Garden Update May 28, 2012

It's been HOT HOT HOT here this past week. I've been busy planting vegetables and flowers and scoring awesome deals on clearance plants and manure at Lowe's. Here's what's going on around my yard:

First up, the vegetable garden. I actually used twine to mark out the square foot dimensions. The resulting garden is a little rigid looking, but the nice bonus to rigid looking is that I can plant significantly more than I have previously. I've quite a few more empty spaces and I may put some annuals in there to help attract bees.

This shows my peas climbing up the back fence and the large 4'x8' bed of alpine strawberries. The peas are a bit stunted from the heat-they are about 3' tall and are flowering and setting fruit. We've munched on exactly 3 peapods thus far. The strawberries, however, have produced nearly 1 pound of fruit with lots more to come.

Sorry for the bad angle--this is Bryce's corn bed and to the north of the corn is our newly planted asparagus. Most of the asparagus has popped through and it's looking like most of it is female as most are setting berries.

My awesome trio of rain barrels! They are becoming covered by the perennial sweet pea vines and other assorted plants. I've heard that people in the neighborhood call our house "the one with the rain barrels" and not "The one with those &%##$&%* rain barrels," I guess people don't mind them. Right?  And if you're my neighbor and you're reading this, please stop by! I might even give you a plant or 8. =)

Little progress has been made out front in the new cottage garden bed, other than Brad  busily cutting sod out to get the new shape. See the hose? That's my form for the new layout. The poppy has finally bloomed and it was worth it to leave it there all by itself. All that's left to do is finish the remaining sod cutting and then pull all that soil forward. If you look at the house, you can see the bed comes right up to the height of the first row of siding; I need to grade that lower and away from the house.

Here's a close up shot of the poppy-it's about 3 feet tall and is LOADED with blooms.

Here's why we haven't made much progress out front-5+ yards of mulch was delivered last week. We get our mulch for free from a local tree service. They only give us good chips from non-diseased trees, usually maple, and they dump it here for free. They save on the landfill fees and we save this much mulch from ending up in the landfill. As it's maple, we can't use it in the vegetable beds, but it makes for great mulch around the pool and sandbox.

Can you see the bee on this pink Salvia? I wish I knew the variety as it has a lovely round habit and the bees LOVE IT. I got it from Lowe's last year for $0.50.  Yep. Fifty cents. It's awesome this year.

In the backyard, my Spiderwort is in it's glory. This looks so great paired with my old fashioned orange poppies.

My Sweet William that I grow from seed every year is prominent in front of the shed. I've got quite a hodge podge of plants in here, but it looks nice & my next door neighbor has a prime view of this garden from her deck. If you look in the bottom right corner of the photo you can see that our shed is falling apart. We're not sure what's holding it together at this point, but since it's still standing, we'll leave it there.

There. That's a tour of the highlights around my yard for this week. I can't believe how much is actually blooming and growing so early in the year!

Linking up:  Tuesday Garden Party at An Oregon Cottage

Check out how the garden looked late May 2011.