My Garden

Laila's garden pictures inspired me to take some of my "garden" too. We have never tried a traditional garden at this house because when we moved here we had 3 one year olds...and then 3 two year olds, etc. And then by the time we might have thought about having a garden we had realized that there is NO place in our yard that gets much sun....except for perhaps the front yard right along the driveway. And I'm not sure I want a garden *that* bad! So anyway, last year I got creative. I had a half whiskey barrel in front of the garage that I'd planted flowers in before. I decided to stick a grape tomato plant in there as well to see how it would do. WOW! It was like Jack & the beanstalk--it grew so fast & furious that about ever week we'd have to break off the top of the plant! I picked off the last tomatoes the day after Thanksgiving when we had our first hard freeze. I call that a successful experiment! Here is a picture of this year's grape tomato plant. We've decided that this spot, although it gets no morning sun (which is supposed to be important for gardens) gets such heat from the combination of the garage wall & the driveway that it just grows like gangbusters.

I enjoyed my tomatoes last year so much that this year I decided to expand the experiment. Here is my pot on the back deck. It has a tomato plant (cherry--not grape--I'm branching out!) in it with my beautiful mandivilla flowering vine. Unfortunately the tomato plant seems to be outpacing the vine at this point! I also planted a zucchini in the same pot. I am fertilizing heavily in hopes that that will be enough to enable all of these plants to grow in the same pots! Next year if I decide to repeat the squash plants I'll get a burpee catalog and look for a variety that's more of a small plant--as you can tell, this one is huge!






Next the really experimental part of my experiment--yes indeed, the big plant on the right that is vining down onto the driveway is a pumpkin! And a very happy pumpkin it appears to be. It is in a pot with red petunias, a red mandevilla (which was small when I bought it and is hopelessly outpaced by the squash plants...very sad!) and a yellow squash plant. The last pot on the far left has a regular tomato plant, another squash plant, and more petunias. I am worrying right now that I will find out that I've planted a only male squash plants, and that I'll get flowers and no fruit...

For the last couple of years I've set plants on the benches on our deck--because almost the whole deck has benches there isn't any room for flowering things. This year Russ made some awesome shelves *behind* the deck railing for me, so that I can sit planters on them. So now when I look out of the kitchen windows can see beautiful flowers but they don't have to sit on the benches!