this little life of mine

As you can see from the series of photos below, our Earthbox garden is going like gangbusters! I harvested four more tomatoes from the Bush Goliath plant - the largest of which made for a delicious bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich! - and noticed the Big Beef tomato plant is looking like it might give us some fruit eventually as well. As for the peppers, the largest plant is still busting out ginormous peppers, all of which I'm keeping on the plant as long as possible in the hopes that they'll go red (although I don't have a picture of it yet, the kinda red one I picked a week or so ago has along completely changed colour! I'll try to remember to get a piccie of it before I roast it!), and the little plant we thought wasn't going to make it actually has TWO good sized peppers on  it!

In the front, all of my roses are doing very well. The Midas Touch has not stopped blooming all summer and my two mini red rose bushes are both growing and blooming!

How's your garden doing??

It's a little warm today, so the garden is a little droopy, but it's still doing pretty well.

The bush goliath tomato plant is stuffed with tomatoes, a couple of which were ready to harvest:

This little critter (I'm guessing it's a caterpillar??) tried hitching a ride on my tom. I transferred him to our tree where he'll hopefully be okay.

My Big Beef tomato plant is still huge, but still not really producing much except a few mutant-looking toms:

The peppers are both still going strong, too. The big plant has several big peppers on it. I really want to hold out to see if they will turn red, but I'm afraid the plant will break off with the weight of them, so I took, a couple in. The little plant actually has a tiny pepper starting on it which is pretty exciting!

Here is my haul for the day. These guys are going in a pasta salad for lunch - yum!

Cheers!

Well, our little Earthbox garden is going along just fine! No ripe tomatoes this week, but the Bush Goliath tomato plant is quite full of good-sized green ones, so we should be getting some soon. Also, I noticed the Big Beef tomato plant is finally starting to get some more little green tomatoes on it. I'm curious to see how big they actually get! As for the peppers, the one on the right is still going strong, and has a couple peppers I could harvest, but I'm holding out to see if they'll turn red, and the runt ont he left I think might actually have grown a little bit! There may be hope for it yet!

Hopefully I'll be better at updating our growing garden during July than I was in June. We've already harvested one tomato and I'm sure there is at least one more ready to be picked. Let's find out!

Here is our Bush Goliath tomato plant. We got our first tomato of this one and it looks like there's a couple more ready to go!!!

This ginormous monstrosity is our Big Beef tomato plant. We only have this one odd-shaped little "frankentom" so far, but the bush is covered with blossoms, so I'm still hopeful!

Okay, so I just don't know what to think about the sad, little dwarf pepper plant on the left there. It's not dying, but it's not really growing, either. The other pepper plant is doing really well, and even had a pepper ready to pick!

For lunch yesterday I used both tomatoes and the pepper in a pasta tuna salad - it was SO yummy! The tomatoes were juicy and sweet and the green bell pepper was really sweet, too!

Cheers!

This week in the garden: the tomato plants are doing very well - especially the Big Beef which is HUGE! - and one pepper is getting big while the other one is doing, well, nothing.

I have no idea what is up with that one pathetic little pepper. It's not all dried up and dead, it's just not growing. *shrugs* The rest of the back yard is looking pretty good.

Our zinneas are still blooming as is our lavender. We took out another cat mint plant and put our sun dial in its place. I think it looks much better!

I love all our little statuary, and I really like these two "rocks" we found at the Paso Robles T.J. Maxx store!

Our little Earthbox garden is doing really quite well:

Both the Goliath and Beefsteak tomato plants look great and have either blossoms or little tomatoes on them:

Only one of our peppers is growing; the other is still stunted and although it still looks green and healthy, I don't think it will survive:

Out front my Midas Touch rose is going gangbusters!

The first blooms on the two miniature roses are done, but one of the buses has a new little bud on it!

In the back, the grasses and shrubbery have started taking over, so we took some clippers to them and tamed them a bit:

We also cut back the dead irises and finally hung my ceramic sun:

So far I'm quite optimistic about our little garden and yard. Most of the plants look great and are producing or blooming or getting ready to bloom. Until next week ... cheers!

Hello and welcome to my first gardening update for 2012! We're one week in and so far everything looks pretty good!

The Bush Goliath tomato plant already has two little green toms on it:

And, the Big Beefsteak has some blossoms:

I'm SO looking forward to some big, juicy, delicious tomatoes this summer!

Here are my little bell peppers. They both have little buds on them, but one seem to be growing faster than the other. 

The rest of the backyard is doing very well, too. In fact, a little TOO good. I'll have to do some trimming here pretty soon! Those stupid cat mint bushes are outrageous again! AND, they're SPREADING!!! 

The yellow flowers are coming back in full force - they're so pretty!

Speaking of full force, I can't believe how well these white flowers have come back. I thought they were just annuals, and over the winter we didn't even water them!

I found this little fella sunning himself on one of my dry creekbed rocks:

Turning to the front yard, my two miniature roses seem to be doing okay - there's new growth on both of them - but there are no new buds! I don't know if they're going to bloom again, and I'm going to have to remove the dying blooms pretty soon. 

