and I greatly apologize for any grief you experience!
2. I took a picture of the giant grasshopper, and it got away. I’m still kicking myself about this one, and it only happened yesterday. The babies are hard enough to catch. If you see a big one, don’t try to capture the awe in regards to its size or even impressive markings. Just kill it. It will eat and make babies. Something eats bits of my corn, and I blame him. Or them.
Here’s what I’m doing right (again, as far as I’m aware). Top-Ten List! Top-Ten List That’s Really in No Particular Order!
10. I gave my cantaloupe seedlings a raised bed and trellis in which to grow to their heart’s content without getting trampled by dogs.
9. I learned about square-foot gardening and went ahead and spent the big bucks to give them a good soil in which to grow. Even the in-ground pumpkins got a healthy dose of compost mixed into their soil spots.
8. I lovingly give them water each day, and I know to hold back on water as fruit maturity begins to happen.
7. I learned the difference between male and female flowers and what “self-fertile but not self-fertilizing” plants are.
6. I learned about and am quite willing to help my cantaloupes’ pollination. I don’t have many bees here yet, so I have to do what I can to help (I did see one of those big black ones this morning, but he didn’t linger long at the cantaloupe flowers; I also see an occasional sweat bee).
5. I check them each day for bugs and kill anything that looks menacing. Unless it gets away while I’m taking a picture, that is…
4. I’m being a good mom by growing the cantaloupes at my son’s request, and along the way I get to teach my kids about plant life cycles and good gardening practices (and/or my mistakes!).
3. I gently guide the cantaloupe vines up the trellis to give them something to hang on to.
2. I learned about companion planting and put in marigolds and corn in their raised bed.
1. And most importantly, I love them and talk to them and love them some more!
And there you have it. I’m so excited to have thriving cantaloupe plants, but I’m worried that I’m growing a hybrid. So I’m seeking words of wisdom from the experienced cantaloupe gardeners out there! And Cat at AmloFarms has some blooming male flowers (from REAL seeds) she can share with me for pollination purposes. This cantaloupe thing is getting pretty complicated, haha. But for the sake of my cantaloupes, I will drive across town and back! Thank you, Cat!
The cantaloupes are happily growing up their trellis and trying to grow out wide, too.
We’ve had male flowers for awhile, and today (day 38) I found my first female. Here’s how you tell the difference. The easiest way is looking at the flower stem.
The male rises from the vine with a single plain stem of its own.
The female has a cute little bulge that will become the fruit if pollinated.
Here’s a baby female bud.
You can also tell the difference by looking at the inside of the bloom, but here’s where I’m unsure about the condition of the inside of my cantaloupe blooms. The male stamens will have pollen, but I can’t tell whether mine do, haha.
And the females will have their stigma ready to receive pollen. But mine look quite green, so I don’t know if mine look the way they should (I’ve seen pics with them yellow).
All the same, I did my best to get some pollen from the male to the female. At first I tried q-tips and a paintbrush, but I saw hardly any yellow on either. So I finally pulled off some male flowers and exposed their stamens and rubbed them on the female.
No idea whether any pollen grains stuck.
So experienced cantaloupe gardeners, should I be seeing lots of yellow pollen on the males? The male pumpkin flower (just saw my first two today!) has a lot of pollen, that’s for sure. And ants. First blooms, day 38.
Here’s one of the giant plants. They have a long way to go to reach full size. Egads.
From what I’ve read, if I read correctly, the female flowers should be ok and just the males might be sterile. But I don’t know whether the females are sometimes sterile, too. And even if pollination happens, will I get a regular cantaloupe out of it or some dud?
And while I’m asking, let me ask this: Can someone identify this red bug for me? The bigger versions of it are black, but I don’t see any of those on the garden yet, but last fall I had a ton of all sizes in a bunch of fallen leaves. Even the people at Natural Gardener couldn’t name them for me. I kill them when I see them now. But I’d like to know what they are. They are not tiny lady bugs, that’s all I know.
In other garden news, I decided to do something with my broken tools. Please tell me this looks like a flower, because it’s supposed to, HA! I will probably paint it at some point, but it’s growing on me (hehe) as is, too.
