July!  I hope all of my American friends had a fun and safe Fourth yesterday.  I’ll have a recap coming soon, but we’re still deep in holiday weekend fun, so since it would be premature to show you Independence Day pics, I’ll share my to-do list for the garden this month instead.  So here we are – the hottest part of summer.  As for me personally, I love the heat.  My garden, maybe not so much?  All the more reason to keep on top of things.  Here’s what I have planned for the month.

• Feed the plants at the beginning and middle of the month.
• Stay on my squirrel spray and weeding.
• Harvest as things become ripe.
• Daily pruning and pinching to keep the fruits fruiting and the herbs from bolting.
• Pull the bolted lettuce and start over with… I don’t know, more herbs, probably.
• Start researching fall planting and consider whether I want to start any cool-weather plants this year.
• Make dried mint and thyme.

A small list for a small garden, right?  There really isn’t a whole lot to do, except stay ahead of the sun and the pests, and try to get to the ripe stuff for harvesting.  I’d love to have more space, and more scope for exploration, but for now – constrained by both square footage and time – this is what I’ve got to do.  And one nice thing is: since it doesn’t take all that long to pull a few weeds and water the plants, I can spend more time relaxing with my feet up and a glass of lemonade in hand.  And that’s the point, right?

What’s on your garden to-do list for July?

Look at this!  Leaves, leaves everywhere.  Whether they’re actually productive is an open question, but hey!  Leaves!

So far, the tomato plants seem to be pretty much untouched – touch wood and spritz a few extra pumps of squirrel repellant for good measure.  But something’s been digging in both tomato pots.  I found two identical depressions, one in each pot, in about the same spot – nowhere near the tomato plants themselves.  Weird.  My first inclination was to blame the squirrels, but…

There are other possible culprits.

The tomatoes are ripening gradually.  I’m getting more than I got last year, although the leaves still seem really small to me.  It hasn’t been as good as the legendary tomato haul of 2017, but what is?

The rest of the garden is a bit of a mixed bag.  The raspberries are pretty much over.  It was fun picking them, although the bush hasn’t produced all that much.  I wonder if it’d do better in the ground?  Unfortunately that’s not an option – at least, not as long as I’m an urban gardener.  We’re staying here one more year, so I’ll have to consider whether I want to plant berries again next year or wait until I have actual ground to put them in.  As for the rest of the plants, the mint is pretty prolific; I think I’m going to be drying a bunch for tea this year.  The basil is doing decently well, and my next door neighbor, Zoya, gave me some lemon balm to plant too.  I put it in with the tomatoes and basil last weekend, so we’ll see.

The lettuces, sadly, have bolted.  Zoya and I tasted them and they’re sappy and bitter – blech.  I think I’m going to pull them up and replant the pots with more herbs.  How have I managed to ruin lettuce?  Don’t answer that question.

As for the blueberries, they’re pretty much over too.  I got a few, mostly plucked on my way in or out of the house, but the birds took most of them.  Obviously, I should have netted them off.  I knew this.  But darnit, birds!  There are TWO bird feeders full of delicious Audubon birdseed on the other side of the house.  Go eat that!

On the other side of the garden gate, the lavender is growing nicely.  I keep the pot right by the gate for luck and blessings upon the house.

I checked pretty much everything off my June to-do list last weekend – went around weeding the patio bricks, fed the plants, pruned and rearranged, while Nugget and Zoya played construction site.

Speaking of Zoya, I’ve got some new additions to my garden – both gifts from her garden next door.  A pot of mixed succulents, and a trumpet jade I’m hoping will take root.  Best neighbor ever.

The other item on my garden agenda for June was to celebrate Litha with a candle-lighting in the garden at sunset.  I made some herb chains, cleansed and blessed some water, and did a blessing for the garden last Friday – midsummer.

I also did a meditation and tuned into some of the nature energy swirling around.  It was peaceful and empowering, except for the part when a woman started screaming obscenities at her boyfriend (she wasn’t impressed with his parking skills).  Ah, life in the city garden.  (Happy – belated – Litha, by the way!)

And that’s June in my garden!  Some successes and some failures, as always.  But I’m learning, little by little.  How’s your garden looking these days?

The garden is bursting into bloom now – a nice thing about living in a relatively warm area; we have a lovely long growing season.  (Remind me that I’ve said this in another month or so, when I’m moaning about the sun burning all of my plants to a crisp.)  Having a small patio garden, I am never going to have an especially long task list, but here’s what I’ve got on the agenda for June:

• Stay on top of watering daily – except for the days when we have those summer thunderstorms!
• On the same note, spray my squirrel repellant every chance I get.
• Make a final decision about whether I’m going to use squirrel netting to keep pests away from my blueberries and tomatoes, and if I decide to go for it, get the supplies and get set up.
• Replace my bird feeder (AGAIN) – the birds just aren’t interested in the one I got, so I’m going back to the previous model.
• Keep up with weeding the front walk and in between the bricks on the back patio.
• Dig up the lavender (which didn’t take) and plant a few more perennials in the front flower bed – chamomile, maybe?
• Check for ripe produce, and HARVEST!

What’s on your garden to-do list for June?

The garden grows!  I think we’re officially into summer garden territory now.  We’ve got:

• Greenery growing with wild abandon;
• Yellowing leaves that need to be pruned… already (damn you, Virginia sun!); and
• Beach toys everywhere.

We also have one missing stair railing – whoops!  After a substantial amount of nagging, our landlords finally made arrangements to have that fixed.  Hoping to have a fully-functional staircase again soon.  Anyway!  The garden!

