weekend update

The front-door pot is looking pretty good! Leadwort in front-door bed is doing fine (no pic).



Tomatoes are taking advantage of their new freedom. Got two more Sungolds.



The east bed has also really filled in. As suspected, I put in too much. The Philadelphus should end up taller that all the other stuff, so the proportions are all off now. The "May Night" salvia (purple flowers) are really taking over. I'll take the weed-suppressing cover, though.

weekend update

As promised, The Tomato Lady posted earlier this week that it was time to finally take the row cover off! Man, were my tomatoes squarshed-looking. I tried to free a few ends, hopefully they will spread out some more. Plenty of flowers under there. The Sungold has set fruit and I even found two ripe ones waaaay in the back. We ate them.









I picked up a couple of sage plants and a shishito pepper plant at the Farmers' Market, they're doing ok.

words of encouragement

... from The Tomato Lady: Hang in there!

According to the weather apps, we are almost into the monsoon season here in Santa Fe. Historically it starts around the second week of July — let’s hope so. I for one am looking forward to it — we need the rain plus I would like to see my plants. So be patient if you have your tomato plants covered with row cover. Some of you may be tempted to take them off early but we’ve waited this long and we are almost there.

She must have bigger cages than I do. Get back in there!

weekend update

Tomatoes are getting too big for their wraps. So I polled The Tomato Lady about when it was safe to take off the row cover. She wrote a nice reply saying she'd do a blog post when she took her covers off! Basil is doing well.





I put out the yard sprinklers for the new grass, the existing grass, and to see what weeds germinate. Mostly pigweed and purslane. I was pleasantly surprised at the number of dead-looking grass plugs that revived with a few days of watering. Taylor continues to be a butt about digging up the "lawn."







East bed is filling in a bit more.

weekend update

Saturday   I finally put the row cover on the two tomatoes. Basically wrapped the cages and secured it with mini binder clips. Italian parsley has croaked. Maybe I'll pick up a pepper plant at the Farmers' Market for that spot.



Set up some sprinklers in the yard. Plan to do several rounds of watering/weed germination/hoe under, then seed grass. Hit the bindweed with the hoe.

I also plugged in the coleus I picked up Friday night at Albertsons (sigh).





Sunday   Rain! And hail! In between showers, planted poppy mallow by the little patio retaining wall, and the leadwort in the front-door bed.







Planted the grass and put up some janky chicken-wire-and bamboo-stake nonsense to keep the dog out of it.





The east bed is looking pretty good (fingers crossed).

weekend update

The employees-only area with the propagation greenhouse and demonstration garden behind the sale greenhouse
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Today was the last day of the spring sales at Waterwise, so I went over in the morning. Selection was pretty picked over, but verything was buy-two-get-one (same-size pot). So I grabbed the last four leadwort (Ceratostigma plumbaginoides) and two poppy mallow (Callirhoe involucrata) in the 2.5-inch pots. Leadworts (leads wort?) will go in the front door bed, not sure about the poppy mallow. Maybe in the backyard to fill in the blank place where some of the primrose croaked over the winter?

Also got eight 5-inch pots of blue grama grass (Bouteloua gracilis "Blonde Ambition"). They were buy-one-get-one. The plan is to divide each grass in two, so I'll have sixteen plug-type starts to fill in the bare spots in the yard the dog has dug up ... ? Will need to put up some temporary fence around them.

weekend update

All I did this weekend was plant the front door pot on Sunday. Stuff was getting really leggy and suffering from having been inside for so long. Dahlia looks iffy, both coleus croaked. I pinched the impatiens and dahlia way back. We'll see how it goes.



Stay out of my flowers, dog.

week update

So I forced myself to do some gardening after work this past week. First-world problems, I know. At least the weather has been lovely.

Monday   Weeded around the raised bed and in the yard across the path from it. Cleared out last year's dried arugula stems/seed pods. Taylor was very interested in all the new sniffs. Hacked back the daylilies — it's going to take disassembling the railroad ties to get that one clump out. Raked all the straw to one side and forked in a bag of mushroom compost. Pulled the drip hose out of the shed (there was much swearing). Set up a line of folded tomato cages as a temporary fence to keep the dog out. ಠ_ಠ



Tuesday   Added Yum-Yum Mix to raised bed. Planted tomatoes, basil, Italian parsley (lookin' pretty sad) and chives. Watered them in with Super Thrive. Set up the drip hose and re-mulched with the straw. Put tomato cages around not only the tomatoes, but also the basil and chives. I believe this is what they refer to in dog training circles as “setting the dog up for success.” I still left the wheelbarrow in the path in front of the raised bed to dissuade Taylor from investigating/digging.



