Our
Raymond Garden 2005Our
Raymond Garden 2005Our morning glories, growing with the pole beans up their teepee, and up last year's giant branching sunflowers, were quite a sight. Our Peace Garden and the enormous sunflowers, our garden highlights last year, weren't so great this year. The sunflowers didn't come up for the first time in years, and the Peace Garden had too many daisies in it and not enough other things. However, Marcia bought 2 painted rocks at the dollar store, one says Peace and the other Garden, so the name is out there for all to see.
We
continued to have a large number of birds visiting the birdbath
there, including robins, blue jays, and black-capped chickadees. A
mullein grew right out the window so we got to see lots of birds
sitting on that and eating the seeds. The bluejays weighed too much,
and would plummet to the ground when they tried to sit on it. A robin
(pictured) had a baby on our front porch in April.
Marcia started some tomato plants in the garden under plastic on March 31, they actually did okay. We also bought two kinds from Wayne's Daughters down the road, plus eggplants and purple basil. The eggplant was because Marcia dreamed all winter of growing lovely striped eggplants from the seed she got at Seed Saver's Exchange in Iowa last year. But the seed didn't germinate, so others had to be found. We didn't mean to grow potatoes, but they started growing in the pantry in April and Marcia felt sorry for them and planted them. It was too early, but we put plastic over them early on and they did fine.
Having had good success with raised beds for vegetables, we added
2 more this spring. One has wooden sides like the first two, the last
is edged with concrete bricks.
The concrete one did better, the other one had so much organic
material in it that it eventually composted itself and sank several
inches. I struck my largest plum tomato plant in here and harvested
about 3 dozen tomatoes from it at one time. Overall we had a good
number of tomatoes this year, and canned many quarts of sauce.
In our official vegetable gardens (understand that more plants
grow themselves around here than we do) we grew various colors of
lettuce, onions, tomatoes, and Swiss Chard, plus radishes, purple
corn, zucchini, eggplant, spaghetti squash, marigolds, cucumbers,
cilantro, onions, nasturtiums, Kohlrabi, bachelor buttons, broccoli,
morning glories, cantaloupe, parsley, dill, chives, basil, broccoli,
snapdragons, the ubiquitous black-eyed susans, irises, Sweet Annie,
and 2 kinds of daisies. Some happy events in the flower area were
that the wisteria that brother Bob cut down and burned up years ago
finally bloomed again. Also, we received many plants from friends and
even strangers (freecycle) and added an especially lovely wispy
flower called centaurea to our garden. Also, the johnny-jump-up and
other violas from last year 
came
back. You can see the centaurea behind the irises, just starting in
this photo, which also did incredibly well this year.
We are organic gardeners and also have a prairie area intermixed with the fruit trees and black raspberry bushes. Found an especially lovely wild purple aster this fall, so overall we did quite well on the purple angle (Marcia's favorite color.) We also had violet monarda and just one purple coneflower. Marcia sowed more wildflower seeds this fall.
There was quite a crop of berries and fruit as well. Marcia keeps finding gooseberry and red currant bushes in the orchard, and tries to get more sun to the currants. They of course are all growing under trees where birds sat and excreted the seeds. Sounds disgusting, but that is how nature works. The one grapevine we actually pruned around to give more light was eaten at the bottom by rodents over the previous winter. It was a very good year for apples, we were picking them well into November. The most remarkable thing about the entire growing season is that our first really killing frost was Nov. 10. Marcia was picking beans and tomatoes and admiring flowers up to that point. Things had tapered off after a couple very light frosts in October, but with slightly raised beds and high ground, we gardened for a month longer than normal. Global warming isn't so bad sometimes in a cold state like Wisconsin!
last changed December 16, 2005
