Inman Square: Additional photos from 06/22/10

Weeds!

Brussels sprouts: Not as ambitious as radishes. C'mon, little buddies -- work it out!

The bougainvillea flowers are looking very happy, which is more than I can say for those leaves. Trying to heal this little guy, but so far "withered" is this season's hot look.

Did you know potato vines flower? Yeah, me neither.

It's hard to see here, but my cucumbers appear to be attempting to climb -- hallelujah. I'm really hoping I can prevent them from swallowing my whole garden, as they did last year.

I think it's time to give up the ghost on the red cabbage. I keep watching and watching, waiting for it to look head-like, but I think it got too hot out and our pal here skipped that stage altogether and went straight to the awkward teenage years. Look how ugly and munched-on. Gots to go.

This White Beauty heirloom plant is doing a whole lot of nothing. I don't understand it -- its relatives are really taking off, but not even one little, green tomato here.

Inman Square, Somerville: Home of the Rose Killer

First off, I'm having a conceptual issue with the fact that starting a post with "Somerville:" could initially imply that I am either that hilarious Amy or the considerably more sedate me (Raquel). So, until I think of something better, I'm "Inman Square." How's that work for you?

Regarding roses

When I think of "finicky" plants, I think of orchids. And roses. And souffles, but that's only because my brain doesn't work properly. I'm used to buying spectacular orchids, coaxed to health and beauty by someone in a lovely greenhouse, and then tending to their withered, half-dead convalescence for years. These experiments always end up on the inside of a Glad bag. Like people who can keep orchids blooming, rose gardeners seem to know a lot more than I do. In their case, about coffee grounds, and banana peels, and pruning. That last one appears to be where I went wrong.

A few weeks ago, I had a pretty handsome rose bush in my back yard. But it was getting a little big for its britches and I had terrible daymares of it engulfing the whole yard and Justin and I being found years from now in some prickly, Grey Gardens thicket, surrounded by ten-foot mountains of cat food cans. So I pruned that poor thing, and I pruned it hard. And now it looks like this:

It used to look like this:

Until I did this:

So the current question is whether the bush has just run its course for the season, or whether I actively killed it.

Regarding radishes

Check em out! I only planted these last Saturday, and here's how they looked on Tuesday:

Kind of amazing, right? Now I just need HMS Killick to get on here and tell me what to do with them.

The tomatoes are doing well:

Black Cherry Heirlooms

Celebrity heirlooms

Regardin' gardens

This is what my husband, Justin, thinks we should have named this blog. And he will not SHUT UP about it.

Amy’s Somerville “Garden.”

What I have here is not so much helpful advice or inspiring photos, but rather a cautionary tale or two with some illustrated stop-gaps and lucky strikes thrown in for color. Let my garden be the garden that says, “Of course you can do better than this.”

Things in pots usually turn out nicely here. I can't black-thumb them.

This is my third summer with this garden. It is also my first non-pregnant summer with this garden. I don’t think I need to explain how awesome that is.

It’s pretty awesome.

A lot of our yard is shaded during the day, so we have hostas and foxglove and some ground-cover. They spread a little and every year I forget where they’re going to be, but they live, which I like. In the sunnier bits of the yard irises, peonies and roses do well. I often have better intentions than follow-through, so happily the yard is mostly planted with perennials.

We have rose bushes. Roses are more trouble than they’re worth, unless you love roses. What they have going for them is that they love to produce flowers, bring the bees, and don’t require too much tending. They grow like mad, regardless of how little you do for them, and come back year after year. The downside, of course, is that they grow like mad and come back year after year. If you don’t hack them off at the base every couple of seasons they will try to kill you and everyone/thing else in your garden. They climb, which can be quite pretty if you’re good at training plants (I am not), but they also encroach. They tangle. And their thorns are a horrible nightmare. Every cowboy sings a sad, sad song.

buzzzzzz

We have a raised bed for foodstuffs this summer, which is new and exciting. It has been planted three times. Thrice. Scavengers and marauders (skunks, squirrels, rabbits, daughter) have uprooted everything up until this point. My husband D rigged a pretty awesome retractable dome, which kept Raised Bed 2.0 safe until the tomato plants started growing through the roof. The first night without the dome resulted in disaster. A rabbit tore the place apart and left its otherwise adorable tracks all over. Solution: kebab skewers.

line of defense

poor beleaguered beans and peas

Incidentally, there’s a real Me Generation of squirrels this season that feel entitled to everything in the yard. They dug up a bunch of my bulbs (my calling card, as a lazy gardener) and potatoes and even ate the begonias. Seriously. Begonias. Enough already.

