Planting Bulbs

It's been another busy weekend in our home, with winter fast approaching I raided local stores for sales on bulbs for spring flowers and planted them all around the ponds and along the walls of the patio. Tried to pick out bulbs that would give me waves of flowers and not all at once so that first early snow drops would be followed by crocuses, daffodils, tulips, bluebells, alliums, irises and lastly lilies.

Still have to plant about 80 or so dutch iris bulbs, at the edge of the stream, but in the ground we have:
Lilies:
Easy Dance - 5
AnneMarie's Dream - 5
Navona - 10
Orange County - 10
Spanish Bluebells - 20
Allium - 10
Bearded Iris - 5
Daffodils:
Dutch Master - 40
Gigantic Star - 8
Ice Follies - 8
Pink Charm - 15
Trumpet Mix - 60
Naturalizing Mix - 40
Paperwhites (Narcissus) - 8
Tulip Parrot Blend - 15
Crocus Blue Mix - 30
Crocus Ruby Giant - 20
Snow Drops aka Leucojum Aestivum - 30

Also were planted, albeit VERY late for the season, was my garlic  - this year I'm planting it outside the garden and hope that animals won't touch it. What I want to do is create a "natural" garlic patch where it will grow year to year and I'll just pluck what I need for cooking and thin some out for winter but leave enough to replenish each fall and won't have to plant it again. Let's see if the experiment works.

I have a mix of varieties, including German Porcelain, Kettle River, Spanish Rojas, Vietnamese Red, Turkish Red and some of the Russian varieties. Let's see what grows next year :)

How is your garden doing these days? 

Forgotten Potatoes and Harvest from CSA

Another week flew by and the clean up continues. Part of the clean up was tilling the farm plot and after the tractor run through disking the leftover plants and roots, I realized that my potato row never got picked out fully. Because there was a whole lot of chopped potatoes unearthed. So I picked some that were more or less whole or with minimal damage and brought them home. Not much, but will provide us with some basic meals for few weeks.

There isn't much left on the field other than a row of cauliflower and Romanesca - green peaky cauliflower. some are just starting to form but with temps being in 20s at night I don't know if we'll get much out of it.

While I was browsing leftovers, I found a very large kricket/grass hoper on one of the kale plants.. It's more than 2 inches long and clearly enjoyed his lunch on one of my kale heads.

And this Sunday I visited the U-Pick field from Hesperides Organica CSA - it was time to pick popcorn. And Lisa was also cleaning up field. She had tilled under all unpicked potatoes as well so I ended up picking 3 more bags of fingerlings from her field, chopped or not. They'll be delivered to the kitchen so it won't go to waste. But while I was there, she also picked some Kalettes - a hybrid between Kale and Brussels Sprouts. The stalks are HUGE! Can't wait to try roasting it to see the taste.

And of course there was regular brussels sprouts and huge leeks - one leek is enough to make a good soup for large family.

At home late fall is in full swing and nothing shows it more than dropped leaves - Oak dropped all in one night so the back yard looked like it was covered in chocolate. That also prompted me to plant whole lot of spring bulbs around new patio and ponds and hope next spring it will all be covered in beautiful flowers.

So how is your gardening season wrapping up? Stop by Dave's page to see other harvests.

Goji Berry

Clean up continues all around the house, and this weekend I found a very nice surprise waiting for me - a Goji Berry bush that I thought died off and was lost in weeds actually survived, and we found it with some of the berries after we started clearing up weeds in that section of the yard. Honestly I didn't think it had any chance of surviving because deer have ravaged all plants down to nothing when we planted them, so I gave up on that section as it's not fenced in. I guess not weeding it out helped the bush to rebound and actually produce! Very happy with that plant and hope it will continue to produce in years to come.

On another note, we finally got a new gazebo for the new patio. We've been looking for one for a long time and just as we find one it would be either sold out or discontinued and our order canceled, so yet another surprise when a company emailed that one such choice was returned and is available to us. We even got a $300 discount on it because it wasn't brand new packaging. Of course my honey and I had to set it up on Saturday to see it and I love it!

Overall, it was a good weekend. How is your garden fairing this time around?