Ka-BLOOM!

The first flower has opened! It's a bright reddish-orange nasturtium, and it's gorgeous. It stands out like a tiny bonfire in the middle of the green of the rest of the garden.

Early morning.

Late morning.

Afternoon.

There's another bud on the same plant that looks like it's going to bloom in the next few days. I wonder what color it will be?

First harvest!

Yesterday, a momentous occasion occurred: Alex and I harvested the first of the lemon basil! And by that I mean we cut the tops off three of the seven basil plants, but hey, I was excited.

I was making curry for dinner. I had been looking forwards to it all week, because I knew that it called for fresh basil, and instead of buying it from the grocery store, I was going to use my very own, home-grown stuff. It felt like a milestone, the first time getting an ingredient from the back yard instead of out of a plastic-wrapped styrofoam container.

It also seems so fitting that the first thing we harvested was basil. My Dad is a basil farmer, and for as long as I can remember, summers with him have revolved around basil. If you hug my Dad between the beginning of June and the beginning of September (or later, if it doesn't frost), you'll smell basil, even if he hasn't been to the field that day. The first solid food I ever ate (or so the story goes) was sweet basil pesto. Yesterday, as I stood there grinning and holding those first stalks of basil, I felt very much my like father's daughter.

There is something so magical, and yet also wonderfully simple about eating something you picked moments ago from where it was growing not ten feet away from where you're sitting. I've experienced this before, but it was different this time, with my own garden. I felt proud, but humbled at the same time. Yes, I planted the seeds and tended them, but really, they did all the work. (I still find it hard to believe that the plants I see all came from such tiny little seeds.) I guess grateful would be a good way to sum up how I felt, sitting there in the yard with Alex, eating curry seasoned with lemon basil. Grateful and full of wonder.

Before

After

 

The trick with basil is to cut it right above where two new sets of leaves are coming out. Cutting it this way makes it get nice and big and bushy.

Yummm!

Countdown to flowers.

Yeah...so it's been a while since the last post. No excuses. But I have exciting news! Flowers are immanent! Actually, a few green bean flowers opened this morning, which is super exciting. I don't know if I've seen green bean flowers before, or if I had, I didn't remember them. They're white and sort of tightly curled in on themselves. They kind of look like pea flowers, only not so frilly and delicate.

Other than that, I think there's a nasturtium flower on it's way, and maybe a zinnia. You can bet there will be pictures as soon as those bloom. In other news, the cosmos are huge. The tallest is up to my hip already, which is impressive even if you don't count the ten inches or so it's raised off the ground. No sign of impending flowers yet, though I did notice a little spider living in one of them.

Something is up with my zinnias. I'm not sure if they're being eaten by something, or what, but the lower leaves on some of the plants are getting all brown and spotty, with holes in them in some places. The nasturtiums, too, don't seem fully happy. Some of their lower leaves are turning yellow and dying. At first, I thought maybe they hadn't been getting enough water, but now I think it might be the opposite problem, since I've been watering them thoroughly and if anything, they seem to be getting worse. It's kind of ironic that the two that seem to be having the hardest time right now are also the two that seem closest to flowering, other than the beans. I wonder if it's because they're under stress that they're trying to flower early. I'm not too worried about them; if over-watering doesn't turn out to be the problem, then I still have my parental units, the local garden center, and the internet to turn to for help.

Any advice for what might be going on here?

Actually, I was wrong: the zinnias and nasturtiums aren't the ones that were having the most trouble. That award would go to one of my Islander peppers, which keeled over last week for no apparent reason. It seemed like it was doing ok, though it was definitely smaller than the other one, and growing more slowly. Still, though, it had put out a few sets of leaves, and I hadn't been worried about it. Then one day, it just fell over and shriveled up. I tried reviving it with some water, but that didn't work, and in a surprisingly short period of time it was dead and dry. All the while, the rest of the plants in the bed were doing fine. My Mom suggested that maybe something had come up from underneath it and eaten it's roots or something like that, but there was no hole under it or anything to suggest that that had happened. It remains a mystery.

I finally gave up on the mint and thyme ever coming up. I think I probably just didn't keep them moist enough over their incredibly long germination time. So I started them again, along with a new Islander, in little pots and put them on the window in the kitchen where I can keep a close eye on them.

When Alex came home yesterday, I told him I'd restarted the mint and thyme, to which he answered: "I'm sorry Disa, but you can't restart time. It doesn't work that way!"

My ABC's have had a rather rough ride, or at least the A and B have. In my last post, the arugula and sweet basil had just come up. Then, only a night or two later when they were still very small, we had a big rain storm. Unfortunately, those two pots happened to be sitting on the part of the back steps that is directly under the run-off from the little metal awning that shelters the back door. The next morning when I went to check on everything, I'd mostly been worried about the frilly cosmos. I had assumed that everything on the steps was protected by the awning. Well, it turns out the cosmos were fine, but the baby arugula and sweet basil were flattened.

Poor things! I tried to prop them back up and cover their now exposed roots, but they were all matted down and tangled up with each other. I thought that most, if not all of them would die, and I'd have to start over again, but they once again showed me a plant's amazing will to live (with the exception of Islander peppers, that is...). A few died, I think, but when the sun came out that afternoon, most of them picked themselves up and pointed their faces at the sun. Now they're doing great, though they're no longer in their neat little fairy ring circles. In fact, I have so many tiny basil plants that I'm going to have to thin them out, or they'll get majorly overcrowded.

This is them later that same day, when they were just starting to pick themselves back up again.

This is them now, including the cilantro, which didn't get smooshed by the rain.

 
The garden survived another barbeque without anything being trampled or kicked or hit with a soccer, golf, or football. My potted back step garden survived being played with by a curious two-year-old, who was more interested in getting at the dirt they were planted in than the plants themselves. I have some flowers now, with more on the way, and I might harvest the first of the lemon basil later this week. So all and all, I'd say things are doing pretty well!