Tuesday, er make that Wednesday = Garden Tour

This week's photo tour was brought to you by Wednesday, as Tuesday was being kinda persnickety with its rain and gloomy clouds and short five second bursts of sunshine with a side of chilly wind.  Do us Washingtonians think summer is coming...meh.  I think it will occur for a couple days, maybe in August.  At this point, i'm ready to move to Inuvik.  At least they've converted one of their old indoor ice rinks into a year-round community garden.  :)  Who would have thought that the natives of Inuvik would have better gardening opportunities in the NW Territories than us jamokes down here in the Pac NW.

Anywho...on with developments.

Besides growing a broody ol' bat in the Back 4/10ths...

Yeah, i'm talking about you, you crazy ol' Merangue!

Our Shasta daisies have returned under the Doug Firs.

They look so pretty--a nice surprise when we look out our bedroom window.

Out in the garden, the cauliflower is growing gangbusters with the addition of the Reemay.

On a related note:  Moose's thumb isn't quite as bum anymore--

the feeling has returned to it, and the gash is healing nicely.  Thank goodness!

And an experiment with coffee grounds spread in a ring around the bases has yielded 6 of the 18 plants without slug damage.  Like our favourite kindie-rocker Ralph Covert says, "M-O-M-M-Y needs C-O-F-F-E-E."  In more ways than one. :)

The potatoes are doing well.  Must be this great spring-like weather.  Oy vey!

The berries are all truckin' right along...



the only two fruits on our pink blueberry bush we planted this year

red currants

The best in berry news is that our boysenberries we planted last year are flowering!  Hooray for boysenberries!  Three cheers for homemade syrup!

Only items left to plant now are the squashes and melons...

we're giving them a little time to beef up in the pots before we subject them to our garden that is

the slug buffet.  Need. More. Coffee.  and beer?

Our poppies are almost done flowering.  These pink ones are my favourite.  When we move, i am going to have a whole bed of these beauties.  Somewhere.....don't you think they would look fabulous adorning the grey weathered cedar picket fence around an orchard?!?

The biggest news here is the progress made in Cookie Monster's garden bed.

It's made from the frame that was to be for the Reemay and some of the old bags of soil we used to enlarge the garden last year.  This is the first year she's been gung-ho about gardening.  However, she remembers that we've told her a little story about her Great Grandma wanting her to learn how to garden...and we tell her that she comes back as a butterfly each year to make sure Cookie is digging in the dirt.  She told me the other day that she thinks Great Grandma will be very happy with her garden this year. :)

Today she planted Royal Scarlet Sweet Peas (in honour of Prince William and Princess Catherine) and Scarlet Runner Beans.  She's getting very adept at judging planting depths with her thumb and fingers.

Yesterday we planted all the nursery starts she picked up.

She was so excited to get a geranium (she's a sucker for the coral colours) and she planted her primroses and some "blue puffs" as she calls them.  She was elated to find petunia named after Picasso too, since we had studied the artist and visited his personal art collection at the SAM this year.

Today we also poured over the seed packets she picked out, deciphering which plants would grow best where in her garden.  I used a piece of freezer paper and drew a mock up of her garden on it.  She spent time this morning labelling everything that had been planted already and planning where she would seed the wildflowers that grow 18 inches high versus the Bell of Ireland that grow 3 feet high versus the sunflower seeds she's planted in the back of the garden.

She's named it "The All Thing Bright and Beautiful Garden".

I can't wait to see what this bed looks like come July.

Should summer decide to grace us with its presence, eh? :)