You can see the evil chinaberry in my very nice neighbor’s yard behind it — it’s been my nemesis for many a year. My neighbor finally had it cut down several months ago, but the workers left the stump and roots, so of course it’s been growing back with a vengeance. We cut it again just to prevent seeds and it’s back — so the neighbor is getting the tree people back out to properly kill it. Not sure they’ll succeed if they don’t get the roots out. I’m having to close my eyes and ears about the herbicides they’ll probably use… But I’m so thrilled to have a neighbor who is trying to help with the invasives problem!
Sugar pumpkins continue to grow and confuse me. They just aren’t eager to send out tendrils, but growing they be, with new bloom buds forming.
Marigold seedlings! Only about 6 took, but I have more seeds to try with.
And much of my corn is happy. A few seedlings are getting chomped by something <evil eye at grasshoppers, even if they aren’t to blame>, but the rest are growing. I never really realized how beautiful a corn plant is until all this growing stuff.
And I’ve planted 8 pole bean seeds so far. I’m making use of the far corners of the trellis squares (ok, according to square-foot gardening, those squares belong to the cantaloupes but they were just sitting there empty! seemed so wasteful). I’ll be planting more along the fence once I amend the soil. My wonderful oldest son dug out the weeds from that area for me this morning. This whole “raising kids to work on the farm” was a brilliant plan of the pioneering farmers!
I planted Black-Seeded Blue Lake Pole Beans. The seeds look like engorged ticks. Don’t they sound wonderful? But I hear they are delicious. No, really. Really!
And we had another frog in the dog pond. Not surprisingly, he’s just as cute as Murray! Pictures soon!
Entwined
© Great Stems
The darkness of night faded
I turn to the light of dawn
And gingerly I reach out
A shy and uncertain hand
Longing for love, and clinging
At the briefest hint of touch
Will I be made the fool?
My denied hopes a tangled mess
Or will the tendrils of love entwine?
For hand in hand, and more than hugs
Tenderness brings strength to heart
And hopes become wishes true
Oh, be the rock on which I stand
And I will stand proud but grounded
Be the wall upon which I lean
And I will know comfort yet stay dependent
But hold my hand and love me
And I will bloom and grow
High and higher, unbound by rooted doubts
Upon the ladder of heart’s embrace
Toward the warming sun above
And I shall be whole and happy
All because I reached, and you were there.
And love entwined.
The photos show a glimpse of my young food garden: jack-o-lantern pumpkin, cantaloupe, and sugar pumpkin vines, with images of the tendrils of crossvine and caroline jessamine mixed in. The seedlings are growing well, and they are my babies. The cantaloupes are blooming now, and the jack-o-lantern pumpkins are teasing me with buds.
A few days ago I saw my first squash vine borer moth (horror!), and the next day I went out and removed about 30 little brown eggs from my jack-o-lantern pumpkins. Hopefully I got them all. Seriously, I’m checking for eggs every day now. This task will get harder as the plants get bigger.
I’ve planted 32 corn seedlings and all are growing. Yes, that’s a lot of corn! But they all fit with this square-foot gardening.
I’ve had a few leaf-miners tunneling, but I haven’t done anything about it. As far as I know, the overall plants will be fine, though I hate to see the pretty leaves tainted with trails.
And I’ve bought seeds for my third raised bed, for fall: carrots, beans, spinach, and zucchini. Looking forward to and terrified of attempting to grow even more veggies… But having fun, too. 🙂
If you’d like to learn more about sustainable, healthy eating, you might want to check out Edible Aria. My friend Ren shares incredible whole, fresh recipes accompanied by beautiful photographs (I drool at every picture), and he also includes current articles about healthy eating and what’s going on in the food industry. He encourages the use of organic, local foods and having home gardens, and he shows how the use of seasonal ingredients keeps healthy eating affordable. Did I mention the delicious recipes? (I’m still drooling.) Ren tells us, “Eat as if your life depends on it.” Food for thought, eh?
Ren’s Edible Aria was recently reviewed by The Monday Campaigns, Inc., in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, on their site Meatless Monday as well. This site is also worth checking out — by not eating meat one day a week, you’ll not only improve your health, but you’ll reduce your carbon footprint, helping sustain our planet.
Good food. Good living. Yay, Earth.
I think I need a better name than Pumpkin Army — this veggie gardening endeavour just gets bigger and bigger. I’ve now added corn to the plan. Alas. This is what research does for you! It also gets you: trellises!
