Summer of 2016 - so far so good

This year is going well for the backyard plantings.  So far the tomato plant is doing well and I don't see any problems with the tomatoes that are on the plant.  It has been a dry year, but, the mix I use has a good bit of peat moss in it to help hold the water.  I have done two cuttings and drying of herbs so this year I will have many bottles to last me for the winter.

My wife is looking forward to the sweet peppers as she didn't get to enjoy the garden much last year due to being in the hospital.

The strawberries were a surprise again.  This is the third year being in the planter and I never expected it to survive the first winter let alone a second one.  I picked about 15 strawberries from the one plant that flowered.

Sweet peppers are liking the weather and if everything matures I should be getting a dozen peppers per plant.  The peat moss mixed in the soil seems to be what is helping as the soil has stayed moderately moist without being overly wet.

Start of the 2013 gardening season

It has been too long since I had anything to write here.  The new season has started and I am going with nine geraniums on the fence life for my wife on mother's day.  I don't buy her anything for valentines day and for mother's day I like to buy a lot of plants that will give her a whole year of enjoyment when she is sitting in our back yard.

I am starting only with geraniums as they are fairly hardy and environment Canada is forecasting a low of around 0c this week.  Next week we will be going out to the garden centres and picking up enough plants to fill around two dozen planters.  The theme colour this year will probably be bright red with white.

Hint to all of those guys who are reading this;  rather than buying cut flowers for your significant other why don't you pick up a potted plant and put it into a container for the whole growing season.  My wife loves this and she gets to show off our garden to neighbours  friends and family for the whole year.

The next thing we have to figure out is what other plants we are putting in.  It looks like the dill from last season self-seeded so we will probably keep that.  I am leaning towards cherry tomatoes (red colour again) as they go well in salads along with green onions.  In a few more weeks our rosemary will be moved to the outside after I give it a severe pruning.  The winter savoury did survive the winter, but the oregano and thyme for some reason didn't.  I like those three spices as I cut them fresh and crush them up into a pan with mushrooms, onions and butter on the BBQ when we are grilling.

Dill and bugs again.

This year we decided to try planting dill again.  For a while it looked good, but, one day I noticed that the plant didn't look very healthy. When I had a closer look we could see about 6 green and black caterpillars having a great time chowing down on the plant.  We manually picked them off and then dusted around the plant diatomaceous earth.  That seems to have worked as for a week now we have not seen any more bugs and the plant now looks very healthy and starting to seed.  We like the plant as when it gets a bit wet we can smell dill in our living room.

The cherry tomato plant is doing very well and we have a good number of green tomatoes growing and a larger number of blossoms.  Hopefully in a week or two we will be getting fresh tomatoes every day.  The Savoury and Thyme are also doing very well and I will be doing a harvest of fresh herbs and drying them for the winter.

Dill

Cherry Tomato plan