Welcome to My Garden

With the arrival of spring 2009 along with my new camera, I've learned that I have way more I want to share about my garden and landscape than most of my readers at Inside The White House would care to know. So here is a spot where I can write about my gardening efforts, and hopefully I'll have some insights to share too. In my childhood, people thought it was funny to recite the nursery rhyme question to me, so I guess this is my answer to "How does your garden grow?" I am in no way a professional. I have simply discovered a love for making my yard beautiful. It's a work in progress; I have the end results in my head, but time and financial restraints are delaying that finale. (It turns out kids take a lot of time too!) I'm coming to learn that I don't want to reach a gardening finale. I love the work and I love trying new plants and new techniques every year. I hope you enjoy this site and I would love your comments about your own garden. This blog will also serve as a journal of the plants in my gardens and the care they require. Feel free to skip over all the boring species' names and plant care. If you have questions, leave them for me or a fellow reader to offer help. Thanks for visiting my garden!

Some tips for navigating this blog: You can find areas of interest by following the category labels listed at the right. If you simply scroll through everything, it will be pretty random, but it will allow you to see what I'm currently up to. You can also use the search bar at the top to look for specific plants or structures to see how I've used them.

Spring 2009 Flowers

Progressive Spring Bulbs

Last fall I planted a couple thousand bulbs in my front yard perennial flower beds. This past spring was the first season for them to show their stuff, and I recorded the show in a series of photos taken every few days. Toward the end of the movie clips, the spacing was every week or two, because the allium just hung around forever.

Allium are more impressive in person. They remind me of purple fireworks in the garden...and I wish I'd thought to take a close-up photo when they were still purple! I've even discovered a fun, permanent use for them in my home decor! (I'll send a link when I've finished redecorating my bedroom.)

I bought all the bulbs online from a company called Colorblends. I highly recommend them if you want an impressive bulb bed. Their prices are great and the flowers are stunning. See for yourself in these little films. (Each clip is less than two minutes long.)





Pretty nice, eh? And I didn't even plant the real stunners. All of these bulbs are perennial, meaning they will return each year, and some of the bulbs will even reproduce. Each year the bulbs and non-bulb perennials will fill in a little more. I'm already looking forward to an improved show in years to come!

Mutant Vegetables

The harvest has begun! #5 and I picked 27 pounds of Roma tomatoes Monday morning, and by that evening, they had been transformed into quarts of spaghetti sauce sitting on my kitchen counter. All except for one tomato.

Kent called it Devil Tomato. I called it Wilbur.

See? Just put another little deformed tomato--notice the "pony tail"--on top and you have a cute little thing. Wilbur was "some tomato".

What can I say? We Whites, E.B. and me, like to save farm products from their natural fate.

Unfortunately, while my little Wilbur/devil tomato was saved from the sauce, the kids called dibs on eating its "arms" seconds after I took these photos. I didn't even get to put a little shirt on it. Sadly, s/he (or it?) is no longer with us. But my, homegrown tomatoes sure taste good!

A Few Peeks at My New Front Yard

My sister requested some tulip pictures. Last fall I planted 2,560 spring bulbs in my front beds. I know that sounds like overkill, but I really did come up with a plan beforehand. And I wanted to excavate, which meant everything had to be planted all at once...and now I'm done (that is, until I figure out what summer and fall-blooming perennials to throw in there). I mapped out the colors I wanted in certain spots, and then bought a variety of bulbs to give me those colors from early spring through June. I bought everything at Colorblends.com, and highly recommend them for their selection, service, and prices. I've been taking photos every day or two since mid-March, and I'll make a slideshow of the flower progression when the bulbs are all done in early summer. But in the meantime, here is a little peek at what we've been enjoying in our front yard...

April 5--Crocuses. The dark pinks in the background are called tulip crocuses. They look like miniature tulips, and bloom early with the crocuses. Love their color!


April 13--These white flowers are a wild tulip called Turkestanica, a fabulous flower whether it's open to the sunshine or closed during cooler temperatures.


April 18--Hyacinths. The fragrance and color from these flowers is AMAZING! The whole front yard smelled of sweet perfume for three weeks.


April 18--I also cut some daffodils today. I planted 200 mixed daffodils that blooms throughout the spring...and I love the surprise of what type of daffodil shows up each week.


April 30--We had 4" of snow overnight, and I love how the pinks looked wearing their white blanket.


May 3--The wind blew these flowers together. It looks like the tulip is wearing a daffodil corsage.


May 3--I just love to come home to this! I asked Kent if the $700 I spent on the bulbs was worth it. He asked if they made me happy, which of course they do, so his answer was that it was worth it. I should add that many of the varieties I chose will reproduce underground and fill in these beds more in years to come, so this show will only get better!

