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Tag Archives: garden

Fall colors in the garden

18 Sunday Sep 2016

Posted by laurieanichols in postaday, postaday2016, Uncategorized

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fall, garden, postaday2016

Fall has shown its face in my garden, boo hoo. Don’t get me wrong, the colors are beautiful, I’m happy to have them. I suppose I’m railing at what comes with fall, cooler temperatures and shorter days. We went food shopping earlier, the apples have taken center stage in the produce aisle, I haven’t yet had my fill of nectarines, I want more time with my favorite fruit. I shouldn’t wallow in regrets over a fading season.

There are ways to turn a frown upside down, I could cheer myself up with visions of homemade apple tarts, warm pain aux raisins out of the oven and pots of hearty soup. You can’t stop the passage of time, so why not try to find the best out of what time deems suitable to give you.

It’s mid February and I’m fooling around with plants.

21 Sunday Feb 2016

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garden, plants, postaday2016

  
Remember the beautiful orchid my son got me? It lasted quite a long while in bloom, I read that if you wanted to continue having blooms, you needed to transplant the orchid, once the original blooms started to fade.

With the warm weekend, I felt inspired this morning to transplant my orchid from its decorative pot to its permanent glass bowl, I hope I did it correctly, I followed the instructions on E-How to transplant my orchid. LOL I’ve never done this before, I’ve only tried to keep them alive, keeping them in their original pots and they have all died so I hope this time I am lucky. 

  
The Calla Lilies, next to my transplanted orchid, are going to need to be cared for until I can transplant them outside, they are perennials, so I’m sure I can find a nice little home for these guys come Spring; maybe I can fit them in with my new primroses that I have to keep alive as well.I have a small “nursery” at this point that I must nurture for a fairly long stretch that seems to get bigger each fall. LOL

  

My first aubergine!

10 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by laurieanichols in postaday, postaday2015, Uncategorized

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garden, postaday2015, snacks

   
   
I should offer some clarification, of the six aubergine plants growing, it’s my only eggplant so far. LOL I also picked my first green zucchini (courgette) and my first poblano pepper and I forget what type of pepper the onlong pepper is, but I used everything in the picture, threw it all in my saute pan with shallots and garlic, salt and pepper until everything was nice and caramelized and it was quite good.

I have green tomatoes galore, it is only a matter of time before they start turning red. I just hope I won’t have to fight Jack over the tomatoes. I noticed one red tomato hanging on the vine, I was going to pick it, but when I turned it, it was half eaten, it looked like a convenient place to have your snack available to nibble on, in between perimeter guarding and critter hunting. I doubt it was a bunny, unless the bunny is a cousin of Bugs Bunny, because between Jack and Lulu, I don’t think many critters would have a chance in the back. However they are taking advantage out in front, they know dogs are not a problem there. 

My poor plants, serving as snack food.

Oh Jack, Jack, Jack

25 Saturday Jul 2015

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garden, Jack, piglet, postaday2015

   
 
Jack is the epitome of pigletness, I tell you. Jack decided to go out this morning tomato picking, I caught him lying on this rug, sphinx style, gently nibbling on his tomato, his first harvest. I surprised him, of course, when I crept over to take a picture. The little nut!

His newest thing with Lulu, after they finish having their 3 o’clock vittles, Jack stands underneath her mouth and licks her teeth clean, he then walks over to the water bowl to sip out any little crumbs she leaves behind after drinking from it. He is unbelievable.

  
 In other news, after we had a good laugh about Jack and Lulu, I went to go squash and basil picking, my husband had a few ideas for the basil. He made a superb pesto using our fresh basil, a huge bunch of it, three different cheeses and good olive oil, he dressed some fresh tortellini with it and it was delicious. The basil was the star, its flavor so aromatic, as my tastebuds were embracing its herbaceous flavor, my nose was compounding the sensation, both were appreciating my husband’s pesto. 

Once you have garden fresh produce, it really changes how you perceive our food delivery system. It is so hard to go back to supermarket tomatoes after spending a summer eating your own off the vine. 

I went back to the drawing board

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by laurieanichols in postaday, postaday2015, Uncategorized

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garden, perennials, postaday2015

   
    
   
I had hoped the pansies might have recovered from the hard rain, but after a week, there wasn’t any hope left. When I touched them to see about digging them up, they fell away from the roots, they were way passed life, so I replaced all of them with these lovely zinnias, a steal at Ray’s nursery in Southwick, buy 1 get one free.

The plant sale was hard to walk through, I wanted to buy every plant I saw and bring them home, it took a lot of discipline and focus to buy just what I wrote on my list at home. I knew that I wanted to fill one of the rectangular containers with herbs and the rest with annuals, but walking along the rows of perennials and other annuals was so very tempting. I did get some more vegetable plants, I added brussel sprouts and regular bell peppers to my vegetable patch.

