Finally! The last couple of weeks we've gotten some nice summery weather. It's not quite consistent yet... and we're still getting some heavy thunderstorms that cause flooding in the prone areas... but it's finally warm enough that my little ash trees are taking off! Took long enough. It's been such a bizarre spring.
Yesterday I got the urge to plant things. Lots. My terrace still needs some dirt work done (but at least the tractor should be working soon, we finally got that part of it going) but I'm eating lots of salads so I needed some more vegetables growing to support my salad habit. Mom and I planned out some containers for me with seeds she had and made a short list of plants to pick up at the store and got to work. Here's my plan:
Medium Smart Pot: Cherry tomatoes and petunias. We had to get full plants for this pot, which is fine. We ended up getting a cherry tomato plant, a yellow pear tomato plant, and a package of white petunias. Why are people nervous about mixing flowers and vegetables in containers? I was... I never even thought it was an option until Mom got a book like this one (might even be this one, I'm not entirely sure) that gave me permission to try it. Why the stigma there? Hmm.
I'll start some Lavender in a pot until I have a good spot to plant it permanently outside.
I started some catnip in a pot and I might split some to leave outside as a perennial and bring the rest inside. Aside from the obvious feline uses (hehe!), catnip tea has a list of benefits that are definitely worth a try. Those of most interest to me are relaxation, relieving pain from menstrual cramps and migraines, and helping clear sinus congestion. There are more, like relieving fever symptoms caused by a cold or flu. Definitely sounds like something worth trying. I already have some spearmint growing for tea, might as well try this too.
Medium plastic pot: cucumbers and dwarf sweet pea flowers. The sweet peas I planted don't grow tall enough to need support. My favorite summer snack is fresh refrigerator pickles. I'm an admitted pickle fiend (for some reason, that's the only thing that can calm my stomach when I'm feeling a little carsick. Not sure why that is.) and these are so easy to make! Slice up 1-2 cucumbers into a colander or strainer, sprinkle a good amount of kosher salt over them, stir them with your hand a little, and let them sweat for about 15 minutes. Rinse the salt off, put the cucumbers in a bowl or plastic container, pour some vinegar over them (enough that 1/2 or a little more of the cucumbers are sitting in the vinegar), sprinkle with some dill weed and white pepper, stir, and place in the refrigerator. Stir or shake again after 20 minutes or so. You can vary this by trying other kinds of vinegar, other spices, or even adding onions or peppers. It's entirely up to you. I use a lot of dill because I love dill, but you can also find different spice packets at grocery stores. Nothing tastes better to me than cold dilly vinegar when I've been out in the sun!
Small Smart Pot: beans and carrots. Again, doing a combination I'm a little nervous about, but the plants grow at different heights so it should be alright. I looooooove fresh beans and I eat lots of carrots in my salads.
I started a new batch of baby lettuce greens and threw in a few seeds for butter lettuce from an old packet. They may not come up, but if I don't have to buy wilty lettuce from the grocery store it's a win all around. I had one pot already but not enough to keep up with all of my salads. Eventually, we'll probably bring the really big container up for salad stuff to take over. It's really a stock water bucket, with a drain out the bottom, and mom used to use it as a little pond, but it works really well for container gardening. Mom has no use for it at the moment so it'll come up here until she does again. I may try to keep garlic going in that too, but it needs to get up here first and that won't happen today.
So, once I get my rear in gear, I have some work to do outside. The soil up here is very rocky so I'm picking out the rocks I can as I come across them, but there are lots out in my "lawn" that will make mowing difficult, so I need to bring up the cart and start filling it with little rocks that I can use for edging. I have a plan to put a pair of spirea shrubs at the end of the trailer, on the parking side, so I need to start clearing the ground for that so when we do get to the greenhouse to buy them they can go right in the ground. I need to take my native wildflower book to the store and find seeds for some of our native wildflowers to spread out in my "lawn." Let me clarify... I live in the country, in the middle of native prairie in the Buffalo Gap National Grassland, tucked up against a hill amongst Ponderosa pines. There's no point in me fighting the prairie to make a nice barefoot-grass lawn on the side of a hill. It's a "fool's errand," as one friend pointed out. However, I can encourage the wildflowers so it looks nice. Bonus with that, they live out here already so they're already fine in this climate so that makes for minimal maintenance. In fact, the less you mow them the better they do. One good mow in fall serves to spread the seeds and that's really all you need to do. Most of the perennials I want to plant on the terrace are similarly low-maintenance.
I hope the weather is as lovely where you are as it is here today! We had a big storm last night, but it was thankfully short-lived. Hope you're having a great weekend!
We rock.
ReplyDelete