Friday, October 28, 2005

How does my garden grow?

Well, it's official. My vegetable garden is dead. The gophers finally ate most of my squash plant and the okra has either stopped producing because it's too cold or the rats have finally figured out that okra is good to eat! (Most likely it's the latter.) So now we're going to subscribe to the OC Register and use the b&w pages to control winter weed growth. I discovered last winter that my veggie garden is way to wet and cold in the winter to grow anything except weeds, and there were lots of them! According to Martha Stewart, 6 layers of newspaper covered with mulch is as effective as weedblock cloth and better because it is biodegradable and never has to be torn up. So we'll try it and see if she's right.

On the other hand, my shade/flower garden is quite dry. It currently doesn't have many plants in it, but in a few days I'll get a shipment from Henry Field's with these plants:
Scarlet Bee Balm
Californa Garlic
Maximillian Sunflower

Double Hollyhock mix
Hardy Lavender
Purple Cushion Mum
I'm so excited! I have to plant them as soon as I get them. It will be a lot of work, but I think the end result will be very nice. You'll notice all of these plants are perennials, which means that once they are established it will take less work to maintain a nice looking garden, I hope. I've never tried to grow flowers before, so this will be a learing experience. I hope I don't kill anything!

Testing my green thumb,
Alberta

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear the demise of your veggie garden. Night temperatures have hit below freezing here, so our farmers market is done, too. Good luck with the flower garden!