The potatoes grow on, though. Check it out:

Raquel, my advice for you is potatoes in planters. They aren't hideous to look at, they grow ultra fast, and then a month or so later... what's up, potatoes?

This potato plant was started by Olive. Maybe I will let her dig into the pot later. Maybe she will just do it without me asking and eat a handful of raw potatoes.

Somerville: Fast-growing plants?

Although I have a couple of spots I could fill in my garden bed (RIP, cabbages), I'm almost maxed out for space, at this point. Even so, I'm not really feeling done with adding more (more, MORE!) plants. So, the current plan is to add some containers to the garden area, specifically here on this plant stand:

That pot on top will eventually (and hopefully) be a bucket of marigolds.

I'm thinking the containers would be best used for plants with a quick seed-to-harvest time. Maybe I can even get a couple of rounds out of some of them. So, I'm looking for ideas about what would work best here. Got any?

I've poked around online and it's looking like lettuces/greens, radishes, spinach, and scallions are some of the fastest growing vegetable plants. I'm focusing on them because it seems pretty late in the game to be planting anything else (unless I go shopping for seedlings again). But I'm wondering if I could be missing out on other fun options by focusing in on just the zippy growers. What do you, the two people reading this, think?

Somerville: Raquel's Little City Garden

Hi, y'all. Raquel here. I live in Somerville, MA, in a rowhouse in Inman Square with my husband, Justin. When we moved in, almost three years ago, there was already a lovely vegetable garden going in the little backyard -- the previous occupants had built a raised bed alongside what is sometimes our patio and other times our driveway. It's not large, so for the past three years I've struggled with what to plant and how to manage the limited space.

That first year I had more time to stay on top of the garden, but failed at a few of my vegetable choices -- anyone who's seen lettuce allowed to grow past it's harvest date knows it gets pretty much prehistoric looking. And inedible.

Last summer I planted again, but between final planning for our July wedding and our honeymoon in Spain, I lost control: the weeds pretty much took over, vegetables weren't picked at the right moment, and we didn't really get much of a harvest. It's sort of unsettling what happens to cucumbers that grow past their prime and I can tell you, you definitely don't want to eat them.

So here we are. I've got a free, open summer ahead of me, having decided to take the summer off from my graphic design program at MassArt, and it's time to try and get this right. I never expect everything to go perfectly. I see gardening as a lifelong learning experience, so I don't really expect to be good until I'm 45 or so, which really helps with forgiving myself for any gardening failures. It works for me.

Here is my garden in early May:

This was after I lost two red cabbage plants, on either side of that little guy that's left. I'm pretty sure it was the (disgusting) japanese beetle grubs I kept finding when I was first planting my seedlings. Incidentally, I'm not growing from seed this year, though I'll be giving it another go next year. My past attempts at growing from seed ended up in containers on the deck of an old apartment in Cambridge. I never got much yield and my plants were rangy and weak, so I decided to backtrack and get better at keeping purchased seedlings healthy and happy, at least for now.

So far this year I'm growing heirloom tomatoes (black cherry, white beauty, and celebrity, I think), Italian and Thai basil, red cabbage, cucumbers, and jalapeno, sweet red, and carnival bell peppers.

Here are some shots of the garden as it looks now, as well as some other parts of the yard -- I'll keep you updated on my progress.

Red cabbage and cucumbers.

Baby Black Cherry heirlooms.

Lilies lining the raised vegetable bed.

Honestly, not 100% sure what this.

Might be the clematis, might be something else. Time will tell.

More lilies, and our classy outdoor dartboard.

Bougainvillea. Check out that crazy fence.

This is where my enormous jade plant summers.

If it were a person, it'd be old enough to drink in a bar.