Chamomile Plant

Texas Terragon

Patchouli Plant

Catnip Plant

Sweet Marjoram Plant

Cilantro Plant - flowering.

Last Years' Sole Surviving Rosemary

Cindy M thought I was crazy when I asked to use her truck to get these hog panels home – she couldn’t figure out why I wanted all that metal in my garden – well isn’t it obvious? Rot proof trellising baby! I’ve combined all my plantings so that I’ve got a Vine (or at least viney plant that needs support) going up the trellis staggered with a lower growing bush plant. This way the vines go up and the bushes go out! I’ve got Sunflowers going down the entire right hand border now – need to plant the ones on the left side but I haven’t gotten that far.

I originally had Italian heirloom tomatoes planted in the space pictured below – but I apparently suck at starting tomatoes and… lets just say they failed to thrive. So $10 and a trip to Rural King later and I’ve got 30 Beefsteak Tomato plants!

Beefsteak Toms - Fooled You Jalapenos - Sunflowers - May 2010

Fooled You Jalapeno

Beefsteak Tom

Beefsteak Tom 2

Crookneck Yellow Squash

Amaranth

Sugar Snap Peas

 I stopped by Lowes one night and checked their clearance racks – as I’m wont to do this time of year – and low I found strawberry plants for a $1! (Originally $3) – So I bought 20.  When I went back 2 days later the 30 that I had left behind were gone, darn it, but at least I got my 20! It’s past their fruiting cycle but their perennial so all I have to do is wait! They’re already producing runners and I swear the doubled in size overnight once I got them into the ground. They wound up in the spot I was going to plant cabbage in but it’s the most acidic spot in the yard (presumably) since it’s under a pine tree and it’s semishaded (which all the wild strawberries seem to like). Keep your fingers crossed that they make it through the winter.

Strawberry Plants

Strawberry Plants Planted

 The cucumbers have decided this is their garden and they are going to take it over dang it! I think you can almost watch them grow. They sprouted faster than anything else in the garden and are growing just as fast. They’ve already got fruit started! I direct seeded some basil in between the cucumber (don’t know how well that’ll do – apparently cucumbers don’t like aromatic herbs, which I didn’t know) – only about six sprouted which I suppose is pretty darn good considering I was supposed to start them indoors.

Cucumbers

Baby Cucumber

 I had to replace my Amish Canner Tomato seedlings and my Chinese Bell Pepper seedlings – none of them did well. Another trip to Rural King and I’ve got 20 Roma Tomatoes and about 34 California Wonder Green Bell Peppers.

These and the Cucumbers are interplanted with Marigolds and Nasturtiums for (hopefully) pest control.  Also the Nasturtiums are edible.

Roma Toms - Bell Peppers - Marigolds - Nasturtiums

 I’ve got Butternut Squash and Tetsukabuto Squash (Japanese Pumpkins) interplanted with Striped Toga Egglants – the Eggplants are pretty shimpy right now – not sure how well they’ll do.  The Tetsu’s have really pretty leaves with the white marks (which distinguishes them from the Butternuts) – apparently the Butternuts are required to pollinate the Tetsu’s.

Tetsukabuto Plants (Japanese Pumpkin)

 I’m having a battle with the pests this year – which is new for me.  The only real problem I had last year (that I knew about) were Squash Bugs (which suck).  This year I’ve got Bean Beetles (which I had last year I’m sure – I just didn’t recognize it), Vine Borers (which are so gross! They’re basically big maggots! ICK! The Ortho Pest book says to slit open the vine, find the maggot and pull out – then bury that part of the vine and hope it heals itself – well here’s hoping! I pulled out alot of those things! 

Bean Beetle

Vine Borer Damage

More Vine Borer Damage

 I actually think the ants killed these 2 vine borers – go ANTS! There were a bunch of ants at the base of the plant and these guys were very, very dead.

Dead Vine Borers

 I’ve already found 2 Squash bugs and some eggs.

In the morning we found that the ditch had gone over it’s banks, enough that it was flowing *over* the foot bridge, over our neighbor’s driveway and over the top of the culvert at the end of the street! There was so much water, moving so fast that it dug through the separation between the two pieces of metal culvert and left a man sized hole there!

Drainage Ditch and Foot Bridge

Debris from flooding in neighbors driveway.

Main Drainage Cluvert with Debris

Hole dug by the water over the culvert.

The storm damaged the back end of the garden – luckily we hadn’t planted earlier that day like we had planned - it would have washed out all my cucumber and basil seeds if we had.  As it is we’ll have to re-mulch… gar!

Garden Damage

Garden Damage 2

The ramp to the highway was flooded – the southbound on ramp always floods but this started 1/2 a mile back from the ramp and went all the way up under the underpass where the land rises just a bit. I was very annoyed at hubby for driving us through this… we didn’t, however, drive back through it to get home – we took the long way ’round.

Flooding approaching the highway ramps.

Flooding behind the truck stop.