Seeing Red

Here are this year's most prolific crops, and they all happen to be red. (I haven't dug up potatoes yet, which I hope were heavy producers, too. But half of them are reds, so they just add to this group.) All of these plants have been producing food since July, and they just keep going. Love it!

Peppers

I started an 'Ancho' pepper plant from seed this past spring, and my fried, Tina, convinced me to get serious about a pepper crop when she gave me five more pepper plant starts in May. I haven't grown peppers much before, because I really don't know what to do with the vegetables at harvest time. But they were free, so I gave them a shot.

Unfortunately, I planted on a breezy day and the plant tags were scattered by the wind as I was about to place them with their plants, so I don't know all of what I grew!

One plant produced these huge bell peppers. I have grown bell peppers before and that plant gave me almost 20 medium-sized peppers that were delicious. I wish I could remember the variety. This year's plant has given me two huge peppers and two medium ones. I let the big peppers sit on the plant until they turned red, and then paired them with a green and a sweet onion from the garden to make two dinners of fajitas. Because we are mostly vegetarian, I add rice and red or black beans to the veggies and season with powdered fajita seasoning. My family really likes this dinner.

Another plant, not pictured, is growing sweet baby red peppers, the type you would use in a veggie tray with dip. Except mine never make it out of the garden. We love to snack on them as we work outside.

A couple of the pepper plants didn't survive, including my Ancho. That was at first disappointing because I found a tasty ancho and mushroom recipe last winter; but I developed a mushroom allergy this year, which helped me accept the loss of that pepper plant.

Then there are these plants. I have no idea what they are, but I really like the peppers. They have produced like crazy! At first, I was harvesting the light yellow peppers, but some have started turning red, so now I wait. These peppers have a little bit of heat to them. It's not too noticeable until you finish eating them and notice that your lips are burning. Kent likes to stuff them with cream cheese, grill them over charcoal, and then dip them in strawberry jam. I've also sautéed them with onions and bell peppers and served with sour cream in a corn tortilla. Does anyone know what they are? I'd like to grow them again.

This year in my garden, I've started analyzing which plants are worth the effort and space they take up. Peppers are definitely worth it. I would spend a pretty penny buying this quantity of peppers from the store. But when I can go pick a dozen peppers for dinner whenever I've wanted for the past few months, I'm really saving cash and supplying good vitamins to my family. The pepper crop will definitely make repeat appearances in years to come.

Garden Box Construction

Last year we began constructing our garden boxes. I mapped out our vegetable garden area to include three 4'x8' boxes (6" tall) for standard root and summer vegetables, one 2'x12' box with a frame and netting for vine plants to climb vertically, one 2'x8' box for my raspberries, several 1.5' square boxes for tomatoes and potatoes, and a 3.5' tall angled box to act as a wall, which visually separates the garden from the rest of the yard.

This first close-up picture of the tall box shows how we constructed all the boxes. I used unfinished, 2"-thick cedar boards, which are actually 1.5" thick with the finished cut. Using a jig saw, we cut joints from the ends. (Please leave a comment if you want more detailed instructions on how we measured that.) My dad used his drill press to make a jig from a block of oak, which is a harder wood than cedar. We cut a 3/8" hole and used that jig to keep straight holes when drilling into the cedar. It was helpful to run the drill through the hole a few times to make it just large enough to easily hammer in 3/8" steel rods. I bought the steel rods at a metal retailer and cut them with a saws-all. A hacksaw works too; it just takes longer. The shallow boxes have rods 4" longer than the height of the box. The rods on the tall box go about 12" into the ground.

Constructing these by hand, not everything lined up perfectly. The smaller boxes were relatively easy, but the four levels of boards on the tall box made it difficult to line up exactly right, not to mention cutting for the angled corners. There are small gaps between the boards and in some of the joints. But it's just an outdoor garden box, so no big deal. None of the gaps are so large that the boxes can't hold soil and water.

Tip: In laying a box on the ground, carry it in pieces and not assembled. We put a box together in the garage and attempted to carry it that way to the garden. On the way, a board slipped and split. After laying the box out, squaring the corners, and driving the rods into the ground to hold it all in place, I used a level to ensure a flat grade for the box. To get the boxes level, I had to slip rocks under boards or dig into the ground a bit.


In this last picture, you can see the boxes at varying stages of completion.

The empty frame in the foreground is waiting to be positioned before we drive in the rods. The box on the left was busy growing cool-weather crops. The box with the grid had grown summer crops, which I had cleaned out for the fall (when this photo was taken). The tall box in the upper right of the photo forms a wall for the garden.

For the box with the grid, I attached a 4'-long 2"x4" across the bottom in the middle of the box to prevent the sides from bowing. I did not brace the other boxes because I later decided the boards are thick enough to not bow. I'll let you know if I notice any problem, but so far this season, they are all full of soil and plants and have not bowed.