A while back I showed you the Martha Stewartesque stacking planters which I seeded with seed carpet. They would be a lot more successful if the weather hadn't turned cold, rendering the squirrel-deterring peppermint oil null and void, and if the squirrels had not upended them FIVE separate times, all requiring rescue, replanting, and now I'm resigned. Either they grow or they don't, and there are small signs that they will, unless Martha wants to visit and fix it all up.
However, now is the time to think about food in the garden, and I have embarked on a new way of doing the upside down veggies. Last year's upside down tomato went great guns until the tomato blight hit and my tomatoes, along with those of unfortunate local farmers who earn a living from these things, were lost totally to the blight. How it found my little hanging planter is one of those mysteries of nature, like how do Japanese beetles know it's July l, time to eat your roses?
Nonetheless I'm trying again. But instead of the official tomato planter which I found incredibly awkward and difficult and heavy and curse-inducing to maneuver, particularly overhead, I'm using readymade hanging planter things, which I cut out at the bottom a bit to accommodate the roots of the veggies, and I decided to plant the tops as well, so that they might look nice as well as functional.
So here are pictures.
And I had a rush of brilliance, about time, and used S hooks to stage them, also to bring them down low enough to work on. I got a set of these last winter, sure they'd come in useful sooner or later, and they did.
Soooo, we have tiny tomatoes, the kind HP loves and I don't, Roma plum tomatoes, the kind he tolerates and I love, bell peppers (extras went into ordinary containers out back on the deck, for comparison purposes, also because I ran out of hanging planters and room to hang them), with wave petunias one lot of white, two of mixed mauvy purply.
Vegetables upside down, not easy to see in the pix yet, and the flowers right way up, similarly not easy to see in the pix yet. Purply not my fave color, but it goes well in the context, and anything's better than red in the garden. I really dislike red flowers, don't ask me why, probably very Freudian.
So here are my spring hopes. Again. If'n the creek don't git up (around here that's not actually a joke, since I live in a floodplain) and the squirrels don't git up there either, I will post progress pictures. That's if'n we have any progress.
Baby rabbit wondering if he can climb up that high.
It's amazingly hard work doing a few little containers. You feel as if you've been heaving rocks for hours, what with finding the tools and lugging the bags of soil, and fixing the containers and dropping them and picking them up and sweeping up the results and making the tea.
Meanwhile, here are cherry bushes which are supposed to give me actual fruit
Cherry bushes and iris
Which reminds me that it's time for another cup of English Teatime.
Damn birds ate my cherries. But I was happy that any fruit appeared at all so I'm not hideously irritated. Chuck and I did have one each that weren't quite ripe because I was impatient. A dog and 2 cats keep the squirrels and rabbits out, but they can't stop the birds.
ReplyDeleteI have plums, pears, peaches and blueberries actually beginning to ripen and I'm pretty excited about that since I just planted the trees and bushes last year. (And I'm stingy so I got small plants to start with.) My expectation is that, eventually, they will all be big enough for the birds AND the people to get some.
I don't like red flowers in the garden either, Liz. I'm actually not surprised that most colour blindness is of the red/green variety.
ReplyDeleteI planted a pot of white wave petunias on my balcony today, and lots of stuff in the pea patch.
I like red flowers best. Blue is second. I don't care so much for white flowers.
ReplyDeleteThe marigolds, nasturtiums and chamomile I planted from seed are coming up. But not a speck of chives to be seen. I wonder if the seeds could have been bad? They were this year's crop and one of the usual seed brands you see all over.