I’m back from camping. It was good fun — and nice to have a change of pace. I’d like to say that all my plants survived my absence, but I’m happy that most of them did (mourning the rest). The seedling army grows.
And of our three swallowtail caterpillars happily munching away before we left, we found one chrysalis, so we’ll try to monitor it for butterfly-ness. Of course, it’s in a place that is very hard to get a picture, and it’s also in a place that the butterfly will have a hard time getting out of without our help.
Though my DH didn’t quite get to all the plants, he certainly tried, and it was nice to return home to additional hoses and hand sprinklers so that I don’t have to drag hoses around to water those plants far away from civilization, my house. (It’s not that I hadn’t thought of it, I just was trying to avoid spending the money!) In addition, he made great progress on the raised garden beds, which means I will soon have the cantaloupes happily planted.
The jack-o-lantern pumpkins are going to be spread around the yard and will have to brave possible trampling by dogs, scary because the vines are so important to the size and quality of the pumpkins. I’ve got three jack-o-lantern pumpkins in the ground now, with more to come, maybe. I put them in little mounds, and for now I surrounded them with rocks to help the dogs avoid them. One of them is near some other plants, so I’ll have to guide the vines other directions, as best I can. It will have to do — those vines are growing so fast that I wanted them in the ground as soon as possible. I’ll get some marigolds and radishes near them for bug repellents. It’s apparently not the right season to grow radishes, but if they’ll keep the bugs away, I’ll try!
The cantaloupes will be in a raised garden bed, grown vertically on a trellis. All in all, we’ll have three raised veggie beds (for now, haha). The cantaloupes will be in one, along with corn and some marigolds, and sugar pumpkins will be in another, with some more corn. The third bed will be prepared for yummy fall planting goodness. The third bed was made for me by my kids this weekend, their first project working with drills and saws and whatnot!
To prepare the area, we dug out the grass. It was dead, so other than dealing with the hard soil, it was no loss and only somewhat of a pain. Then, with the frames in place, I mixed in compost into the existing soil. I expect some plant roots to extend into that soil, so I wanted to enrich it somewhat. How hard was the soil? Casualty, one shovel.
For the main bed soil, I decided to follow “Mel’s Mix” for square-foot gardening. I talked with the folks at Natural Gardener before doing this, and they had various suggestions (including Mel’s Mix), but nothing really any better or worse. The other option I considered was mixing compost with more of my clay soil, but that would have involved more digging. Forget that! Once I got the stuff home, I read on the bag about dust concerns with the vermiculite, and I felt a little concerned that I’d made a bad choice, but a little more research online made me feel better.
In mixing the soil, I felt a lot like Hermione in front of a big cauldron at Hogwarts. It was fun mixing it, I admit. I did add in some bonus clay soil from a pile in the yard, for good measure. It’s that secret ingredient in my special sauce.
Because someone at NG told me that peat moss can be a pain to get wet at first, I decided to wet down the soil well and plant tomorrow. Sure enough, I had to work with the peat moss in a big soup of mud to get it to soak in the water. Then I really did feel I was creating a magical potion! Tomorrow will be a good planting day. First I’ll get the trellis wires in place and the grid. Then in will go the cantaloupes and marigolds and some corn seeds.
Side story… While I was digging the soil for the frames, I found a weird, soft little tube. At first I thought that it was, pardon me, some old dog poop. But then it split open, and a spider carcass fell out. Squeal. And then lots of little spiders came out and crawled over the spider carcass. Shriek! While I was wondering whether they had eaten the spider, more horrors awaited me… the legs of a gigantic spider appeared. And they MOVED. And more baby spiders crawled out and over the legs… By now, I’d made loud enough noises that the kids came running over. And finally the whole spider slid out, and it was the biggest spider I’d ever seen in my yard. Yes, tarantulas are even bigger, but I haven’t seen one as a resident yet. Despite my startled reaction to the sudden appearance of this spider and her babies, I find her beautiful. Can you see some of her babies in this picture?
It turns out this spider is a female trapdoor spider, and she creates a silk tube-like burrow for hunting purposes, laying eggs, and feeding young. I felt some major guilt about disrupting this little family. But once the babies left the tube, all I could do was scoop up (with the shovel) some of the dirt they crawled upon and get them to a prepared garden bed instead of letting them get buried under the dirt I was lifting and turning. The mom spider went to a shady spot, because she looked so shiny and that “carcass” I saw was probably her molted exterior. Or perhaps her mate, eep!