Yesterday mom and I planted our Earthbox garden containers with tomatoes and bell peppers.  We stuck with our old, successful familiars and decided against trying anything else this year. In the past we've grown cantaloupe and honeydew melons (which I'm sure were cross pollinated as the honeydews were orange inside!), Japanese eggplant, summer squash, and zucchini. We've always had good luck with zucchini as well, but just didn't feel like dealing with them this year.

So in our first container we have the Bush Goliath Hybrid tomato:

And, rather than making our toms share a box this year, we put the Red Beefsteak tomato in its own container. We're hoping this will help the plants grow tomatoes that are actual BEEFSTEAK-size rather than cherry-tomato-size we've been getting the last few years. I mean, yes they're still sweet, juicy and delicious, but we're buying large tomatoes because we want LARGE tomatoes!

Because we've always had good luck getting good-sized bell peppers when the two plants have shared a box, we again put them together. They are both Bonnie Green Bells, although we've contemplated getting one we saw called a Red Bell, but if we just leave the green ones a week or so extra, they automatically turn red, so we decided against it. I suppose I should do some research and see if the ones called "red bell" are actually red to start with, or if they start out green, then turn red. Anyway, we've got two green bell peppers, which is fine because we like the green ones and if they turn red, awesome, if not, whatevs.

So there's our garden!

We also got our two mini roses put out front, and they look lovely:

I'm a bit concerned that each plant has only one blossom and no other buds on them, but I'm hopeful that they will continue to bloom this summer!

This weekend mom and I bought and planted some very pretty (and hopefully tough!) flowers for our pots in the front yard and back garden. Originally we were going to buy some African marigolds because they looked amazing when we saw them inside the garden center at Home Depot a couple weeks ago, and the plant info indicated "full sun". However, when we walked up to Home Depot on Saturday, we saw a bunch of them sitting outside, in full sun, and ... wow, they didn't look so good. The flowers were smaller and looked kinda fried, and the leaves were really wilted and generally they were some sad-looking plants. The African marigolds we saw inside? In the shade? Looked amazing: huge, bright beautiful blooms and full, green leaves. Full sun? Really? Maybe not so much.

So we decided against those flowers, and started looking around for something else to put in our pots. It was hard. Everything said "full sun", but could we really believe it? This sun is brutal. Could these plants really take it?  We contemplated cactus, but the idea of planting the prickly beasts turned me right off. We contemplated ice plant, but it's really a ground cover not a container plant, so, in the end, I decided against it. We even contemplated decorative grasses, but, again, we need something for containers, and it's such a pain when stuff outgrows the pots.

le sigh!

Suddenly, we came across some minature roses, et voila! Problem solved! Roses do great here, expecially in the front. My Midas Touch rose has been blooming like crazy, and our neighbour's roses are exploding now, too. And, these roses were made specifically for containers!!! Score!! I grabbed a couple red ones that I thought would look good with my yellow roses and blue house.  We also grabbed a half flat of zinnias because they were so pretty and we still needed something for the back garden. 

We got everything planted Saturday evening, but we're going to keep all the pots along the side of the house where it gets part shade just to give everything a chance to adjust to their new living conditions. I figure I'll put everything in it's proper place on Tuesday after I mow the lawn. I'm pretty excited about my choices, and hope everything does well!

Next week: tomatoes and bell peppers! Yay!

Our front yard has been looking a bit ragged around the edges lately, so mom and I decided to replace the edging and freshen it up a bit. The old edging was just some plastic stuff we bought probably a hundred years ago, and not only were many of the pieces sunk down in the ground to the point of being totally buried and overgrown with grass, many of them were broken and faded and just plain nasty! So, I enlisted the help of my professional basketball player cousin (and his truck) to pick up seventeen concrete edgers, some black plastic edging, a couple bags of bark and a couple bags of gravel. 

This morning, mom and I headed out to what we thought was going to be a long, tough day of digging and sod cutting. We prepared by slathering on the sunscreen, chilling bottles of Vitamin Water, and donning garden hats and gloves. 

As it turned out, however, the whole process went smoother than we expected. The old, plastic edging pulled out of the ground super easy, and the new concrete edgers fit perfectly in the dug-out space. After just an hour and a half, we added the fresh bark and called it a day.

Oh, there's still more to do, but we're in no hurry, and also it's pretty hot out, so we'll take care of the other little project another time. Like, maybe next weekend. 

In the meantime, here's some pretty pictures:

Oh, and Happy Earth Day! It was two years ago today that we had half of our backyard landscaped and had our little Madrone tree planted. Here's what it looked like April 22, 2010:

And here's what he looks like today:

Everything looks really good; we only lost a couple plants, and we're not really heartbroken over them, so it's no big. We tested the drip system, and it's working perfectly! We just need to do a little trimming and we'll be set for the summer! Then we can spend our free time day tripping to SLO, the beach, or just chillin' in our own backyard:

Cheers!