Let me paint this picture for you...I'm sitting outside, relaxing, ice water in hand with fresh strawberries and tulsi from the garden dancing amongst the cubes of ice. Just sitting here enjoying the breeze as I collect my myself and prepare to dazzle you all with my thoughts...
hahaaa......right. It's like a zillion degrees outside right now. This breeze is more like what happens when you make the mistake of walking too close to an air conditioning unit on the OUTSIDE of a brick building. I do have tulsi and strawberries in my sticker coated hydroflask, cause I'm obviously fancy, but my ice definitely bailed a while ago. I'm outside, but it's only because if I spend another minute locked in my house I'll lose my ever loving mind.
To be clear, I'll take this heat over snow any day. I actually like the heat, and when I'm medically allowed to swim and do fun activities again (post pregnancy stuff) I'll be pumped!
ANYWAY, now that we have established that I have the fantastic ability to complain in literally any weather, let's move on to garden chatter shall we?
Everything is finally looking good! A few of my black poppies even started blooming today!! Boy, they are wild looking. I don't know if this first fully open one is just glitching out on me or what, but it is definitely different! There's another one that should be fully open tomorrow, so I'll have a better comparison. Whatever's happening with it, it's gorgeous.
Cosmos are opening up, the coral fountain amaranth is looking wild and amazing, zinnias are blooming, and sunnies are sending promises of near future blooms. I can't wait for the garden to just be full of color again!
I really want to be able to share lovely bouquets with people in the upcoming years. I may end up putting a few out by the road in a pop up stand this year, but 9 times out of 10 I end up just giving them away. I know that isn't exactly the best strategy monetarily, and we certainly aren't made of money over here, but it just warms my soul so much.Nothing tickles me more than being able to pick things fresh from the garden, be it snap peas, tomatoes, or fresh flowers. Nothing, besides sharing those goodies with people I love. Now that's the good stuff.
Speaking of snap peas, they are finally fruiting! They currently are taller than I am, and are climbing our awesome trellis Jon built a few years ago. I LOVE snap peas, and so does my oldest daughter. I planted way more this year with the hopes that some may actually make it inside, but at the rate we are both snacking, it isn't looking promising. C'est la vie.
On the other side of things, we must have bought the Usain variety of bok choy cause those babies BOLTED so fast!
You see what I did there?
Yikes right? You're welcome.
Realistically the variety had nothing to do with our bolting bok choy. We had a crazy heat wave and the bok choy and spinach both went to seed in a hurry. It happens.
It brought about an interesting happening though. We have never been great at succession planting, like ever. As home gardeners with a short growing window, we just never really thought about it. Now, with wanting to have a market garden in the future we knew that needed to change a bit.
For some reason the bok choy bolting triggered all sorts of planning. We ripped up the bok choy, much to our chickens delight, and planted a new succession of carrots! We also planted new successions of multiple leafy greens and radishes. We now are working on our plan for what will go in the garlic bed once those are pulled. Scapes were pulled last week, so the garlic will be coming up relatively soon as well. I don't quite know what will go in there yet, but we will figure it out. Our strawberries are just about done too. I have been greatly enjoying strawberry shortcake fresh from the garden, sprinkled with a bit of fresh tulsi basil. Something about the combination of basil and strawberries, am I right? So good. Anyway, that bed is just about done now, but strawberries are perennials so we wont be pulling them up to plant another succession of anything. Interestingly enough, nature seems to have taken over our planning and now cosmos have self sown themselves all throughout the strawberry bed. So it looks like there will be a succession of flowers coming our way, which is pretty rad.
This fall we will plant another round of bok choy, and definitely more cold hardy leafy greens like spinach and tatsoi. The plan is to have a hoop house someday where we can grow the colder hardy greens year round. I go a little mental with the lack of fresh growing greens in the winter time, so I think that will help my soul on top of just being totally awesome.
Pretty sure I was trying to get to a point here, but the heat has me a bit loopy. Hope you enjoyed my nonsense rambling though. I'll get it together a bit more for the next one....
Maybe...
Have a lovely day fellow humans! I hope there's water, a/c, and belly laughs in your near future!
xo
Kelsey & Jon
