Well, it’s producing…something. I’m now pretty sure this is not a blueberry plant. It has little catkin-like buds, and the tallest branch is higher than the gutter (around 8 feet tall!). And I just looked, and there’s a blueberry plant at its base! So what is this thing? It must have been a secret passenger in the blueberry pot that took over, like a cuckoo’s egg.

Here are a couple of pictures of the buds. Any help at all would be welcome. It’s nice and tall and healthy, but I don’t know if I want to keep it. If no one knows, I’ll let it flower and then decide. But I’m sure one of my gardening friends will, right?

What is this??

I should probably sweep the porch from time to time.

This little trough in front of the house is nice, but the trees around us are a source of constant pine needles piling up here and on the porch. There’s a giant old rhododendron here that does produce some nice springtime flowers, and after years, I’ve finally managed to get some stuff to grow in the trough. Mostly sweet woodruff and that one big bleeding heart. By June, it’s big enough to engulf half the porch.

A young but crowded border bed.

This is the long border that’s near the street in our front yard. We built the little rock wall last year, and I’ve slowly been filling it in with plants. I’m trying to use lots of light colors; variegated foliage and white or yellow flowers, because it’s partially shaded by trees and needs to pop a little. But it’s been so slow filling in. The crocuses have had their day already, and the tulips are getting ready to bloom. There are a couple of euphorbias, including one of those great striped white ones, which you can see there by that pile of rocks. The rocks are supposed to be ornamental; what it really needs is some sort of statue or birdbath. I don’t exactly know. Like most of the rest of my yard, it’s a mishmash of things that caught my eye at nurseries, without focus or plan. I’m hoping that as it grows in, there will be a nice cottage garden effect. I’ve got a lot of groundcovers here and there that should, in another couple of years, fill in some of that empty space.

Another view of the front border.

That bare-looking tree in the middle here is a wild lilac (Ceanothus, not a real lilac). It’s got some amazing blue flowers that bring all the bees to the yard. But it also had a tough winter, and a lot of the inner branches look dead. There’s green on the tips, so maybe it’ll just need some hard pruning this year. To the right are a couple of staghorn sumacs, which I love in the fall, but which spend much of the spring and summer in a state of unleafyness. There’s also a smoke bush (Cotinus) that I have eternal high hopes for. Every year it looks nicer, and its red leaves do look lovely from summer until late fall.

Grass hates this area.

And this is the sad area I call the “lower front yard.” Our house is on a weird, two-level lot; this is the lower level. There are trees to the left of this photo which shade this whole area, making it possible for only the toughest grass to grow there, and of course the little shotweed plants that grow happily in any location at all. I don’t even bother to pull them out here, because hey, they’re green. There are a couple of patches of euphorbias, too, and those thankfully grow just about anywhere too. I really, really need to do something about this area. At the very least I should weed that patch of planting that’s over there next to the neighbor’s driveway. That’s definitely on this year’s to-do list.

Gone to hell.

And from there, we come to what we call “the sideyard.” It’s the corridor between our house and the neighbors’. On the left is a chain link fence, which I don’t think we can get rid of without some hefty expenditure, so I’ve encouraged honeysuckle vines to grow on it. There’s also a random mix of bamboo, miscellaneous shrubberies, happily spreading Vinca major, bamboo, and weeds, weeds, weeds. I have big plans for this area, though. There is a gravel path there, covered in weeds; I want to dig it all up and put down slate stepping stones. It needs some kind of enclosure for the air-conditioning unit (a lovely industrial touch), and more growth against the fence to hide that ugly thing. I transplanted some bamboo from a gardening neighbor; it’s the perfect place to plant it, with the neighbors’ concrete driveway on one side and the house on the other. If there’s any place I want things to be invasive, it’s here. Except the damn weeds. So I expect to spend a lot of time in this part of the yard in the coming year.

One nice little friend in the side yard.

At least these guys are happy in that sideyard mess.

Much work needed here.

As much as it embarrasses me to post this, I need to be honest: this is the state of our backyard. This patch is the vegetable garden from last year; this year it’s back to flowers for me. But I don’t want to just re-dig it and plant, I want to really plan out what’s going to be done in the back yard. It’s also a two-level affair, like the front; I want to join up the various borders you can see here around the edges, and have a nice little pool of grass in the middle. Maybe it’ll even be grass without moss and clover…but I wouldn’t necessarily hold my breath for that. The most amusing and ugly thing about this photo is that our table and chairs there in the seating area by the shed were covered with a nice cover last fall, which the ravages of winter have caused to rip. It looks so trashy just hanging there like that, but it hasn’t been nice enough to justify taking the cover off yet. That can be a pleasant area, when all the containers are freshened up and you’re sitting around the little firepit with a drink; it’s just ugly and unkempt at the moment. And it wouldn’t kill me to sweep the stairs there often enough that plants don’t grow on them. More for the to-do list.

