52 Card Project 2021: Week 17: Gardening

[pegkerr]

The weather has turned. Taxes are done. I have had my birthday. All of these are my annual signal that it is time to start thinking about gardening.

My garden was a big success last year: I had a few herb pots on the back stoop:



I had petunias in container boxes on the back patio:



I planted two City Pickers (enclosed garden beds with wheels). One was planted with a variety of greens so I could wander out into my backyard and pick the ingredients for a salad for lunch:



The other was planted with tomatoes and basil and it absolutely thrived. I was still picking tomatoes in October. Here it is when it was just planted:



and a month later:




All this success went to my head, and so I'm tackling my backyard with even greater energy and ambition this year. This year I plan to have three City Pickers, with trellises. I have planted two of them with twenty different plants of spring greens, cucumbers, pole beans, and I'll plant the third with tomatoes and basil again. Besides the boxes of petunias, I am setting out more garden pots on my patio and planting them with bee-friendly flowers. I will plant bee balm in the strip by the garage. I had planted a bulb garden last fall which is coming up beautifully, and since I'm getting more involved in cooking with herbs, I've enlarged the herb garden in pots on my back stoop. I bought potato bags and am planning on growing potatoes for the first time, and hey, why not try other root vegetables: beets, carrots, onions, too? In short, I'm going nuts.

This card turned out a little different than I originally envisioned when I started. I had taken pictures of the City Pickers and the herb pots and planned to include those. But I started with a semi-transparent picture of the cover of my garden journal for the background and layered over that the flowers that are included in the bee-friendly mix. I liked the look of that, so I just put in a few more layers, emphasizing delicacy, and at the last moment, overlaid that with the first page of my gardening journal. I like the result.

Gardening

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Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

(The icon on this entry, of course, is from Lord of the Rings, from a passage about the thoughts of Sam Gamgee, master gardener.)

Comments

[pegkerr]

They are about thirty dollars at Menards, plus Miracle Grow soil, fertilizer and dolomite bring the cost up to $50. NO WEEDING because of the mulch cover. And they produce like gangbusters. I think they're absolutely great.