The new bed by the front door with the dwarf lilac Scotty and Mariela gave us.
The hosta and white flower bed at the top of the drive, below the shed.
The kitchen garden in bloom.
Wild roses in the yard.
Gardening
05/22/2012
05/12/2012
05/07/2012
Kitchen Garden 2012
Got the kitchen garden planted for the most part this weekend. It sits in the circular drive and Bill did just an amazing job edging it. A nearly perfect round. We featured an herb farm as the food purveyor at First Friday and I got most of the herbs from them. They're all organically grown (as is our land.)
I layed it out as a compass...North / South / East / West...with deep purple pansies for the North, yellow for the South, white for the West and bi-color blue for the East. The center is a yellow rose.
Each quadrant has different herbs in it...chervil, sage, chives, French tarragon, English thyme, oregano and parsley. We want some dill and basil of course, but I will put the basil in the main garden and the dill hasn't sprouted yet. The whole is ringed with multi-colored French marigolds which I am hoping fill out and create a border flower hedge. Of course they're also edible.
The picture is taken from due North. That's Missy Girl posing in the background.
03/30/2012
Climbing Clematis
I just love that this becomes this.
The picture on the left is today...the one on the right is July.
03/12/2012
03/10/2012
Annual Amorphophallus Watch
Every year, over the past ten years (yes...we've been together ten years now) Bill's amorphophallus tuber, which he brought up from the Keys, puts on a spectacular display and it is different every year. It is never less than beautiful to watch, but occasionally it is really spectacular.
This appears to be one of those years. While outside the vicissitudes of winter play out...it was nearly 65 degrees here this week and today it is snow flurries. We've had more snow in the past two weeks than we've had all winter, in fact.
In any event, while winter runs its erratic course, inside it appears that the amorphophallus is about to bloom. In fact we think it may actually flower this year, which is one of those "good news/bad news" situations.
The good news is the bloom of an amorphophallus is so spectacular -- newsworthy actually -- that when a similar plant bloomed at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden the lines were out the front door.
When old enough, the tuber produces a 6' flower (early May, before the leaf emerges), resembling a giant vase made from the purple vinyl used for cheap '70s car seats.
The bad news is it stinks like rotting meat.
Stay tuned.
11/28/2011
10/17/2011
10/11/2011
Apple (Buddha) Time
Well I guess it's no surprise that I just got tired of writing about rain. It has finally stopped, for now (and we are already holding our breath for winter and what all this precip would look like in white!) But if the rains did one thing right, it is that it grew our apples to a new level.
We've had apples since the day we moved in. The first weekend I was here, almost two years ago (as of 10/31, officially) I gathered apples and made applesauce. But the apples are not "pretty" and they were always small. This year, however, they are nearly twice the size, if not three times the size of that first year's crop. Don't know how sweet they will turn out to be. Rain = size...sun = sweet...but now I need to start getting some apple butter ready.
