Flowers are here!

This week some of our big tomatoes started to bloom. The weather has been nice and warm, and the plants are loving it. The sprinkling system was turned on, and I spent two afternoons cleaning and replacing sprinkler heads and adjusting them. 

Our roses are looking good with all the blooms. My friend Camille got me a new rose called St Patrick that is a pale yellowish white, almost light lime green. It's one of the most gorgeous rose I have ever seen.

The chocolate rose is looking as good as ever, it's by far my favorite red rose. I first saw it about ten years ago, and fell in love with it.

This is one of my other red roses. 

Since I fixed the sprinklers, I also decided to reseed the back yard. We first seeded it last fall. It rained all week after it was seeded, and some of the seeds sort of floated away. This created  gaps in the grass. The dog hasn't helped either. In four to six weeks we will have a nice full lawn in the back yard.

One of the yellow nasturtiums we grew from seed has started to bloom. I also planted some moss rose, some more geraniums, and green bell peppers. Our Micro Toms that started blooming earlier in the spring are bearing fruit. They are slowly starting to turn orange. A few more days and we'll have home grown tomatoes!!!

The honey suckle that we planted last fall has lots of buds. The plant itself is very bushy, and I hope that it will start to grow lengthwise so we can get our ugly chain link fence covered this summer. Also in the news, our praying mantis cocoon has not hatched yet. I read that you can almost treat them as pets if you feed them bugs and ground meat. Two hundred pets would be a little too much for me, I think.

Kari was so excited about growing broccoli this year, that he overwatered them quite a bit. Two did not survive the drowning, but the bigger ones didn't seem to mind as much.

I have to brag a little here. Mikko learned to ride his bike without the training wheels! It took him one try to learn this. We tried to get Kari to do it too, but he is not interested at all. He has quite good balance, so he would learn, we think. He was pretty mad about the whole thing, so we left him alone to pout.

So this week has again been a good one in the garden, our grass is hopefully starting to sprout soon, and the kids are having fun as you can see. The god of all urban farmers is a keeper for sure.

Almost Summer

We have had a busy week. We got several bags of turkey poo from Home Depot that we have been tilling into the garden. It's made by a local company, and it seems to have done a lot of good to our soil. We did a soil test, and found out that our dirt has hardly any Nitrogen, and is very alkaline. Most plants like a pH slightly on the acidic side or neutral, so this is not good for our farm. We have been applying peat moss, compost, and poo to amend things. Lots of poo.

We planted our tomatillos, some yellow bell peppers, banana peppers, and jalapenos, and started an English cucumber and a zucchini from seed. They are all covered by walls of water, so they will get a good start before Summer is here.

Right by our south facing fence we put 14 broccoli plants. Kari asked if they were for him, and when told yes, started to water them excitedly. It's one of his favorite things to eat, and he's very happy we have so many this year.

Our tomatoes are growing fast. We took some of the walls of water off because they were outgrowing them.  We also put cages around five of them. I need to make another trip to the store to get more of them so we can have good support for the tomatoes and the tomatillos.

The onions by the tomatoes are doing very well. I might put a few more in the ground, we eat a lot of onion.

I found some praying mantis cocoons at the store, and we tied one of them to a tomato. When they hatch, there will be about 200 or so of them running around. They are good predators to control aphids and other insects that ruin plants. We have had an aphid problem every year, so there should be plenty of food for them. The second one will probably go to the front yard.

I planted most of our flowers today, hopefully there will be no more frost at our house. A permanent place was found for some Wallflowers, poppies, a Geum, some baby's breath, scarlet flax, more nasturtiums, and some more uncommon things like "poor man's weatherglass", and  a couple of geraniums. These will help pollinators find our yard, and hopefully increase our harvest.

We now have some purple basil with all the green ones, and our neighbor gave us a small leafed basil that has a very strong fragrance. Our dill was finally big enough to be planted, and I decided to plant a sage as well. They are fairly invasive, but I'm hoping that since there's only one plant, we can keep up with it so it won't take over the whole back yard.

Last fall we bought two honey suckles, and the other didn't make it through the winter. On Monday I went back to the garden store where we got it, and got a new one that is already making some new growth. It will eventually cover our chain link fence, and give us some privacy from the church we live next to.

So things are going well, and the God of all urban farmers has been good to us. We're hoping that he will  make our harvest bountiful, and that in the meantime our children learn where food comes from, and how much work it takes to make it get to our table.