Swan with Eggplant

It's been a while since I have posted anything with my beloved plastic swan planter. This spring it sprouted chamomile and was glorious for a while. When that got scraggly I cut it back, topped the planter with my special potting mix and tucked in a few random flowering annuals. I seems to be looking good again.

 

I moved my ichiban eggplant forward as it is becoming very productive and seems to enjoy the extra sun and warmth.

Random photos

I took this swan picture by the light of 2 lightbulbs. It had just rained and the chamomile looked like some fairy thing. I had to doctor the result a bit but I like it. Eh, it's a canon powershot... I mean I guess there might have been something fancy I could have done to take this better but still.

Here's me editing my garden, sorta akin to copy and paste. I decided to stick some more of my birdfeeder sunflowers in back. Surprizingly, they spring back pretty quickly, especially given that it's been so cool and wet. I still have a bunch of millet and other mystery birdseed babies in that I'm not sure about. I blame the squirrels!

I love chives. They make a simple thing really nice. They are one of the 1st green things in the spring, they are super easy to grow, even in pots and their flowers are pretty and edible. I have been known to scope out chives that are slightly differently colored but in this garden I only have lavender.

I understand that in certain SE Asian cities crowded, and I mean crowded beyond what most of us experience that you see lots of little pots full of various onion greens. If you have only a balcony and want fresh produce, start with chives.

Here's the 1st eggplant I planted this year. It is called ichiban, which means "number one" in Japanese. If I had to choose one eggplant to grow it would be ichiban. It's beautiful with black stems, I am rather partial to dark things, and very productive as well as good eating. I tend to harvest eggplant while young which is when they are most tasty and this also keeps the plant productive.

For some reason I have ended up getting this from boxstores, though last year I ordered one from California. My local nurseries spurn this eggplant and instead favor 'little fingers' which is also a similar, nice eggplant, but not as pretty. Its stems are green but the eggplant is similar. Don't get me wrong, I have a little fingers too that I haven't planted yet but, I will plead with my local nurseries to carry ichiban! It is called 'number one' for a reason.

Here's yet another post today. I think what I am doing is worthwhile but currently I have an average of only 10 visitors a day. I hope that this will increase. Anyway, it is my habit to post before I am done editing which means that if you are really keen on this blog, you oughta not click on new posts until they are at least an hour old.

My boyfriend got me set up on bit.ly which I forward to my twitter account when I am really(I think) done editing a post so if my incomplete posts are annoying, you might do better to follow me on twitter and click on the bit.ly link. I am gobbism.

Morning

Just a random post here with eyecandy.

My posh saladbowl planter is filling in nicely. I rotate it slightly clockwise everyday to ensure even daylight for all sides.

I am very happy to see these tulips gradually bloom. I got them late last fall and they were marked down considerably. A few of the 40 bulbs were rotten but I planted the rest here in a single spot. A lot of the bulbs have more than one bloom. They are smaller but wow! I'm easily impressed. Another thing about this planting is that it is elevated about 2 and a half feet above the sidewalk next to it. Everyone walking by may look closely at these tulips.

When I looked out my window this morning on the 3rd floor, this is part of what I saw. I am showing what is currently the prettiest part of my yard. You'll recognize the tulips and the swan, but then there's the bonnie artichoke I saved from last year. It grew huge but did not bloom. This year it should bloom if I don't eat all the artichokes. There is above the bed a shepard's hook with a robin hanging out and a hummingbird feeder. I haven't seen any yet, but somebody claims to have seen one around here on April Fool's day. Maybe that was a joke. Below the feeder next to the tulips is a patch of fennel that braved the winter. That should be pretty nice eating soon.

Mizuna is a very nice green. I like to let it get bigger but I enjoy thinning it. The more feathery leaf is a fennel seedling. There's a bunch all over my front yard. I still haven't decided if I want to let any grow up.

Starting from Scratch

If you wanna start a garden where there was none, there's more than one way to do it. A lot of people think that you need a rototiller and to double dig before you plant anything. That is not my approach. I had an art teacher in high school who said, think of any art that you make as being complete as you are creating it. This definitely applies to a garden. Indeed, a good garden is good art. Art is often beyond your control. A garden is definitely that. A garden is really a partnership with nature.

You 1st need to ask yourself some questions. The 1st one should be how am I going to do this and have FUN with it? One thing that makes a garden fun is not doing too much work. You might have an overall goal but it's best to do it in manageable steps. When you take a step by step approach you also get to reassess your garden. Maybe that spot that you thought would be great for lettuce because it looks to be shady gets more sun than you thought. Watching a garden go through a year will help you make better decisions later on.

You've decided what area you want to use. What should you do to make things grow better? I start by clearing it of weeds. Ideally, one should get in there and not only pull them from the top, but dig down to the roots. Maybe your yard is a god awful mess. A large part of my garden was awful. Rather than weed the whole thing, I concentrated on the front. In back I covered my weedy mess with cardboard. On top of that was some landscaping cloth and on top of that I put compost. I made raised beds about 6 inches deep. you can't grow everything in that, but you can grow a lot. Square foot gardening is all about this.

The 1st picture shows an intensely improved bed. I dug in compost over most of it to a depth of 8-12 inches deep, some largely due to the fact that I had to dig up a weed tree then topped it all with 3 inches of compost. This bed was very productive but if I had committed myself to doing the same for ALL of my garden I would have become really tired. Personally I tend not to be so single minded. It's so much more fun to fill a silly swan planter with flowers! This year I will shape up more beds.

One bed all I really did is top it with compost. I'd dig some dirt in as I planted things, but I didn't go crazy with it. In some ways this is less disruptive to all the beings that lived in the soil before I arrived. My veggies did all right with that.

Another thing I did because a lot of my space was challenged is to grow things in containers. I like containers anyway because you can get very creative with them. Rose Marie Nichols Magee, and Maggie Stuckey's Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers is a great book even if your plans are not all about containers. These ladies really make it fun with very specific instructions to make your plants grow.

Another thing I believe is important are flowers. Flowers are not only pretty and smell nice, they attract many beneficial insects like bees and good predators. Whenever there has been a lapse of flowers, the bad insects have dominated.