The Bulb Boxes

I love tulips. So much so that it has become harder to find places for the new tulips that I buy every year - especially since they are sold in the fall when you can not see what is already planted. I got sick of accidentally digging up established bulbs, so I started planting the bulbs in plastic planters. That has worked out really well, but I wanted to see if cardboard boxes would work too. Verdict?

They do!

Gardening Begins for 2011

I did finally get out to do some gardening this last week. And I was so excited to see that things were even starting to bloom!

Crocuses are easy multipliers.		They are the earliest bloomer.
Dutch irises are great en masse.		The Pickwick crocus are big and multiply well. I like the stripes.
And then last night it snowed.		But the hyacinth...
the tete-a-tete daffodills...		and the chionodoxa will be fine.

Garden at the Wayside

I just want to update on what is going on with my gardening - nothing! I have been so busy the last month preparing two rental units for new tenants. I pulled up carpeting to find an oak floor in the house and proceeded to refinish all 650sqft by hand, as in with a belt sander! Hard work, but worth it. It is beautiful! Maybe I will post on the results.

AND, of course, there is the huge hubbub going on in Wisconsin which you would basically have to not watch the news to not know about it. I have been kept VERY busy with that, in fact, that is what I will be doing this weekend instead of starting my seeds. And when the Obsessive Gardener can't even concentrate on gardening during the growing season - you know it is pretty important. Power to the People!

I have taken the entire next week off, so I should be able to squeeze some time in to get some seeds started. So check back then!

OMG!!!

THE SEEDS ARE IN THE STORES!!!
:)

Done Planting!

Well, it seems to have taken forever, but I managed to get the last of my bulbs planted today. I went lazy and planted larger bunches in cardboard boxes rather than a few bulbs each in a gazillion plastic pots. I'll let you know how this works next spring. I figure that the bulbs will be easier to get at since I can just tear the cardboard away -- or even just plant the cardboard with the bulbs!

And, I managed to get my garlic planted too!

In the process of cleaning my garden for fall, which I almost never do, I even found some plants still in the pots that I bought them in. Oops! Now I have no idea where to plant them. Perhaps they can tough it out in the pots over winter.

I finally laid out my blackberry bed. Hopefully I will get some blackberries next year! The raspberries I planted out in nearly frozen ground last year did just fine and even gave us fruit this year!

I think my blueberry plants may be a lost cause. Oh, well. I can always try again next year. Besides, I plan on planting a ton of blueberries eventually. They are my favorite fruit. Then blackberries, then mangoes. Too, bad I can't grow mangoes.

I still have to pack up all my gardening supplies for a few months. I've been so busy this year, I am really looking forward to a little snowy respite.

Tulip Haul 2010

I can not believe that it is already tulip time. And I was horrified to see that Menards had drastically parred down its bulb offering this year. They decided that instead of devoting a whole row of shelves to bulbs, they would put just a few out in one of their alley squares. Seriously I thought I was going to have a melt down. Where was I going to get all my bulbs and still be able to afford them?

Well, it looks like Menards is still offering a big variety of bulbs (maybe not as many as they used to), but instead of having them all out at once, they are putting them out a little at a time. The jerks. How am I supposed to plan my color, timing and texture schemes?

So, forget them. I did still buy quite a few from them (245 tulips, 12 daffodils, and 35 Dutch irises) but I refuse to run there every week just to see if they have anything new out yet. What a racket.

I decided to finally try out a couple of the other bulb companies that I have learned about since starting my blog. Thanks to many of my garden blogger friends, I chose Brent & Becky's Bulbs. Their order came fast and the bulbs look nice.

The other company I tried out was Blooming Bulbs. I had found them while looking for sites with good visual tulip indexes. They had really good prices on bulk bulbs, and they had a few that I had been having trouble finding. Their order came even faster and their bulbs look very healthy and well labeled.
Now the last test will be in the planting. I have had a few problems with tulips not being what they claim to be -- especially with ones bought on the internet. Breck's has done it to me at least three times. Unfortunately that means waiting until next spring since tulip bulbs pretty much all look the same.

Tulips purchased from Brent & Becky's Bulbs:
Rem's Favorite (10)
Sweetheart (20)
humilis 'Alba Coerulea Oculata' (5)
total 35 at $48.

Tulips purchased from Blooming Bulbs:
Cummins (25)
Rococo (25)
Weber's Parrot (25)
Persian Pearl (25)
Greenland (25)
Spring Green (25)
total 150 at $110.

Tulips purchased from Menards:
Van Eijk (28)
Purple Prince (14)
Zouave (30)
Kung Fu (45)
Odalisque (30)
Purissima (56)
Yokohama (28)
Apeldoorn (14)
total 245 at $48

So you can clearly see who wins out on bulb bargains. Also, the flowers have always been what was described on their package and the bulbs have proven to be very comparable to even Brecks.

Fine, Menards, you win. I'll be there later this week to check again...

[update: OK, so I went back today. I had a $10 rebate to cash in, so I bought Synaeda Orange (15) and Yellow Pomponette (15). I also stopped at Fleet Farm and bought Shirley (14) and Apricot Impression (30). That's 74 more tulips to my already 430. Now to find time to plant them all...]