Flooding off the Pennyrile.

The ‘long way ’round’ took us through Earlington – where the Earlington Lake’s spillway had totally exceeded it’s capacity and flooded the low lying areas around it.  All of these pictures are actually after the water had been receeding a bit – the height of the flooding hit between 2 and 4 AM, I believe, and the pictures were taken between 10 and 11 AM.

Earlington flooding - hope these folks moved their dogs!

Earlington Flooding

I’ve been obsessively planning and replanning… and replanning next year’s garden and I’ve decided to incorporate several plants that you can make natural dyes from (you know, the way it was done ‘back in the day’). This decision mostly came about after going through my Richters Herb Catalog and realizing that I wanted over $500 worth of seeds… ridiculous, eh? And that’s just the perennials (because I’m lazy – why replant things?).

Anyway, so the first plant on my list did double duty as both a medicinal herb and a dye plant so I decided to back through my list (did I mention I’m an obsessive list maker?) and pick out the plants that produced dye. I then wound up with a much more reasonable list (in my opinion anyway, hubby dosen’t agree) that came out to around $50.  Actually it’s a bit less because I realized one of the plants on the list grows ABUNDANTLY wild here… did I say abundantly? Let me emphasize ABUNDANTLY.

That plant would be Pokeroot, also known as Poke Berry. It’s berries can produce Red and Brown dyes. This plant likes to try to eat Mom’s rose garden on a regular basis – so that’s $2 saved.

The rest I’m looking at are:

1. Agrimony (Agrimonia eupatoria) – yellow, green, and gold dyes.
2. Yellow Bedstraw (Galium verum) – yellow and red dye.
3. Bloodroot (Sanguinara canadensis) – red-orange dye.
4. Dyer’s Broom (Genista tinctoria) – bright yellow dye.
5. Scotch Broom (Cytisus scoparius) – greenish-yellow and olive dye.
6. Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) – yellow, gold, tan, grey and taupe dye.
7. Coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria) – bright yellow-orange shades.
8. Curled Dock (Rumex crispus) – yellow, green, gold and tan dyes.
9. Elecampane (Inula helenium) – yellow and orange dyes.
10. Gipsywort (Lycopus europeaus) – black!
11. Goldenseal  (Hydrastis canadensis) – yellow dye.
12. Lilly of the Valley (Convallaria majalis) – green dye.
13. Golden Marguerite (a type of Sunflower) (Anthemis tinctoria) – yellow or gold dye.
14. Garden Sorrel – (Rumex acetosa) – blue and green dyes.
15. Tansey – (Tanacetum vulgare) – yellow and green dyes.

Plus I just read that Sunflowers can be used to make dye as well (I didn’t realize Marguerite was a Sunflower at first) – and since I was going to plant a mix of those in the veggie garden to deter pests I’ll get to test the different color plants to see what dyes they make (because just starting with a yellow plant dosen’t mean you’ll get a yellow dye). I wonder what color will come from the darker reddish-brown flowers? We’ll see!

A word of warning for those looking to set up a Dyer’s Garden – DO YOUR RESEARCH!  Several of these plants are poisonous – either in whole or just parts, to animals or humans or both. Some of these plants will damage others if planted too close while others will help. Just read a lot about them from multiple sources and be aware of your own allergies/sensitivities and those of your family members and pets.

Reading about the ones I”ve chose above is making me tweek my garden plans but so far I haven’t read anything to make me steer away from any of my choices (although it was a close call on the Bloodroot).

I’ve got most of the garden layout nailed down – we’re not going to do any large gourds this year but I may run some spinner gourds and egg gourds up the dog kennel fence or the privacy fence around the ‘barnyard’.

As a side note the gourds I harvested this fall are slowly hardening… I think. It’s a very strange process and I’m not sure how many of them are going to make it. Some of them have rotted (most of the ones that did are ones I expected to but there were a few surprises). There are some that look like they’re rotting but when you tap on them they’re still hard and sound okay – I guess, not that’d I’d really know for sure since this is the first year for this. But we’ll see how it goes. You can check them out in the green-on-the-vine-glory here.

So the Gourds have eaten half the garden… and tried to take over the neighbors yard and the street for that matter. Apparently gourds cross breed – a problem I’ve had all across the garden, but lesson learned and the gourds look cool anyway. The leaves are getting a little die back thanks to the abnormally cool weather so it’s lots of fun to go out and see if I can spy any new gourd goodness on any given day. Hopefully the vines don’t die back too fast… the gourds have to lose a certain percentage of water before the vines give out, otherwise they’ll just rot… and then Judy B will be depressed!

Most of the gourds appear to have leaned towards the cannonball and bushel gourd persausion. There’s 2 snake gourds that I can find… one is really fat and about 3 feet long. I’ve only found 1 dipper gourd and it looks more like one of those penguin/swan gourds.

The gourds taking over the next section of the garden…

And shamefully… this is the grass taking over the rest of the garden…