Hopefully they’ll survive. Guilt, guilt. Live, spiders, and go eat my pest bugs!
Speaking of horrific creepy-crawlies, check out this bug I found in Oklahoma. At first I saw beautiful wings and thought it was a really unique and large moth. But then I saw the head and its enormous pincher-like mouth. My guess is it’s not a moth! This bug was more than 3 inches long, front to end. Imagine this bug about the size of a house. It’s got B-movie horror written all over it! Edit: I googled and determined that this is a female dobson fly. Takes some of the fun out, knowing the name, doesn’t it? 🙂
We saw a pretty cool leaf butterfly of some sort there, too, and many spiders. This picture didn’t turn out as well as I’d like, but I like the overall effect of the image.
The Oklahoma state parks seem to be very nicely managed and maintained, more so than some of our Texas ones. I loved that they had litter bags to help people keep the trails clean. My only complaint was that they didn’t offer any recycling options for bottles or cans anywhere. We kept our recyclables and brought them back to Texas with us. Green points earned!
I loved the bark of the pine trees at Robber’s Cave.
All along the highways and in the state park itself, the beautiful but very invasive mimosa silk tree could be seen. I have a close-up of the flower, but I felt too guilty about admiring the beauty to post it. Bad invasive, bad!
At least it’s prettier than the invasive Chinaberry all over Austin.
The Austin Pond Society Pond Tour was this weekend. I have lots of pictures to post over the next couple of days!
Day 6… Separating the Seedlings
Now that I’ve gotten over the shock of discovering that once again I stuck myself into an enormous project I’m not ready for, I’m moving ahead full force. Because that’s how I roll, baby! My pumpkin army will help me conquer the world! Muahahaha!
The pumpkins, cantaloupes, and endurance sunflowers are all growing like mad. Today I separated almost all of the seedlings into individual pots, which was quite a chore given that I only have so many available pots — I used the last of my cups, too. I heartlessly thinned out a few that looked at me funny (ok that’s a lie, because it really is painful for me to decide which ones have to go). In all I think I sent 4 little pumpkin plants to their doom, but they will serve another purpose in becoming compost. It means I still have about 20 pumpkin seedlings growing, LOL (I was afraid to count the cantaloupes). I recognize that I can’t possibly grow them all, but I’ll choose the best of the best after my camping trip this week. If any survive my husband’s attempt to water the seedlings in my absence, they are sure to be hardy little boogers.
The current plan is to put some plants in the ground and some in raised beds with trellises. It will be quite the experiment for this newbie vegetable gardener. I happened upon the wonderful blog of Engineered Garden, and it’s this type of trellis we plan to build, at least for the cantaloupes. Actually, I’ve asked my DH to build them for me while the boys and I are camping. If he succeeds, I should be able to get most of my babies planted next weekend. These seedlings are growing so fast, I hope I don’t miss the best window for planting.
Knowing that I’m camping for a week and leaving my plants (seedlings plus the rest of the garden) during a Texas heat wave in the care of my husband, who is NOT the gardener of the family, is a bit scary for me. I think it will take me two hours to write out the whole watering process I go through. But it will be good for him. If I teach him anything, it will be how to deep water, an important skill to have. I worry most that he’ll not notice all the plants around the place. He will also have to fill all the birdfeeders and take care of the pond, dogs, cats, hamster, fish, and our neighbor’s turtles — all while working a full-time job. See why I worry?
I’m sad that our swallowtail caterpillars will go to chrysalis while we are gone — we won’t get to see how big they’ll get before they transition. But if they form their chrysalises nearby, and we can find them, maybe we’ll get to see them emerge as beautiful butterflies.
And I’m going to miss Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day. But most of my plants have given up their blooms in hopes of sheer survival in the heat (thankfully we have a few left for the butterflies). But here’s a new one I’ll post — one of my other Flame Acanthus has finally started blooming, and I was happy to see it was the vibrant red variety. My other Flame Acanthus has orange blooms.
See you next week!
There are several alternative titles to this post, namely:
Obviously, even the list is growing.
You see, I’ve done it again. I got a creative, eager bug (no pun intended), an idea quite simple in concept, and then I once again found myself in the middle of a major ordeal.