Corpse Flower Live Feed

Our university has the privileged of being home to one of the few captive corpse flowers around the world. It has been about 9 years in the making, but it has finally bloomed!

You can go HERE to see the live feed of this flower and to learn a little more about this amazing flower.

It is said to smell of rotting meat, but I have smelled rotting meat and I truly beg to differ. It smells like a diaper pail. A giant diaper pail. In fact you can smell it over 100 yards away easily, even with no breeze.

It is beautiful, and HUGE!

[update: since the flower has completed its cycle the live feed is no longer available, but they still have a few pictures and some information on this flower at THIS LINK.]

Where Did The Summer Go?

As you know I have been very busy, but where the heck did the summer go?! This was the summer that I was finally going to stay on top of my gardens...

Oh well, I guess they don't look that bad, and my vegetable garden is still producing a ton of stuff.










My tomatoes, strangely, are almost done giving fruit, but are still green and healthy looking plants. I got enough tomatoes to can about 10 quarts of sauce, make about 1/2 gallon of fresh salsa, and still have tomatoes for salads and fresh sauces.

I still have not harvested all my carrots. I was intending to pickle them, but that didn't go anywhere, and now they are too big. Oh well, I have lots of friends that LOVE carrots. And you never see carrots abandoned in the breakroom at work, so that will be a treat.

My Brussel sprouts might actually produce something this year.

My beets are just about ready to harvest.

My basil has slowed down in its production, but I am still getting an ice cream bucket of basil from it about every two weeks.

My pumpkins have gone wild. I grew a blue heirloom variety this year along with my favorite Triple Treat. The three blue plants that grew are far out-producing the eight Triple Treat plants. They are also steadily taking over my yard. I hope that these pumpkins are as good tasting as the description reports. They aren't much for decorating with.

I have a ton of edamame to harvest. I've actually lost track of all my beans.

My eggplants are producing through the roof! I actually got multiple eggplants from a single plant!

My squash finally decided to do something. For actual fruits, I have a couple butternut, quite a few scallop, two zucchini (thank goodness for other gardeners!), and about a half dozen delicata. I have no idea what happened to my acorn squash, but I have someone who promised to bring me in some of his extra hubbard and acorn.

I even have onions and shallots this year. The onions came from the onion parts that I planted earlier. They yielded baseball sized onions that were just as sweet as the parent onion, so I have continued to plant my onion bases throughout the garden. Even the shallots that I started from seed got to decent size. I am going to try leaving them in the ground over the winter to see if they make it -- I heard they were pretty hardy and that over-wintering is a good way to perennialize.

Then there are my turnips, which after so many years of failure I now have more than I seriously know what to do with! I would bring them to the food shelf, but most have root worms that need to be cut out. I don't have a problem with it, but not so sure about the food shelf.

Most of my pepper plants turned out to be Cherry Bombs, which I could not be happier about. Cherry Bombs rock, plus these are so hot, they could almost pass for cayenne.

My radicchio wasn't so bad. It was great chopped up in a salad and didn't cost me $4. I only harvested one head, but I only had planted two and just never got around to harvesting the other before it rotted.

I still have a fall crop to plant. Maybe I will actually get around to that this year!

Thank Goodness for Exchange Students!

I finally have a moment to catch my breath, and post. About two and a half months ago my family and I agreed to host an exchange student from Brazil for the entire school year, and he will be here this Saturday!

I have a tendency to tolerate dilapidation and primitiveness, so I had about 13 years of home repairs that could not be ignored any longer. Over the last few weeks I have been painting the house, patching holes in the plaster, fixing broken interior wooden stairs, patching exterior concrete stairs, replacing screens ripped out in the hail storm of 2001, finishing a 3 year old bathroom tile project, finishing a 5 year old shelving project, finishing a 10 year old wallpaper project, repairing ragged wallpaper from an ancient roof leak (pre-us owning the house), trimming the bedroom doors (the previous owners put in new doors but didn't bother trimming them, and neither did we), cleaning the basement (because we needed storage and tools for all that fixing), putting up more shelving, fixing a dresser salvaged from the neighbor's garage (he said that it fell off a truck while his son was moving it and he was using it as a tool box since it was in too rough of shape for clothes after that - not anymore!), sorting through all our old boxes of things (trying to figure out either why we still have it or where the hell we will put it while our exchange student is here), and, of course, cleaning cleaning CLEANING!!!

I am happy to say that we are in the home stretch of preparing the house. I feel much better about offering this more improved house as a home to this young man coming all the way to the US for the first time. And I have to say that as an added benefit, I am enjoying the house much more myself. Some of it was so simple that I really wonder why we waited so long.

GBBD - July 2010

July is hardly ever a good month for my garden, and this year is even worse. It just looks like a huge jungle. I really didn't even think that I would find many flowers, but SURPRISE! There are some after all.

To get more info, hover on the picture.

















Visit May Dreams Garden to see what everyone else has blooming!