"What is she up to now?"

sign in my yard

See this sign in my yard?  The neighbors likely think it's an apt description.  They are probably thinking, "What is she up to now?".  With all of our extreme heat and lack of rain and seeing how it is still early in the season, I have decided to hedge my garden production bets by planting additional sweet potatoes and okra.  Sweet potatoes and okra, generally impervious to drought and heat, and even insect infestation.  Old standby basics of a southern garden.  The only problem is my vegetable garden is already planted up with squash, beans, tomatoes, basil, peppers, eggplants -- limping along in this heat, it is true.  But I still have hopes and am not ready to give in and pull them out yet.  I squeezed in the sweet potatoes where the now defunct sugar snaps, radishes and lettuce were.  But where and how to plant more okra?  The only virgin soil left in the yard is in the front -- in the median between the sidewalk and street, where the purple tomato pots are.  I took a claw thing and tried to break up some soil and get out the remaining bermuda grass -- but it was as hard as the concrete it lies between.  So, I did this:

Talk about lazy gardening!  I got this idea from Starter Vegetable Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Gardens.  I laid down some cardboard and newspaper right on the spot I wanted to plant.  Then I hauled over some bags of garden soil/top soil and laid them on top.  I sliced a big rectangle out of the top of each bag, leaving about a 2 inch frame of plastic, and took a large screwdriver and rammed it through the soil and the bags to punch drainage holes.  Then I planted my okra seeds directly in the bags.  Okra can take a lot of neglect and doesn't need the richest soil by any means, so hopefully they will sprout up and do fine.  I soaked the seed overnight, which helps germination.  After the growing season I can rip out the plants and dump the soil right in the same spot where the cardboard and newspaper will have decomposed and smothered out the weeds and grass underneath, and have good soil to plant in next year.  At least that's the plan.

Linked to Tuesday Garden Party at Oregon Cottage

Fearless Gardening

This is my gardening theme for this year -- Fearless Gardening!  I found these great purple pots at Tuesday Morning.  And Fearless of critique I decided to plant them up with some tomato plants and put them between the street and sidewalk in front of our house.

potting mix ready

You can see a bit of the purple pot here.  I make up my own potting mix, mixing a bag of cheapo potting soil from Lowes, adding in some perlite, some bagged composted manure, and some shredded pine mulch, and sometimes some compost from my compost piles.

purple pot ready to plant

In go some packing peanuts for drainage.  Packing peanuts seem to last a thousand years -- I save them and reuse for drainage, as they don't make the pots as heavy as when you use shards or stones.  Of course, now it seems most companies are moving away from packing peanuts in deliveries, so my supply has dwindled considerably.  When they run out, I use up-ended small plastic nursery pots that plants I have bought come in.

purple pot placed permanently

And here you see my fearless gardening in all its splendor -- purple pot planted up with a tomato plant and a bright blue tomato cage, placed on some pavers on the median strip between street and sidewalk.  The pavers make a walking space for people to traverse across the median without stepping on my plants.  You can also see my showy primrose, that I have naturalized through a lot of my front yard, along with the mailbox on an antique water pump, that I painted a few years back.  I have four such purple pots with tomato plants along the sidewalk.

Now, I've been told that such garden style is perfectly normal in such places as Portland and Seattle and California.  Or Austin, or even midtown Memphis.  But here in the 'burbs of Memphis, this fearlessness risks the wrath of real estate agents with listings of near by houses, along with residents who suffer from "fear of plants close to a sidewalk" (fortunately none of the folks on my actual street).  I am surrounded by a sea of standard waterhog grass lawns and attendant lawn chemical (ab)use.  But for each hater, there are people that stop me and say how much they like  walk by the house and see what's growing, how it reminds them of _____ (Seattle, Portland, their grandmother's old homeplace, etc), and children that are in awe of the dragonflies and butterflies.  So I continue to garden fearlessly.

Linking to TUESDAY GARDEN PARTY

Sharon Lovejoy Writes From Sunflower House and a Little Green Island: Trimming My Sails and Making Soup

Love love love Sharon Lovejoy's books and her blog.  She's having a giveaway of Danish house numbers on her blog, beautiful luscious pics from her garden, and a soup recipe.  Check out the link.

