Jeez, I keep starting out with a nice garden post and just as I’m about to hit publish yet another fire breaks out in the swamp. How’bout that Comey firing!…. this oughta be interesting.
Meanwhile.. back at the ranch….
We’ve had a chilly spring so far in New England – as you drive along the roads and skim the fields and forest, the trees look like they’re afraid to unfurl their leaves. We did manage to plant half of our garden beds a few days ago…praying we don’t get a frost.
Planted on the left, the right still needs weeding and tilling. Someone told us planting rye over the winter is good for vegetable garden beds. I’m thinking not.
In the planted bed we have romaine, eggplant, yellow wax beans, yellow squash and those 500 or so onions. I plant a row of marigolds at the base of the raised bed every year, as they help keep the bugs off the plants. It really does work and by mid summer produces a beautiful show of yellow and orange.
See how anemic the leafery looks just about everywhere? Yet the grass is growing like crazy. We’ve had plenty of rain. My border garden tulips have come up again, good to see the voles have not destroyed them.
On Staten Island back in the day, my grandfather Al had beautiful garden beds. His little house with it’s beautiful tiny lawn and blossoming cherry tree and tulip beds actually graced the cover of Scott’s turf bags and brochures. The Tulips in the spring drew crowds, no kidding. We weren’t allowed to pick them, but I had a favorite teacher, Miss Ferragano, who knew of his gardens and loved them. He would bring me out to the garden bed with snippers in hand and let me choose the ones to snip. I would proudly go to school the next day with a beautiful bouquet for my favorite teacher. To this day a vase full of tulips reminds me of Grandpa Al, a hard working, kind and humorous soul who certainly had his own trials in life, but you’d never know it by his attitude.
My “seaside real estate” garden at the side gate is thriving, the phlox taking over and the new dawn rose climbers have taken over the trellis. It’s called this because having resigned ourselves to the fact that seaside real estate had gotten too expensive to fullfill our dream of owning a little piece of it, I collected rocks and shells from our adventures and deposited them here. Little did we know, the affordable opportunity to buy Stella would become a reality down the road.
The horses are loving their spring pasture grass… and the hay fields are flourishing too.
Speaking of seaside real estate… Now that the renovation work is done at Stella and the grass seed has been sown, the new tender grass shoots are rising.
Have you ever come across “as the crow flies” destination totem poles? I made one for Stella, we’ll “plant” it this weekend.