Dog town.

And this is the “lower back yard” aka “where the dog poops.” It has some nice features; there’s a pretty clematis on that back fence, and some hardy geraniums, a climbing hydrangea, a happy shrubby hydrangea, some ferns, some Gooseneck Loosestrife, and a few other shade specimens — none of which are doing much this early in the year. The bushes to the left get pretty nice white blooms on them around July, but in the winter and spring they’re not good for much except blocking the view of the neighbors’ house. We also have a healthy crop of dog toys and balls, because Mina thinks this area is not just her toilet but also her toybox.

This was nice once.

There’s that clematis. It really will be pretty in a month or so. To the right is my ancient lavender; one of the first things I ever planted here. I haven’t cut it back yet because I think it’s coming out this year. You can’t see it, but next to it is what used to be a wonderful, tall eucalyptus. The poor thing, which I loved dearly, didn’t make it through the winter, like so many things. So both are going to the compost bin. And I so badly need to weed the area against that back fence. There are some great little plants in there but they’ve been overtaken by lawn grass.

Fresh start for the herb garden.

This has always been what I think of as the herb garden; up ’til this year it hosted two massive sage bushes and a decade-old rosemary. But the rosemary died in the cold, so out it came. And I figured I’d just yank out the sages too, since they were a good three feet into the walkway. So I’ve gone and planted new baby sages, and a new rosemary, and there will be room in between for some other herbs until these three take over again. This is all underneath a very old lilac, which I’m sure was planted around the time the house was built in the 1960s, but the tree’s so tall that it doesn’t shade the area much at all (which also unfortunately makes it almost impossible for me to pick lilacs to bring indoors). The whiskey barrel there has been used for all kinds of things; now I’ve started another lavender in there, and packed in some hardy geraniums. Those will grow anywhere, and they’re my go-to plant in areas I don’t want to have to spend much time on.

Pears on the way.

Well, that’s about it. Here are some pretty asian pear buds to make up for all that ugliness. I hope to get a lot of these problem areas cleaned up, trimmed up, dug up and replanted over the course of the year, and I’ll try to be diligent about recording my efforts here. I know it’s really not that interesting to see the ugly side of other peoples’ gardens, but it’s good for me to be able to go back and see how things looked in the past, and encouraging to keep me going on future garden work. And I hope it made someone feel a little better about their own garden tasks as yet undone.

Happy spring!

Anyway, I just got these two amazing scarves from a shop called Cyberoptix Tie Lab. I wish the colors were as wonderful on these photos as they are in real life; they just about glow. Apparently they use Fair Trade silk, which is nice, and each one is made when you order it. They’re very affordable, too, compared to what you’d pay at a boutique store. Check ‘em out. (Sorry, had to sneak a dog photo in there. But she’s so winsome!)

This blog used to be called “Learning to Grow Food” but I decided that I’d better change it, since my focus won’t be on edibles any more (though I considered changing it to “Failing to Grow Food.” Ha!).

Anyway, here are a few of the new green things that have started to appear as this long and chilly winter winds down.

Always the first on the scene!

A little green has popped up on the honeysuckle on the back fence.

Some stray bulbs survived the veggie garden area. In the background, Mina wishes someone would play ball.

The daffodils under the old clematis are getting ready to bloom.

Bleeding hearts coming up.

Euphorbias are good in all kinds of weather.

Now what?

Er…the monster being the zucchini, not the grinny dork holding it.

Fresh peas

Of all the things I planted this year, the peas are far and above the happiest. They’re packed into a too-small space, it turns out, but growing like mad. I’ve been picking the pea pods and eating the peas right there in the yard, usually giving the shell to Mina (she loves those and will beg for them, but so far hasn’t eaten peas right off the vine, that I’ve seen).

We have so many peas, though, that I thought it might be time to actually cook a dish with them. So I googled up this recipe, which seemed simple enough: Garden Peas with Fresh Mint. I wasn’t familiar with the idea of putting mint on peas; when I was growing up, peas came out of a can and were always a bit too smooshy for my liking. But we have mint in the garden (at least until the end of the year, when I’ll rip it out without sentiment or ceremony).