The pond is an example. I found free rocks and came up with the idea of a pond. Months of back-breaking work later, we finally finished the project. Simple idea. Ordeal to deliver.
Here’s another one – my first and only mosaic (Edit: Okay, this is no longer true). That’s the Pennybacker bridge here in Austin – also known as the 360 bridge. Took me about two months to make. I really need to learn to stop undertaking big projects I know practically to completely nothing about doing. Oh, but then I’d have to stop gardening. Moving on!
Even my “simple” act of finding a wonderful man to marry and raise a family with… Did he tell me ahead of time that he came from a family of 10+-pound children? Guess where I learned that whopper? In the hospital, after having giving birth to our first child, a 10 lb-4.5 oz whopper of a boy with the biggest feet the nurses had ever seen. (Currently he’s in a size 13 shoe and not even a teenager yet).
Ah well, at least my son has become an excellent soil digger, when he’s not complaining about the work and the heat and… I digress. But that kid fits nicely into today’s blog saga about crazy gigantic growing things. (The bed in the picture is in progress, btw – eventually the bricks, outlining the shape, will go away and we’ll have plants + decomposed granite path.)
Last week my youngest son (since you might be wondering, he was more than 9 pounds at birth) and I decided that we wanted to grow our own jack-o-lanterns this year. The same day, he helped me scoop out the seeds of a cantaloupe, and we decided we’d try to grow them, too. After all, I had some empty beds I was waiting to plant until fall, anyway, and some I needed an excuse to work on. Besides, I wasn’t worried – my last purple coneflower seeds and two rounds of sunflower attempts didn’t work, so my chance of getting any seedlings from such fresh cantaloupe seeds and potentially old pumpkin seeds was surely low.
Oh, and while I was at it, I thought, I’ll try two other types of sunflower seeds. Oh, and look, here are butterfly flower seeds! Oh, and white swan coneflower seeds! Oh, and look at the cute little swallowtail caterpillars on this fennel. I’ll buy some fennel, and some parsley so the caterpillars can have a yummy salad. And I get to try out my little garden bar I just bought off of craigslist for a new potter’s bench! Woot, what a good gardener I am!
<face palm>
I planted the seeds on Sunday. I ran out of little planters and resorted to cups I’d had in the cabinet for years. And I finally found a use for the hundreds of chopsticks we’d accumulated over the years from the occasional take-out – labels! But to my horror — within two days -TWO DAYS – of planting my seeds, I already had sprouts.
And not just little tiny barely-poking-out-of-the-ground seedlings – these seem to be sprouts ready to take over the planet. I swear they are growing before my eyes!
So I rushed to Google exactly what I’ve gotten myself into with the pumpkin and cantaloupe and other plants. Oh my – 15- to 40-foot pumpin vines? One plant needs 100 square feet of space? Noooooooo. The package said nothing about that. Honey, we a bigger garden bed – about the size of the whole backyard! And we have a big yard, mind you. Suddenly our simple idea has led to yet another huge project.
The sunflowers shocked me by growing as well. The Endurance sunflowers, listed as “Rare” – popped out on Day 2 with the pumpkins. The Maximillian sunflowers are also sprouting. I thought my butterfly flowers already were, but I was confused – it was another sunflower. According to the package (and the white swans), they have another two weeks or so before I need to worry about them. At least they’ll give me time to get the monster vines in the ground. (Did I just hear a butterfly flower seed open in response?)
And my cute little caterpillars? Doubled in size overnight. They are running out of fennel, and they seem to have no interest in the parsley. I see more tiny little baby swallowtail caterpillars have also hatched (and are growing!). I’m going to have to hunt down some more fennel or try carrot tops or something. Argh.
Don’t be fooled by the parsley — that cat is on fennel!
And what is this little white mop-like creature? I hope it’s a good guy, not a little pesty thing. If you can ID it for me, I’d be grateful! Note: It’s a good guy, though not native to the states: Mealybug Destroyer (Cryptolaemus montrouzieri). Eater of aphids and mealybugs and other little pests!
Well, that’s how it grows, I guess (bad pun intended, lol).
I really think I need a new blog category to accommodate this and all future entries about my horrible inability to think ahead. Today’s post will be the first in “What was I thinking?” category. Â I should also add that I’m horrible at chess. And apparently when I endearingly called my son Pumpkin in his younger years, I was way more on target than I thought.
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