Garden Update: The Garden Is In!

I kind of dropped the ball on updating about my plant babies, didn't I? There's a good reason for that, however: they're all dead. The weekend before May Long, I transplanted the babies into bigger pots and started bringing them outside for increasing periods of time (or at least that was the plan). Unfortunately, it either rained too much or the babies just weren't ready for that yet, and they all died. So I decided to go with Plan B and ended up purchasing any of the plants I want to grow this year.

I'll give you a run-down of what I've been up to garden-wise since my little seedlings bit the dust...

Weekend of May 17 to 19 (the May Long Weekend)

R was away bear hunting for this particular weekend, so I took the liberty of vacating my dead seedlings from all my pots and decided that I'd purchase some flowering annuals for them, to add a bit of prettiness to the backyard. 

I found a great deal on geraniums from Costco (six 3" pots of them for $10) and also grabbed a planter already filled with gorgeous dark purple daisy-like flowers for another $17. There wasn't anything else I liked at Costco, so I went to Canadian Tire for the rest of what I had decided I needed. The Canadian Tire in my little suburb is actually a really good store, as opposed to so many others I've visited before (hometown Crappy Tire, I'm looking at you!) and I managed to get the rest of the flowers I needed for about $30.

I planted all my flowers into their corresponding pots, and they ended up looking great! Yay for flowers!

Weekend of May 24 to 25

I did a lot of garden stuff this particular weekend, and R was around to help this time. We first went to a local greenhouse that specializes in tomatoes and hot peppers to pick up some serrano peppers and maybe tomatoes to put in the extra pots I had. There ended up being a deal on the tomato and pepper plants - buy 12 for $3.50 each, otherwise they were $4 each. So I purchased seven hot pepper plants (five serranos, one Thai hot pepper and one Sweet Heat) and five tomato plants (Roma, Zebra, Black Krump, Pineapple, and I forget the last one). I also got three basil plants (to eventually make home made pesto!) so the total bill came out to $56. Not bad, considering these plants were mostly six inches or taller. Anyways, we planted all these plants into pots (easily movable if the weather goes crappy) after I bought more pots and dirt from Canadian Tire.

We also cleaned up both the side and front flower beds, and planted the perennials I had previously ordered from Costco online (seriously great deal on hostas and a mixed perennial "set"). This took a couple hours, but it was worth it because everything looked so much better when we were done, even though none of the plants had come up yet.

Weekend of May 31 to June 1

This was the most recent and most time- and labor-intensive gardening weekend to date. We rented a small rototiller to clean up the back vegetable garden, which had been neglected for a couple of years. Man, was it a mess! Took way longer to get all cleaned up than I wanted it to, and there's still lots of crab grass and dandelion roots in the soil, but hopefully those will disappear and/or die. We also put up a fence around the garden since the dog likes to eat veggies and dig, and S and K are getting a puppy right away, so we don't want it in the garden, either. Finally, we planted! Ross put in his potatoes, and I put in peas, tendergreen beans, zucchini, purple cauliflower, red and purple carrots, and some garlic chives and cilantro. Hopefully it'll all grow!

And now, to share some pictures...

 

As you can see, the plants are significantly larger than my pathetic seedlings would have been, so I think this might be the way to go for plants next year, as well. Especially since the greenhouse I got the tomatoes/peppers at also normally grows tomatillos, he was just out. Perhaps I can request he grow a certain number of plants just for me! :)

I'll post more about the garden when I can, as these pictures are now from about a week ago.