Veggies and the Like

Well here are some photos of my once but no longer thriving veggie garden. I wish it were still amazing and pretty like this. Oh well.

 Here we see the broccoli flowers in earnest as well as the broccoli seed pods on the right. The small pink flowers are radish flowers.

Aren't they so pretty? Radish flowers. They are a bit more pinkish in real life and are very delicate things coming from such a strong tasting plant.

 A closer look at my carrot tops :D As well as radish leaves. Aren't they so fluffy and pretty?

I planted bunch of cilantro seeds into a little planter and they all popped up... and then they died. Then some of them popped up again, though it seems like they have reverted to a wilder form. The sun had come up and the morning light shone so beautifully on the flowers.

Oh yes! The best green onions you have never tasted!! They were HUGE!!! and TASTY!!!

The end of the line for some of my lovely onion babies.

Nasturtiums And... Wasps?

Okay so, I started actually trying to garden a little over a year ago. And I took pictures. I started this blog a little under a month ago. So naturally I have a lot to "catch up" on as it were. I won't spam the blog all at once with everything from the past year (though I want to just so I'm done with it :D), I'll throw a little bit in here and there with the stuff that I am currently doing.

So, Nasturtiums. They should be perfect for me. After all I live in a very clay-rich area where my sprinklers are broken (my fault) so they get little water, but TONS of sunlight. They started out pretty good actually. Then... well you'll see.

 

I planted a rather large variety of these flowers in the area of the yard that has been barren for many a year. It used to have some nice little flowers there (I have no idea what they were as I was a kid at the time) but they have since died from lack of water. Well, when I found that these babies don't want much water and that you can eat the leaves and flower petals in salads, and that they keep aphids away from other plants like roses (of which I've many) I decided they were perfect. Also they get big and bushy and would form a lovely ground cover. The above was the first one to pop up and flower. It also looked like it had the best chance of surviving. It was hilarious how it came to be though. I planted them in the heat of summer, but couldn't water them much what with water conservation rules and all, so they didn't sprout until after the fall rains.

 This one is my favorite color out of the bunch. They came in three colors from the packet I got: Orange, Red, and Yellow.

Here's a closeup of that beauty.

This was an orange and a red that had popped up right next to each other as I had put two or three seeds into each hole, banking on the fact that not all of them would sprout.

 

And this.... this poor fellow was that first orange flowering Nasturtium that you saw. He had the best chance and even he too died from my neglect. That's alright, when the weather cools a bit I'll get some new ones and plant them and actually tend to them and keep em watered.

Now for the stuff I actually did today:

This doesn't really count as gardening, but it's still really cool. I was up in my attic working with some wires when I found this cool looking baby:

I had no idea what it was. It kinda reminds me of marzipan. Well, my father couldn't see it, but he said it was probably a wasp's nest. At this point I freaked out because I was working six inches away from it. He said not to worry though as we had fumigated the attic a few years ago so there shouldn't be anything alive. I started thinking, "A few years ago? That's plenty of time for this nest to repopulate itself!" Anyway, I finally found evidence of dead wasps and didn't see any movement so I carefully finished my job, took some pictures (how could I not?), spray painted the nest (I wasn't going to remove it, but if you disturb it enough anything living will leave it for somewhere else), and got out of there in a hurry.

 

After a little bit of research I have found that this is a paper wasp nest. It's so fragile looking, it's really cool.

So that's it. Tada! This was my day today!

Crooked Tree

This was a tree. This was an insidious, evil, sneaky, dirty, rotten pepper tree. It is dead now. Muwahahahaha! Do you see how the root makes a sharp right turn? That is because it went down in the foot deep soil, hit the concrete, and decided to travel sideways in the foot deep soil. Wanna know how my father and I got it out? Hehe. We hooked a chain around it, hooked the chain to our air operated engine hoist, and hoisted it out of the ground. Total time taken: 10 min. Fear me evil trees that have set forth to ruin my yard. Fear me, for I am the proud owner of an air operated engine hoist and... I know how to use it. MUWAHAHAHA!! Yeah baby! I'm coming after you, pepper tree attempting to kill my rose bushes by the garage, you watch out because next Saturday we have an appointment with an air operated engine hoist.

City Slicker Fails

So I got this packet of seeds for some black pansies. I mean jet black. I can't wait until I get one to grow. I've tried three times. This is the latest result of the latest attempt.

This happens every time. First they start out strong, then they wither and die. It's not like I under or over water them. And this time I even started feeding it Miracle Gro every now and then. I still have a few more seeds in the pot that haven't sprouted, so I'll wait a while and see if they pop up and if I can get one to be a thriving Pansy plant.

Garden Starters

Well, I started out with a mess of a garden. It hasn't changed much, but now I have the time to work at it a bit better. Here's what's happened in the past month.

My poor plum tree. It had the perfect shape, then all of a sudden one side of it died. I was so upset. So I had to trim a lot of it off. I still have some sawing to do to get rid of the larger dead branches. Then years of waiting and shaping to get it back to where it belongs.

This is my dwarf peach tree that no longer looks dwarfish. It has produced one ripe fruit to date. The rest of the fruit falls off of the tree unripe. I figured out it was because I let too many fruits grow on it and I didn't give it any nutrients. Also, it used to look like a peach bush. I fixed that. :D

The cleaned out rose bed. It used to have day lilies (like the one's seen in the peach tree picture) all over the place. I pulled them out or cut them out depending on how soft the dirt was. You can still see some of the bases sticking out of the ground in this pic. It'll take some more work to get the bed cleaned out completely.

And here is the baddie. This is a pepper tree hiding behind my rose bush. You think "That thing is huge! How could you miss it?!" I missed it because of all of the brush and undergrowth that was there. When the tree started growing large enough to touch the roof of the house is when it actually became noticeable. I cut off all of the branches that I could and some day soon we are going to hoist this baby out of the ground. The rose bush is going to take some trauma though.

The newest addition to home: Avocados. My father loves avocados, so he did what everyone's grandma has done: He stuck toothpicks in the seed and suspended it into a cup of water. I had about given up hope and was ready to throw the thing away when father takes a look inside the half-way split seed and says "Hey! There's something green inside the seed!" So it stayed by our kitchen window and in a few more weeks it had really begun to sprout. Then there was no stopping it. A week later and it was in desperate need of a transplant. The neat part is that there was no root shock at all. The little fella just keeps growing and looking better.

Ah yes. My first attempt at home produce. It actually did work. I just didn't eat it all in time before it went to seed. So, I've left everything there for the moment. We have/had carrots, radishes, broccoli, and green onions. All of it was the most flavorful veggies I've ever eaten, but I shouldn't have planted the whole packet of seeds (I totally ignored the spacing requirements. Who needs those?) because I got way too much to eat in a timely manner.

As I was trying to clean up my veggie bed this morning I found this VILLAIN! He is a subterranean termite and he and all of his buddies have eaten out the insides of my carrots. Thankfully I had plenty to eat and I think they only got to them after the plants had gone to seed. But this means I need to take care of the colony before I can plant any more in that area. Such a bummer.