Growing garden

Memorial Day was my garden-planting-day when I lived in Oregon. It was an extra day off work, and seeds were sown and plants planted, come hell or high water. Usually the latter. But I should not badmouth that garden too much: we had fabulous berries (blue and rasp), and greens did great.

The garden here is doing well, and is way ahead of my Oregon one, especially after a couple of warm days. I keep cheering on the peppers which are the only ones not showing a lot of growth. Cantaloupes are setting flower, beans are up, tomatoes doing well. We are on a third sowing of lettuce, and today I added more carrots and beets. The winter squash, zucchini and cucumbers are looking good, the snap peas are setting flower.

The grapes are very promising this year: there must be more than a dozen big bunches forming. The individual grapes are still tiny, but I put most of the bunches in the protective bags that Barbara sewed last year in hopes of at least keeping the birds from sampling every grape. I think that my main competition will be a roundtail ground squirrel; Dan and I did a comical ground squirrel round-up the other day and he finally just climbed the fence to get out. So I know he'll be back. That did answer the question why a coyote tried to dig a hole in the garden fence and tore the screening off.


The yard is looking nice now too, with the desert willow blooming, the blue perovskia, and even the little palo verde that I planted with a hope and a prayer (it is borderline too cold here in the winter) has beautiful yellow blooms all over.