Wednesday   I finally picked up gravel to mulch the east bed. It sat for a week or so before I got around to it. I couldn't decide if it would be better to spread the gravel first (more of a pain to move it aside to plant stuff) or after planting (more of a pain to work around/not crush the plants). So I kind of did it in stages, moving all the new plants out of the bed, spreading the gravel behind where the plants would go, then planting and gently filling gravel in around, working my way from the back to the front. Got about halfway done. Set up the willow trellis thing flat with some random bamboo stakes in hopes of keeping the dog out.



Thursday   Finished planting and gravel mulching the east bed. The willow trellis just doesn't curve the way I need it to when extended to its full length, so I went back to the crossed bamboo. Used more stakes to get smaller openings. Hopefully it will dissuade the dog.

2018 Garden Fair | weekend update

Oh, hi there! This is Taylor, our new dog. She very much enjoys being in the backyard, digging holes in the “lawn” and the east bed, under our bedroom window. The crossed bamboo stick barrier that I put up there last summer to keep Cheyenne out provided zero impediment to her. I've acquired an expandable willow trellis thing to use as edging/fencing in an attempt to keep her out of there.

Also, Taylor had some ... disturbing? poops Saturday morning, so we hot-footed it over to the vet (she is doing well, got a wide-spectrum gut-bug killer and is on a week of colon-soothing pills). I ended up missing prime tomato-buying time at the Garden Fair while waiting at the vet (Bram missed helping set up for Free Comic Book Day at Big Adventure Comics as well). Luckily, my in-laws were there first thing and picked up the requisite Sungold and (lacking any Robesons available for purchase) Black Krim tomato plants for me. They refused to disclose the price, extracting only a promise of tomatoes as repayment. Hopefully the row cover I ordered will thwart any Curly Top Virus-spreading bugs.

I did, however, go over to Waterwise on Saturday to get (in retrospect, probably too many) perennials for the east bed:

• 5 Penstemon pinifolius
• 3 Penstemon "Dark Towers"
• 3 Sedum spurium "Dragon’s Blood"
• 3 Salvia nemorosa "May Night"
• 3 Agastache "Desert Sunrise"
• 3 Agastache rupestris "Glowing Embers"

Why do all these cultivar names sound like they're from a Dungeons and Dragons campaign?



Dug in 2 bags of mushroom compost, and set out the pots. Will attempt to plant them after work sometime this week. Need mulch — gravel, preferably.


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2018 nursery trip

Took today off, met up with Jim and Marsha at San Marcos and caravan-ed over to NM Plant Co. It was my in-laws' first time and they say they'll be back later this week to get more stuff.



Greeter dog is a tank. The guys said "it's all fur," but I dunno. Also: greeter dog's name is Tag. Hi, Tag.



Still good selection, not too busy. I'd say four or five other groups of customers while we were there.


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M+J got some herbs and mostly flowers for the big pots in their courtyard and on their front porch. As always, I'm smitten by the dahlias.





Annuals for the front door pot:

• 1 dahlia
• 2 white impatiens
• 2 multi-colored coleus
• 1 lime-green sweet potato vine

Herb starts:

• 2 Genovese basil
• 2 Italian flat-leaf parsley
• 6 chives
  (because of course all my chives died over the winter, too)

2018 Garden Fair

2017 wrap-up

Oh, hi. Yeah, so I dropped off this blog after June. Lots of things just went south and I didn't feel like documenting the carnage. Here's the TL;DR version:

The only two tomato plants I picked up at the Spring Garden Fair got hit by Curly Top Virus, and croaked.

Everything I planted in the backyard east bed all died, except for the Philadelphus.

The apricot tree out front died, rotted out from the base — leaning precariously into the neighbors' drive, threatening to crush their pickup if it fell over. No saving it, so we had it taken out. The arborists didn't poison the stump, and I had hope the 30-year-old root system might throw up some suckers, but that never happened.




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Good news: we had the coyote fence rebuilt and extended. It's beautiful. Bad: the fence guys finished it up December 15, the day Cheyenne died.



Sigh.