Wow! What a busy girl you have been! I'm very impressed with all of your plantings and ideas. I'm sure it's a lovely garden---have any pics?

Tell us more about the "Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate". I've never heard of it.

Also, you wouldn't happen to have a few purple-flowered hyacinth bean seeds left, would you? I had mine out ready to plant and I think one of my sweet grands carried them off. I've looked everywhere! Maybe they'll come up soon, and I'll find them. HA! Let me know. I'd be happy to send you an envelope.

Keep sending us your progress reports. It keeps me on my toes!

Hi Robolink!

I do stay busy this time of year! Tired, too, but it is a good kind of tired.

I'll have pics in a few weeks. My digital camera went away to college with my son and will (I hope!) come home with him in May.

"Kiss Me Over The Garden Gate" is an old-fashioned garden annual. It is Polygonum orientale. I got my seed from this year's Seed Saver's Exchange catalog and they say it re-seeds every year at Heritage Farm, so I hope it reseeds here as well.

It is a slender-branching plant that get's 6' to 9' tall and is supposed to be heavily laden with pendulous dark pink catkins. They say to sow in place as it is difficult to transplant, but I sowed some in flats and will try transplanting it. If those die, I'll plant the rest of the seeds from the package directly into the garden.

I don't think I have any purple hyacinth bean seed left, but I will go through my vast seed collection tonight after dinner, and will let you know if I find any. I think I planted them all, as not many seeds come in a package.

Thanks for your kind words on my garden. I love the veggie garden and the herb/flower gardens around it are my favorite place in the world. They stay full of bees and butterflies and hummingbirds all summer long.

I will keep posting progress reports all summer, until y'all are sick of hearing about it. LOL I grew up in the city (Fort Worth, Texas) but spent time on my grandparent's farm every summer when I was little, so think I have a little bit of "farmer" in my blood.

Have a great day!

Dawn

My goodness, you were VERY busy, Dawn! I, too, want to see pictures of your gardens. I am envisioning such a slice of heaven on earth when everything is up and blooming. :-) I applaud your work and love of nature. You are truely an inspiration to me.

~Heidi

Sound like 'real' gardening. My parents did that kind, growing almost everything we ate and canned a lot of it. They didn't have a deep freeze. Do you sell any of your produce? We feel fortunate to be able to buy ours from the competent veggie growers. Our garden is more herbal, wildscape, and flowers. We always try to have tomatoes and cantaloupes. EP

Hi EP,

No, I don't sell it. But I give TONS of it away...to neighbors, friends, family, DH's co-workers, etc. I've never actually flagged down a stranger and offered them produce as they are driving by, but if they stop to admire the garden, I will offer them whatever is ripe. You can meet a lot of people that way. Happy people. :)

I do freeze and can a lot of it. You know, when everything gets ripe at once I start whining about how there is too much, but I never plant less the next year....usually I plant more! It's an addiction, I guess, but I love having all the fresh, organically grown produce we can eat.

I have a lot of elderly neighbors who are mostly retired farmers or ranchers. A lot of them have pretty much give up gardening by the time the hit 85 or so, and I always make a point of going to see them with an armload of fresh cut flowers and freshly picked produce.

If y'all are ever driving down I-35 through Love County during harvest season, you have to stop by and see me. I always have enough to share.

Dawn---who spent 12 hours planting, weeding and mulching today

Man, I'm tired!

Flowers are all planted. (25 or so varieties.)

Herbs are all planted. (Various ones. Not as many as I wanted to plant this year but good enough.)

Alliums are all planted. (Green onions, walking onions, chives, garlic chives.)

Cukes are all planted. (7 varieties. Total of 100 feet.)

Zukes are all planted. (6 varieties. Total of 22 hills.)

Eggplants are all planted. (2 varieties. Total of 18 plants.)

1/3 of the tomatoes are planted. (46 varieties. Will have a total of 130-140 plants.)

1/3 of the chiles are planted. (16 varieties. Will have a total of 100 plants.)

Still to go are 2/3 of the maters, 2/3 of the chiles, watermelon, cantelope, asian melon, honeydew, and will try to squeeze in some green beans and purple hulls somewhere.

Grapes have leaves and the little dried thingies that turn to grapes later in the season. (Hey, I'm tired--can't come up with actual words right now. LOL) Blackberries have gobs of blossoms and little berries starting. Strawberries have gobs of blossoms and fruit, but none ripe yet. Raspberries--dang, I still need to check on those.

Now when can we start eating fresh tomatoes?? :-D

Diane,

You've been a very busy woman, I see.

Your garden sounds great.