Sharon Lovejoy Writes From Sunflower House and a Little Green Island: Trimming My Sails and Making Soup

A Productive Day

Oh my goodness, the extreme weather just keeps on!  All week the highs have been in the 90's (normal highs should be low 80's) and yesterday and today -- 99 and 100 degrees.  These are not only record highs, but the earliest occurring since they started keeping records.  It's not unusual for us to have high 90's and even 100 degrees in July and August -- but last of May and early June?  Completely unheard of until now.  And not a hint of rain.

Despite the heat (and it is NOT a dry heat -- it's Memphis humid heat), I went to the local farmer's market, got accepted to purchase a CSA share for the summer (a quarter share to supplement my own garden, which with this heat . . . who knows what it will produce this summer), then went to a local garden tour along with all the other crazy gardeners who love to see other people's gardens, even if it's 95 degrees and bazillion per cent humidity, got home and walked the neighbor's dog (they're out of town and both my girls whose job it is, were spending the night with friends), and finally potted up or planted the plants and herbs I bought last week at Anthony's Herb Farm Festival -- hyssop, rosemary "arp" and rosemary "salem", and some scented geraniums being the most notable, although there were a host of others that I couldn't resist.  Now it's water, water, water, more water -- one rain barrel is already empty.

Wildlife in the Garden

I found this fellow walking into our screen porch the other morning.  The screen porch leads into our back entry and we leave the door propped open so our cats, Ophelia and Belle, can come and go.  I picked him/her up and put her in my herb garden, which is where I took this picture.  I haven't seen it since.  Hopefully it has snuggled in under the blueberry or raspberry bushes, safe from marauding racoons and possums that frequent the neighborhood.

That same day, our neighbor across the street surprised a large copperhead snake that had decided to take the sun right in front of her front door.  She hollered at me to come when I went to get the mail, I saw it was a copperhead and got a neighbor man to come over and "dispatch" it.  I have a "backyard habitat" designation from the National Wildlife Federation, and I enjoy the birds, dragonflies, butterflies, the above box turtle (a first in the yard!), and garter snakes.  I would love to have a speckled king snake in the yard.  I can tolerate the racoons, possums, squirrels and chipmunks to some degree.  But no copperheads.  Nope.  No way.  Glad it wasn't in my yard because I hate to think what the folks in the neighborhood that don't like my gardening style would say.

The Beach Life

 

We spent the third week of March at our favorite vacation spot, Seaside, Florida on the panhandle between Destin and Panama City.  Although the girls wished for a bit warmer weather, as the water was chilly the first few days, Wade and I thought the weather was perfect:  highs in the mid 70's, lows in the 50's (it was actually record cool weather for there).  The air was crystal clear (usually there is a beach haze on the horizon) and both day and night we could see the highrise skylines of Panama City, 30 miles to the east, and both Destin and Fort Walton, 30 miles to the west.

the house we rented "Dreamcatcher"

This is the house we stayed in, within Seaside.  Seaside is a "new urbanist" community of beach cottages, and a "downtown" of shops, restaurants, art galleries, a grassy amphitheater, a repertory company, a public charter school, a farmers' market and community garden.  The movie, The Truman Show was filmed there some years ago.

This a view from the pavilion overlook at the end of the street our cottage was on.  Each street terminates in a pavilion and steps that lead down to the beach over the protected sea dunes and vegetation on the dunes.  These dunes protected Seaside from most of the damage from the hurricanes that hit the area during the year of Katrina and the two years following.

Garden Harvest

Yesterday morning the temperature was in the low 60's, with a high in the 70's -- so welcome with it expected to be in the 90's this weekend and all next week!  I went out to the vegetable garden and collected these thinnings from the carrots I planted back on March 18.  I bought the seeds in Austin while visiting a friend.  One carrot per seed just never seemed like a good return of gardening effort for a garden of limited space, and usually it heats up so fast here that spring crops are always an iffy thing.  But I couldn't resist the colors.  They have grown to a nice stand and hopefully in a few more weeks I'll have some respectable carrots.  The variety is "Carnival Blend" by Botanical Interests.  I have a similar variety that I bought at Lowe's to plant for a fall crop,  Burpee "Kaleidoscope Mix".

I've had a very nice harvest of sugar snap peas and multiple cuttings of side shoots from the "pacman" broccoli that I planted.  Broccoli is another very iffy crop here -- it bolts if it heats up too much to fast here, and usually has a lot of insect and caterpillar damage.  This year the plants have been fabulous -- if only I had planted 20 instead of 4!