So I picked all the fat, ripe peapods I could find, and yanked up a handful of mint. It just took a few minutes to shell them all, and cut the mint up. While I worked on that, Brett prepared some tasty barbecued chicken with feta cheese on the grill. I put all the peas into a steaming pan, and steamed them over boiling water for about 4 to 5 minutes.  When they were done, I mixed them in a bowl with some kosher salt, freshly ground pepper, and a bit of olive oil, and the mint.

They were delicious! Nothing like the bland, gooey peas of my childhood!

Finished peas

They had so much flavor, just like they do fresh out of the garden. And the chicken was incredible; a really perfect summer meal. Next year I’ll plant more peas (but I did learn that it’s smart to plant them closer to the edge of the garden, not in the center where you have to reach over everything else to pick them).

Spinach

Despite my positive results in making baked spinach chips, I didn’t get much use out of the spinach I planted. Before it got very big, all the plants started bolting and I was left with a lovely patch of spinach flowers. This doesn’t make for much in the way of juicy spinach leaves, unfortunately, as the plants put all their energy into trying to reproduce. I guess I could have yanked off all of the blooms, but they were so committed to the effort that it didn’t seem like it would have made much difference. So instead I just tore out all of the spinach plants and planted cilantro in that area. Because you know that even if cilantro bolts, it ends up reseeding (or you can use the seeds, of course) so it seems like less of a waste.

Lettuce

I don’t know if I mentioned it in any earlier posts, but a work friend gave me many lettuce starts, which I’ve squeezed in here and there, as well as putting some in little containers. It’s all doing very well, and pretty soon we’ll be eating little salads.

Happy lettuce

Radishes

Like the spinach, all of the radishes went to seed. So today, when the sun came out, I pulled up the entire patch of radishes and salvaged what I could for use in a salad. Many of the radishes are badly bug-eaten. I don’t know how you’re supposed to get larger radishes if they are under constant siege from underground radish-eating bugs. The biggest intact radish I got was maybe an inch and a half long. Like the spinach, they seemed doomed to fail — the flowers were kind of pretty, delicate white things, though, so I guess not a total loss, asthetically speaking.

Carrots

The carrots seem to be thriving, at least judging by the healthiness of the greenery. As I was pulling out the spinach, I unearthed a couple of nearby carrots and was surprised at how big they’ve gotten; not really long like grocery-store carrots, but certainly bigger than I expected. I saved a few of those to go in the radish salad and murmured encouragement to the rest.

A salad in the works

Peas

The peas are taking over the garden. I suspect that they may have simply bullied the radishes and spinach into early flowering just by force of their massive twining bulk. But today I had the first fresh peas and they were so perfectly delicious that I can only root for them to keep going; there are dozens and dozens of pods on the vines. I’m glad to forgo spinach for fresh peas!

It's almost pea time!

Tomatoes

I was starting to despair of ever eating a fresh tomato from my garden…with all of the wet and cold weather, the tomatoes in the ground are still stunted. The three in containers are doing much better than the garden tomatoes, though, and over the last week, the garden plants seem to be making a real effort to catch up. There are already flowers on the container plants, which is encouraging. I hope that a few more weeks of sun will even things up and I can look forward to picking tomatoes later this summer.

First tomato blossoms

Etc.

The zucchini I planted late in spring is starting to take off, which I assume is no surprise, given the plant’s reputation for doing great in Washington gardens. The corn, also planted late, is about four inches high. It’s more a novelty than anything, I guess; I’m not expecting much from it but am looking forward to whatever it feels like producing. The non-edible parts of the yard area really thriving in this weather; everything is blooming or vining or greening, as per each plant’s preference. Also thriving are the moles. One or more have made a home in the lower part of our yard, piling up their dirtmounds where grass should be. It’s not all that bad, though; it provides literally hours of amusement for Jupiter, who is now completely obsessed with the moles. He spends the day either standing over each pile, staring intently at it, digging at it with his grubby white paws, or resting his entire bulk on the area in some kind of odd cat display of dominance. He is Jupiter, King of the Moles!

Catloaf

That’s it; hopefully as the weather improves, the various plants will start producing snacks for us. It’s been an interesting learning experience this far. I suspect that the next trial will be to see if I can keep things watered once the real summer hits and we don’t see rain for days or weeks at a time. In the meantime, we can always eat the flowers.

Pretty!