At our house we usually have fresh tomatoes before Memorial Day, and sometimes by mid-May, if the good weather holds.

After last night's freeze, though, who knows?

I'm going outside right now to see what survived.

Dawn

Okiedawn, I think you're absolutely right about April being the key time to get those beds weeded and mulched. Last year I didn't get a couple of areas done in the spring and struggled all summer. This year I'm doing one bed at a time, and doing it right!

Robolink, are you planning to come to the plant swap April 30? I will probably have some hyacinth bean vine seeds left. I've planted them fairly late before and they popped up in no time.

sara

Dawn, you sound like a garden goddess! Weaving your magical spells and planting your magic beans! I'm so jealous, sigh..... Wish I could have a veggie garden, but they just don't do well in my yard. I've tried tomatoes, squash, you name it, but I just don't get enough sun.

Are you bringing some veggies to the plant swap? I just have to go to the farmer's market and buy them, woe is me.

You sound like you have a real handle on cottage gardening with all of your old fashioned, antique ornamentals. The one thing I would really, really, really like to have is amaranth 'love lies bleeding', and I had tried and tried and tried to start it from seed. I'm a failure with it, totally. From seed I have grown nigella 'love in a mist', borage (which keeps reseeding every year, and I love it, love it, love it), salvias, basil, cilantro, morning glories, hyacinth bean, spanish flag, hollyhocks (nigra and chater's doubles), fennel, dill, lemon balm, thyme, and Northern Sea Oats. If I can't direct sow it anymore, I don't bother. I don't have the room for pots of seedlings in the house until my kids move.

I would really like to try more of the Japanese Morning Glories. I tried one last year, and it was gorgeous - the double blue? It had a picotee edge and a star-shaped bloom. Also grew chocolate, which some say could also be mini-bar rose. Chocolate has the biggest blooms I've ever seen on a morning glory. I have seeds from last year, and it may self-sow. Grandpa Ott's is coming up like crazy, but I love it, too. One year, it wound it's way thru my azalea in the front yard, and my neighbor thought I had planted a new purple blooming shrub!

But, oh for a mouthful of fresh veggies - warm tomatoes plucked directly from the vine........sigh.....

Susan

Sara,

I have struggled with the weeds ever since moving to Oklahoma in 1999, and have finally determined that mulching is MORE IMPORTANT in the veggie garden than anything else I do, you know?

I see a lot of people in our area who till up the ground and plant a garden in the spring--say about April. The garden looks great as you are driving by. All that lovely brown or reddish-brown soil and all those tiny green shoots in rows. It looks great by mid-May. By early June you see weeds creeping in. By late June the gardens have as much weed and bermuda grass visable as row crops. By July the weeds and grass have won and the veggies are virtually abandoned by the homeowners. Then the same thing happens all over again next year. I can't understand people doing all the work each year to start a garden and then letting the weeds take over.

So, every year in my garden I mulch and hand-pull weeds, and every year the weeds are less and less of a problem. Mulching is definitely the key.

Now, if I could just "transplant" my weed control success from the veg garden to the rest of my landscape!

Susan,

I wish the swap were in late June or early July so I could bring bushels of tomatoes and corn and beans! Since the swap is in April, though, about all I can bring is a few letover tomato plants that I didn't have space to plant.
If I had planned ahead and planted a lot of cool season crops, I might have had some to share. But I save almost all my space for warm-season stuff, and those plants aren't producing yet.

Love-lies-bleeding is very slow to germinate. I always soak the tiny seed in water and sprout it in pots to get it started. I transplant it while it is tiny. I haven't planted any the last couple of years because it usually reseeds itself nowadays. The problem is that I grow 15 or 20 kinds of amaranths/celosias/cockscombs, so I never know for sure just what has reseeded until they get a foot or so tall. Until then they all look alike...well, all the red-flowered ones look pretty much alike...and all the green-flowered ones look pretty much alike, etc., etc.

I do love the double blue Japanese morning glory with the picotee edge. I planted it two years ago and it was gorgeous. I haven't tried it since. Simply a space problem. And I do love Grandpa Ott's. It is so beautiful. I noticed that even Wal-Mart has seeds of it now, so guess it it one heirloom that has won full acceptance and has, thus, been successfully saved from extinction.

I am waiting for that first ripe tomato. Every day I go and look at the 2 plants that have one fairly large tomato each. I stare at them and try to will those tomatoes to grow faster and ripen sooner. Those big fat green tomatoes stare back at me as if to say "we'll get ripe when we're good and ready and not before". I guess I don't have to tell you that the day they are finally ripe we will have BLTs for lunch AND dinner!

Dawn