Millions of Peaches

Well, not quite millions...yet! Our old faithful peach tree in the lower orchard has yielded tons of gorgeous and delicious peaches. Let's hear it for cobbler!

Wonderful Time for Gardening

Summer is a great season for gardening. The plants are well underway, and many of them don't mature or blossom until mid to late summer. Here are some pictures below with descriptions by the garden planner herself, Martha.

This is the second year for the delphiniums.
The blossom spikes have reached at least six feet!

It is amazing how varied the colors and petals are-

Strawberry foxglove made an early show- I let it go to seed so I can
propagate more and fill in the borders of the Cottage Garden.

Many of the hollyhocks planted last year have deep purple- nearly black blossoms,
tho we do have some white and pin. Unfortunately with the wet spring they
have been stricken with hollyhock rust and have been cut back to nubbins. You can
see the rust forming on the leaves to the right. It looks like large scale. Looking in
Wymans I found out that this can be combated with laying down
ground cornmeal prior to emergence- otherwise it is best to destroy the plants.

We got four unique perennial onion sets from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in
the fall. Unfortunately my labels disappeared during the winter!

The early lettuce has gone to seed. Not the most attractive but
the seed has to come from somewhere.

Hollyhocks prior to the rust explosion-

Bib and redleaf going to seed-

The Cottage Garden was created last spring (2010). The asparagus was
moved from the raised beds it occupied to the inner and outer aspects of
the garden border setting it back a yer. I expect that in the following years it
will be lush. I read in Field and Forest that I can put oyster mushroom
spawn under the asparagus in the straw mulch and plan to
try that next year...or maybe this fall.

This magnificent mass is an Autumn Joy Clematis combined with a Jackmanii.
It has totally covered the birdhouse we constructed during the snows of 2009-2010.
In the hidden garden of the foliage a hummingbird has nested. It is fun to see the
tiny bird zip in and out the huge jungle.

Bronze fennel obscures one of the bird baths in the raised beds
making a protected spot for some of the shy birds.

Red leaf lettuce- yumm salads

Salvia and lavender share the bed with climbing roses. The wet spring was
hard on the roses. Continual dampness allowed black spot to flourish-

We have had a bumper crop of cilantro-

Another view of the bronze fennel with baby's breath in the foreground.

The Seeds are sprouting!

Martha has been hard at work getting her garden started! Every winter starting in February, Martha gets her seeds in order to get a jump start on the season. After all, the plants don't grow themselves! (At least not the plants we want to eat.) Here are some pictures of her first sprouters for 2011!

Berries Galore!

Many years ago, this was the site of the vegetable garden. It made sense for it to be here for Grandpa Cecil and Grandma Jeanne when their house was the only house on the property and just up the hill. Since then the vegetable garden has been relocated closer to the (now) main house and this area had been forgotten and overgrown. I was given the task to use the bush-hog and clean it up again!

Now, I wish I had taken "before" pictures, because then it would be more evident the amount of sheer destruction that was necessary to get this area looking the way it does now. The berry patches to the right were planted before I got here, so the goal was to rescue them and lose all the rest. MAN! Wild blueberry and blackberry bushes had moved in and taken over! Wild berry plants aren't the best because they're incredibly invasive, hard to control, HUGE, have more thorns than just about anything, and yield a tiny amount of fruit given the amount of landscape they take over. The wild plants were choking out the berries we had planted and want to keep. The thick thorny stalks of the wild berry bushes were taller then the tractor! I kept losing my hat and catching my clothes on all the thorns and getting smacked in the face by the branches caught on the tractor...it was a lively experience. I'm glad to report that I've survived the ordeal. Haha! Now the remaining berry plants we wanted to keep have been replanted and are enjoying their un-compromised sunlight!