How does your garden grow?

Let's talk about my gardening adventures here in the high desert.

2021 is our third spring in our 1900 home, and I'm finally feeling like I have some understanding of how to tend to and care for the yard surrounding our home. I know the names of a good portion of the plants, shrubs, and trees the previous owners lovingly planted and tended. For the first time since we've been here I bought some annuals (snapdragons and pansies) and planted them in the pots that previous owners have left just for this purpose! I really feel lucky to have a yard that was clearly loved and tended to for years before us.

Let me tell you that I have made plenty of mistakes around the yard since we moved here! The first spring I pulled up the tiny bulbs of grape hyacinths thinking they were weeds (they are the lovely blue flowers in the slideshow). There were things like the honeysuckle vine that I too aggressively hacked away at, and let's not forget that I had no idea how to care for the grass other than trimming it! I've since learned about and identified species and read and watched videos on how to care for all the plants and grass, and I'm hoping that someday I really get the hang of properly fertilizing everything.

For now I just love and appreciate every blossom and do my best to care for the yard to the best of my abilities. I look forward to my abilities and knowledge increasing and noticing the beauty and wonder of my own yard for years to come. The scent of lilacs, honeysuckle, the early April blossoms on the plum trees, irises, roses, and peony have been a most welcome pleasure that I will look forward to every spring we live in this house.

Walter has been a great companion in the yard and he and I together have been dabbling in the adventures of vegetable gardening.

Since our lovely yard is fully landscaped and irrigated with beds around the house and lawn in the front, side, and back, I did not want to redo any of that to grow veggies. Last year my neighbor so kindly gifted us with a self-irrigated planter (SIP) with basil in it that he made from a cat litter container. He told us to check out "Gardening with Leon" on YouTube. That started us last year on our first container growing success, and this year we decided to make more SIPs and tuck them around the yard in empty places that have at least 6 hours of sun.

The purple totes and green plastic tubs in the slideshow are what we made into our self-irrigating planters (SIPs). Below is an illustration from AlboPepper which gives the description of how these planters work. The AlboPepper website ended up being our greatest resource for information on SIPs. If this idea interests you at all, check out his website--its full of really great information and it will inspire you.

The pictures in the slideshow are already 2-4 weeks old, so I will tell you that my plant babies are all bigger and there are some that didn't get pictured this time. I will give another update with garden photos in the summer. Also, another type of pot I'm using for peas and buttercrunch lettuce is a grow bag (fabric pot). So far they also seem to be working well, and it was the Epic Gardening channel on YouTube that helped me out with info on those (another really good gardening resource, IMHO).

Other pics in the slideshow: insects in the garden, little tiny grubs on the trampoline (the sparrows like to hop on and eat them), a three-headed daffodil, a beautiful tulip that kept getting more pink over 2-3 weeks, regrowing green onions, leeks, and fennel which we planted in our coffee sack "tower garden."

Well, I am sure I will have more to say about gardening this summer, and in the meantime I will be out side enjoying my yard! I hope you are enjoying being in nature too.