I have to confess that I broke down at the last second before leaving Ray’s and got a few perennials that I am excited about, a white balloon flower plant, russian sage and the orange and yellow self-seeding plant, I forgot its name but I love its colors. I couldn’t help myself, they were calling me; “psst Miss Laurie take us home, save us!”

Looking forward to getting home

26 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by laurieanichols in postaday, postaday2015, Uncategorized

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dirt, garden, peppers, postaday2015

        

I am looking forward to getting home because I am curious to see how my little plants are doing, as you can see from the two pictures at the top, I have flowers and a couple of baby peppers growing, so I am a little excited to see how much bigger they have gotten in the 4 days that I have been gone.

Who knows, I may see some other “fruit” bearing flowers such as zuchinni blossoms, cucumber flowers, tomato flowers and eggplant flowers. As you can see I am not very good at waiting, I want to see a harvest tomorrow, not in 45 days.

I definitely need to spend a few days digging in the dirt, it makes me more zen and less impatient.

60 days from now

06 Saturday Jun 2015

Posted by laurieanichols in postaday, postaday2015, Uncategorized

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garden, perennials, postaday2015, vegetables

I now feel a little anti-climatic, I was busy, busy today, I planted and planted to my heart’s content. Now I have to wait and wait, water of course and weed, but for the most part, I have to be patient and wait.

   
     

Now it wasn’t all vegetables and lettuces, I did give in to my love of perennials and picked up a few for the poolside area and I grabbed several flats of pansies because they were on sale. I think that I spent at least 9 hours working the dirt and wow am I moving slow right now. I don’t look forward to tomorrow morning, getting out of bed, I may very well be limited to a crawl for a bit. lol.

   
     

   
     

I may be tired and achy, but I feel great with everything that I accomplished, working the dirt is good for the soul.

Hooray, my lilies survived the turmoil!

22 Friday May 2015

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garden, lilies, plants, postaday2015

  

  
Yesterday when my mother and I came back from our mini walking tour, I stopped short at the bottom of my mother’s stoop because out of the corner of my eye, I spied evidence of lilies, which in all honesty should not have been there, because the professional landscaper from last year had “stripped the soil of all previous inhabitants” and replaced everything with all new plants. Those lilies had been a Mother’s Day Gift and I was a little sad to see them go without ever once seeing them in bloom. Mother Nature apparently decided otherwise and my lily bulbs surivived the turmoil and clung to life as stubbornly as possible. They stayed exactly where I had planted them last May, I am so excited to see them in bloom in a few weeks, partly because I have forgotten what color I chose and also because I think that it is so cool that they hung in there despite all the odds against their survival.

Aside from the “discarded” plants determination to not go quietly into the night, I think that the professional landscaper did a very nice job and my mother’s garden is very elegant and beautiful. I am happy with the results and so is she.

   

  

What if we piped our excess water to California?

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by laurieanichols in postaday, postaday2015, Uncategorized

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drought, garden, postaday2015, rain

I’m not complaining about the rain, rain is vital to spring and plant life, every gardener understands this, but we are experiencing an overabundance of rain and I am more than happy to share our rainy bounty. My sister had a brilliant idea, why not pipe our water over west to California and if the pipes leak, no worries, it’s only water.

   

     

Bluebells are in bloom!

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by laurieanichols in postaday, postaday2015, Uncategorized

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garden, patience, postaday2015

        

I’m not sure if Bluebells is the correct name for the plant with the pretty pink and blue flowers, my mother-in-law called them Bluebells and it stuck in my head; I always deferred to her in gardening matters. The purple crocus like flowers, I thought, looked striking rising up amongst the dead leaves, I had to take a picture, I’ll clean the leaves away later.

I was excited to see the chives once again, I missed them a lot during the winter. I hadn’t realized just how often I used them until they were gone. Now all I have to do is pop out in the back with a pair of scissors, snip, snip and presto I have either a garnish or an ingredient. The flowers are pretty as well, a light purple ball a top a delicate green stem, I wouldn’t necessarily add them to a bouquet, I like them swaying in the summer breeze out back.

   

       

Everything else, for the most part in the back, is still slumbering; everything except for the bane of my existence, the bamboo. I captured the tiny red heads of the bamboo shoot peeking up through the soil, if I can’t count on anything  else, I can surely count on them coming up year, after year, expanding their territory, just to thwart me. At least it gives me something to do and keeps me on my toes with maintenance.

   

     

It’s extraordinary to me even after all these years, how dramatically different the back yard looks in April from the way it looks during the month of June. The rejuvenating powers of Mother Nature are indeed incredible. Even if I did nothing, the lilies we see in the pictures are coming back, my forsythia is still dormant, but give it a few weeks and those yellow blossoms will be photographed for everyone to see, trust me on that.

My curiosity will be getting the better of me as time passes because I am dying to see what survived and what didn’t; there is the lavender, the newest azaleas (they don’t look too hot right now) and the dianthus, so I may get frustrated every now and again in the next two weeks, just because Blandford lags behind everybody else.

Patience is a virtue and a necessity for gardeners, I must remember that.

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