Anticipation

I feel like the garden is almost, almost starting to reach it's potential. I still have a long way to go learning the quirks and little rodents that enjoy feasting here but I've managed to keep most things alive.

I've figured out with the strawberry bed that pill bugs LOVE strawberries. It took me a few weeks but now that the plants are large enough, if I carefully lay the unripe strawberries on top of their leaves, the pill bugs can't reach them.

This weekend was herb harvest central in the garden. Mint, chives, chervil, lemon balm, german chamomile, thyme, sage, oregano, basil and more basil were cut for drying and making pesto. Above is summer savory, something you don't find too often in the grocery store. Eating them with green beans is sublime. A gopher ate one of my plants but this one is already 2' in diameter and still growing. Speaking of beans ...

Here's batch one of Kentucky Wonder and Purple Podded beans. The bed is about 5' square. After planting them all and seeing the gopher destruction on my other plants, I wanted some insurance so I planted more last weekend.

This was where the english peas grew, underneath a weeping Santa Rosa plum tree. I can see beans climbing up the branches now. There's another spot that I've planted even more beans. We'll see how much is too many soon enough.

Other plants are growing quickly too. This is a Rouge Vif D'Etampes pumpkin that I planted far away from the watermelons this year. I overhead someone at the garden store mention this and took their advice. So, we won't have pumpkiny tasting watermelons this year.

And here is one of the watermelons. A little small for my liking but I'm hoping the growth spurt kicks in soon enough.

Our next big project is to rebuild and start to organize some of the raised beds. This little area as you first enter the garden from the house is screaming for some order. I plan to build 3 3''6"x6' beds to replace the four hodge podge beds  located in the back. We'll keep the strawberry bed for much longer. As soon as my beets are ready to harvest in one of the beds, we'll get started. Speaking of beets, they are the best growing thing I have. I thought they would be done but they taste great. We love the greens the best.

The anticipation is killing me ...

I'm heading up to Sonoma this morning to see what progress (if any) has been made on the giant mulch job of the garden paths. See all those weeds? They grew even higher after this picture was taken in March.

The gardeners said they would lay down mulch sometime last week. Fingers crossed they actually did it. If so, I'll have some incredible transformation photos to share. I'll spend all weekend redoing the battered irrigation lines that run all over the place. We've been hard at work ourselves in another part of the yard, building yet another raised bed, this one for herbs that will be located closer to the back door.

See that flat patch in front of the lattice? It's now much higher off the ground. My husband built an amazing contraption that I'll be busy filling in with loads and loads and loads of compost this weekend (my back is already crying). The bed will be 3'x8', lots of plants to slip in the soil this weekend as well. And just maybe I'll have a few moments of this too.

Maybe I'll have a little time to do some of this as well. It will have to be iced though, it's supposed to be 85 this weekend!

Spring break

Just a few images of the garden from the past few weeks. The cherry tree was in full bloom last week. Beautiful! This more than makes up for the terrible formatting blogger is having right now, grrrr.

There is fruit developing on some of the trees already, mostly the plums. The peach and nectarine trees were hit hard by the late rain leaving lots of peach leaf curl. I sprayed three times like I was supposed to but apparently that doesn't matter if the rains come late. No one is sure how much fruit we'll see this year. The same thing happened last year in Sonoma county.

Peach leaf curl on one of the peach trees.

The square foot garden beds are starting to fill in. I was able to plant some peppers this past week, fingers crossed no late freezes! I chose a red and yellow bell pepper and two padrone pepper plants. Padrones have been all the rage in the bay area the past few years. They're amazing grilled in some oil and salt.

Radishes, carrots, beets, lettuces, peppers, tarragon, calendula and cosmos.

Even though the ladybugs are everywhere in Sonoma this month, we let a few more free in the garden one evening. They seem to be especially happy in the artichokes.

My daughter's garden bed is growing quickly. It's the first bed we planted after moving in. She picked out two cherry tomato plants over the weekend at the Tomatomania festival here. We'll have to figure out where to squeeze those in. We chose eight more for the rest of the garden. I have no idea where I'll plant them.

Chard, broccoli, oregano, parsley, radishes, carrots and stray onions.