Tomato pants are growing!  This one is looking a little spindly, which always seems to be the way with this pot.  What the what?  I didn’t snap a picture of my other tomato pot, but it’s looking better.  Both are showing signs of a few little green tomatoes, which is promising.  I’m being militant about the squirrel spray – these are my tomatoes!  The basil is looking pretty good, too – hoping this experiment of planting it together with the tomatoes works.  Otherwise I may end up back at the garden center buying another pot (twist my arm).

The mint is doing fabulously well!  This is spearmint, and a very happy spearmint it is, too.  Also – do you see what I see?

RASPBERRIES!  In POTS!  ON MY PATIO!  Happy dance, happy dance, happy dance.  This one wasn’t quite ripe yet, but there were two ripe ones when I checked on the plants after a weekend away.  Nugget and I enjoyed one each, and they were delicious.

Lettuces are doing well.  All three are butter lettuce, but the ones I planted in the larger pots have really flourished, and the one in the smaller pot is a bit stunted.  It might not be too late, though – in fact, maybe I will meander over to the garden center and get something a little bigger for this one, and move one of the basils into the smaller pot.  Hmmmmm.  Also: the lavender hasn’t flowered yet; I’m looking forward to smelling Provence on my patio this summer.

The herb pot is doing well, too.  Does anyone know if chive blossoms are edible?  Also, this lemon thyme turned out to be more of a creeper than a shrub, but I think it makes the pot look lovely (and you should smell it, y’all).

Finally – the blueberry pots are thriving!  I bought two varietals to see which was the better producer.  It seems the pot on the right is definitely going to be the star – too bad I’ve forgotten which varietal it is.  None of the berries are ripe yet.  I’m a little worried that they’ll be picked off by the neighborhood birds, but I’m watching the pots like a hawk (<–see what I did there?) and chasing away any critters who get too close to my precious berry bushes.

Here’s to another summer in the garden!

Have you planted your garden yet?  Planters or plots?  How’s it doing?

The weather is warmer, the spring rains are nourishing the little plant babies (and washing the pollen away, a nice and welcomed side-effect) and the garden is starting to grow!  More to come in a full update in a couple of weeks, but the tomato plants are getting taller and sturdier, the blueberry bushes are showing berries already, and I’m tied in knots trying to decide which squirrel-repelling techniques to employ.  (Spray all day?  Cage the plants?  Water dish on the other side of the patio?  All of the above?)  May is a month for doing lots of upkeep, but not too much harvesting – yet.  Here’s what I’ve got on deck for the month (and some of the tasks are already completed, but who doesn’t like putting an already-done item on a to-do list just for the satisfaction of checking it off?):

• Plant the rest of my lavender, and the daffodil bulbs I picked up at Burnside Farms, in the front garden.
• Stay on top of weeding between the bricks on the back patio.  Take the weeds to the compost tent at the weekly market day instead of just throwing them in the trash.
• Start harvesting lettuce leaves and herbs as they’re ready.
• Prune dead leaves (how, already?) from the raspberry bush.
• Make a decision about whether the buttercrunch lettuce is staying in its current pots or moving somewhere else.  If somewhere else, figure out where that somewhere else is and then make it happen.
• Keep researching squirrel repulsion and (maybe?) come up with a plan.
• Bury my Beltane offering in the flower patch.

What are you up to in the garden this month?

Here we go, friends – patio garden, round three.  Last year’s garden was a total bust – the squirrels got anything that was even approaching ripeness, and it was almost complete loss.  But I’m armed with squirrel repellant spray (which, incidentally, smells amazing – like citrus and cloves, which apparently squirrels can’t stand) and I’m ready to fight for my crop this year.

We planted in stages this year.  A couple of weeks ago, I hit the local garden center – looking for tomatoes, herbs, beans and fruit.  I mostly struck out – due to a cold snap the week before, the garden center had very little in the way of edibles, even though it was April.

We ended up with buttercrunch lettuce (my favorite!), spearmint, and lemon thyme.  Headed home with our kinda sad harvest and got ready for planting day number one.

Got the mint and the lettuce in pots and made a mental note to go back for more in a few weeks – which was this weekend.  We headed back to the same garden center on Easter Sunday after church – Nugget came with me – and found it overrun with people and pretty disorganized.  All of the edibles were on a few tables with signs that simply said “Assorted Edibles” – to find out what they had I had to read the plant markers themselves, which was fine but a bit of a challenge with a small gardener.  I made several loops and couldn’t find any cherry tomatoes or berries, so we decided to go back to our old standby, several miles south by our old house.

Much better!  I was able to get several varieties of cherry tomatoes, some basil and lavender, and three different shrubs from Bushel & Berry – pink icing blueberries, peach sorbet blueberries, and raspberry shortcake raspberries (a thornless potted variety – WUT).  Time to get them home and into the pots!

My first order of business was to move the buttercrunch lettuce out of the big pot and into three smaller pots.  All three lettuces looked a bit dejected after I’d moved them, but I’m hopeful that with time, water, sun and love, they’ll perk up again.  (Lettuce is fairly hardy and I’ve had success with it in the past, so I may have gotten overconfident.)  Next up, I mixed some new potting soil – nice and loamy – into the tomato pots and planted the cherry tomatoes and the basil.  Fingers crossed!

Said a prayer for no squirrels this year.

Raspberry shortcake went into the big pot in the middle, and I planted lavender in the smallest pot, then put it by the garden gate to bring luck and blessings to the house.

Last task was to put the two blueberry plants in these purple thistle pots I picked up a few weeks ago.  Here’s hoping…

And that’s the garden!  I may move some of the plants around – in fact, I’m sure I will – once I figure out where they’ll thrive best.  And I know this summer is going to be a pitched battle with the army of neighborhood squirrels.  But I’m armed with rage and squirrel repellant, and I. WILL. PREVAIL.

Is your garden in the ground (or pots, as the case may be)?