How is your garden looking today?

It's looking pretty good. Southeast US, the weather has been warm, good rainfall, my flowers are pretty, veggies on schedule, so far, so good.

Lookin' a bit raggedy. We were out of town for almost a week and a lot of weeds got a foothold in that time. Gotta go pull out some monsters.

The rain in the evenings has fairly been encouraging the weeds here, plenty of weeding to keep me busy each day - when I close my eyes I see chickweed

Just got home with a new plant to stick in the ground. c.i.

It has been a very cool spring here in the San Francisco Bay Area, so my warmer weather crops aren't faring very well. Cukes and zuchs almost look stunted, but they will eventually take off. Getting seeds to sprout has been fairly easy, since the lack of sunshine prevents the ground from baking into a hard mass, but once sprouted, things grow slowly.

It hasn't bothered my tomatoes one bit though, they are growing perfectly and are already about 3' tall (the indeterminate varieties). I also have some beautiful red leaf lettuce that normally would have bolted by this time.

The garden is also overflowing with bachelor buttons, dahlias, hollyhocks, and a couple other flowering plants that I don't know the names of.

Tons of apricots, enough plums, but hardly any apples, I'm guessing because apples bloom late, and it was colder in late spring than it was in February, when the stone fruits blossom.

All in all, a strange year.

The snowball (viburnam) bush is bent over from the weight of flowers and rain. The poppies fell over from the rain. The grass and weeds are doing very well in the rain. I can't see anything else because of the rain and fog!

the Pa GHardens are fine , this years is outstanding in the weather department. However , things are late. Were having a shorter strawberry season and the sugar pod peas may all come in at once rather than give us weeks of meals. and stir fries and salads

cjhsa and c.i.-I used to live in the Sacto area (Folsom) for a year or two and the gardening was divided into early season and burnt earth times , then followed by a fall gardenseason. We had summer temps at 105. I like my extremes on the cold side. No thanks. Here in the Valley of Pa we get a few 90 degree days but they write about em in the paper, and everybody goes to church to pray for forgiveness. Out there , you have 45 days of 100+ and nobody even questions it.

Here's how it looks today.

Depressing - it is early winter here, mud, fog, bare branches, not a bit of colour in sight. I wish you hadn't asked - I was trying not to think about it.

Eve, when is your gardening season?

Been a slow start here as well. It's been to cold to plant most of my stuff outside, but the stuff that loves being planted in cool weather were planted about 3 weeks ago and are going to town. That includes garlic, onions, turnip, radish, and peas. It's raining and cool today and they say it's suppose to continue like this for another 10 days :-( Not a good thing.

When we are in Maine in most late summers We run up to St Johns from CAlais ME to buy sweet corn. They dont grow corn in most of Maine and what is, is really junky. The produce market in St John has some Annapolis Valley corn grown in Nova Scotia. Almost as good as the stuff we can grow in Pa (not quite, but almost)
Sweet corn needs some good hot days in a row to get really good. The problem with most of MAine (and Atlantic Canada) is the microclimates are dictated by the oceans and bays, so cool weather crops do fine, not so for corn, tomatoes, and peppers

Don't ask. I have a camphor tree in my yard. They grow very big, and the limbs were spreading over the sidewalk.

My husband decides that today is the day that he wants me to help him trim the tree. He cuts, I bag. Bear in mind that this morning I worked out in the gym for 1 1/2 hours.

Anyhow, at three in the afternoon we set out to trim the tree. It is about 93 degrees, and very humid. I thought that I was going to pass out. We got back in the house around 6pm, with seven big black garbage bags filled with the results of our venture.

One pain killer, one muscle relaxer, and a tranquilizer later, I am just beginning to relax. Hubby mentioned something about the grapefruit tree. I don't care if the grapefruit tree swallows up the entire house. He is on his own with that one!


For those of you unfamiliar with camphor trees, here is a picture of one. They are big suckers, and can grow up to 60 feet around.

Poor Phoenix! I helped my ex-hubby dig up a sabal palm once. There were several others in our yard that we weren't happy about it and said NO FLIPPIN WAY!!!!!

I am going to plant my second pineapple top tomorrow.

Yup, that's one big ass tree Phoenix. Glad you're done with it.

Tell hubby I said "good luck with the grapefruit tree" ;-)

Goodness me, Phoenix!
I felt in need of a pill & a good ly down just reading your account! Exhausting!!!!
Are you feeling a bit more revived now?

The garden out front is looking pretty damn good, if I do say so myself. Considering we only dug it last year, it's incredible. Stuff really likes to grow here. Now, as for the back yard, stuff really likes to grow here!

Spent all of yesterday trying to pull out the gout-weed before it goes to seed. going to spend a good portion of today doing same. I can get large amounts of huge, heavy duty, cardboard boxes (empty) from work. They love it because that means they don't have to dispose of them. The plan is to cover the gout-weed infested back yard with a layer of cardboard, and cover the cardboard with wood chips. by the time the cardboard and chips rots, we'll have an amazingly fertile ground for planting anything (grass, maybe?)

One of these days I'll figure out how to upload a picture...

SP - a layer of newspaper works too!

We actually have some sunshine today. I was supposed to be doing some gardening at E's house, but I can't seem to get up the get-up to do it.

Considering today is the first sunny weekend that we have had in ages, our garden isn't looking to bad. We've had MORE than enough rain but no sun to get everything growing. Hopefully the tomato plants will come back...they are looking pretty yellow.

But all my flowers are just waiting to soak up the sun and start blooming!