Joy In the Little Things- Petal Explosion

Magnolia blossoms!

Spring Showers on March Flowers

A walk in the rain on a Saturday morning...

How Does My Garden Grow?

Following up on my first garden post & pics with some updates! Well, with Pittsburgh's crazy onslaught of rain and thunderstorms, some of the garden is exploding with growth while some is, well... struggling. The storms and downpours have made for a lot of cleanup in the garden, and for hours I've picked little weeds, removed sticks ond rocks, and pruned demolished leaves on the greens. Some of the pics I'm sharing are pre-pruning and cleaning up from the storms.














Week 4

The tomato plant has grown a lot in height and has gotten it's first flowers! Yay! I think we'll need to trim it back a bit so that it is less spindly and more bushy. The cucumber plants are nicely building up. They are vining, but no flowers yet. We expect them soon.













Cukes and tomatoes.

The beans are growing, too! We saw our first sprouts the very day I last posted about the garden. Been training them to vine up the poles. The carrots are getting their *real* carrot leaves- woot!

Green beans (above) and carrots.

Urgh. The lettuce plants we put in the garden are slowly growing, but have taken a big beating by the storming. :/ So many leaves were tattered and buried in the mud that the plants seemed shrunken when I was done pruning. None of our own lettuce in salads yet because of this.The baby lettuce and spinach were totally pummeled by the heavy rain, smushed and flattened into the soil. Pruning was more like lifting the tiny leaves out of the mud and brushing them off (what was left) so that they can hopefully revive.

Pummeled greens. :(

Wildflowers? Eh. Also ravaged by rain and by the rain streaming off of the roof of the shed they are planted beside. I don't have high hopes for the explosion of flowers I initially hoped for. I added more seed and fertilized, so we'll see what happens.

Wildflowers. Sparse and beaten down or washed away. Come on little sprouts- you can do it!

Guess what? We have a rogue pumpkin plant in the garden, a surprise product of either last year's planting or the compost we added to the soil. :) So cool!

More later...

PUMPKIN!

Sophie is an excellent helper.

A Garden!

So my partner and I just planted our first garden in a few years after several years of poor yield. After ruling out lack of sun and water, we concluded the soil must be the issue and set out to solve the problem. We've spent the past couple of years enriching the soil with compost, and this year decided to have it tested by the local Cooperative Extension (Penn State). Turns out we were right and that we needed to add Sulfur and Phosphate, and along with more compost and lots of rototilling. So we're crossing fingers for a good year! :) And of course it will be organic!

This is our garden at week 1, with beans (seed) at the poles, cukes to the right, and tomatoes beside that. In front of the beans is a row of multi-colored carrots (seed), and in front of the carrots is spinach and lettuce, both from seed, and butter lettuce plants.










This is week 2, with all of the seeds sprouting already but the beans! Weee! :)







Spinach (look out, Popeye) and Lettuce






Cucumbers (I hate'em, but my partner loves them) and Carrots (Stay out, bunnies!)

As my own little side project, I also cleared and prepped a plot for wildflowers near the garden and sowed loads of butterfly- and hummingbird-friendly fleurs.









In less than a week there are already sprouts!











I love gardening, tending, weeding, pruning. I hope it pays off- looking forward to seeing what grows. :)