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

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.

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…

Boston Pickling:

And Lemon:

And here’s what you get when you plant them too close together…

Sigh… on the bright side, Harvey says they taste great… Otherwise, we’re drowing in monster Zucchini (seriously – you could take out a Zombie with these things), there are lots of Cherry Tomatoes we’re just waiting to turn Red (or white, depending).  I spotted the first crook neck yellow squash today and harvested a handful of the Dragon’s Tongue Heritage Beans.

 I’m going to attempt to make beads out of the dried kernels – hopefully those colors will as impressive off the cob as they are in the picture!

So my garden is going pretty well.  I’m in the process of mulching the thing, which would be easier if it weren’t so frickin HOT! And of course, being Summer in Kentucky, when it’s not too hot to breathe, it’s raining!  I can proudly say, though, that my garden was 3 weeks earlier then my neighbor’s and I have much fewer grass and weeds… of course that’s more than likely because of my crap soil condition… but I love denial! This is the first year there’s been anything on that lot besides lawn and, of course, I didn’t do any soil prep.

We got a late start (thank you Ice Storm From Hell and a month and half of down pours), and several of my seedlings starved to death in their little starter trays – note to self, use bigger starter pots if you refuse to transplant before you can get them in the ground.  But the tomatoes have finally taken off and while the eggplants are really trying, something keeps eating them – and, oh yeah, cutworms need to die, die, die! Those little buggers helped kill of several off the tomato plants that made it through the seed tray debacle.

I ordered all my tomato seeds from Amishland seeds – see the Garden Links for the site. I also ordered some Ground Cherries and Job’s Tears which I really, really, really need to get into the ground.  Everything else came from the old standby of Lowe’s and Rural King.  Oh yeah – since I lost a bunch of tomatoes to the cut worms I had to fill in with some Rutgers seedlings purchsed from Rural King.  They came in a bunch of 20 for like $3.95 – I couldn’t pass that up.

We’ll probably have all kinds of cross pollination and wind up with a bunch of mutant veggies but it’s my first garden so…

I’m waitng till late to plant my turnips, carrots, radishes and golden beets. My attempt at a fall crop? (I have no idea what I’m doing!)

We want to turn our entire landscape into either edible, or at the very least useful.  We have 4 oak trees around the house that are going to come down at some point this year (old argument between hubby and I – I said they were too big for our lot, he said they shaded the house, ice storm came and big branch ripped the electrical meter off the side of the house, hubby says their too big for the lot – ), and we’re going to put semi-dwarf fruit trees in their place.  We ripped out all the boxwoods and holly’s from the front and one side of the house, the ones around the air conditioner will stay until next year.  There are 3 nandinas that I’m going to dig up and move closer to the pool, right around the water spigot.  The nandina, the wysteria tree, and the 2 stonecrops will be the only non-usefuls.

Close to the nandinas will be my rose garden, running down the left side of the house.  I count them as a useful because I have a recipe to make beads out of the flowers – supposedly the beads keep their scent! Yummy rose beads!  I’ll post about that experiment next summer. (Although I should go raid Mom’s rose garden so I can blog about it this year… mwahahahaha!)

Anyway… here’s the diagram, there’s still a few empty places I need to plant but I haven’t decided what to put there - I’ll keep you posted – And just wait until I try to figure out how to can it all!