Shasta... I don't see any chives in the pic showing the south faced bed, but the first two pics are in another south facing bed! In any case these chives were wintersown in 2003 and planted out as one 3 clumps to start; I used 3 small butter containers and planted the entire containers out as single clumps (or HOS!). I didn't cut them year one but just let them do their thing. The next spring following flowering and beginning to fade, I cut them clumps back to about 4" from the ground. By the end of 2004 the clumps were nice and thick! The clumps start re-growing and filling out as they do...getting thicker. I always wait for flowering stems to brown up and just pull them out later. Looks a little ugly for a minute, but the new growth covers it up. After that I don't let them re-bloom if I want to harvest later on (same way cutting back to 4-5") and snip out forming buds and stems until enough lush chives to harvest; flowering attempts and number slow down in summer. This act of cutting back increases growth from the base...so for me that happens 3x a year: after bloom, harvest, fall (or just let die to the ground, but I can't stand the yellow muck LOL!). Now I can harvest from a few and allow other's to re-bloom!! Love the beneficials that are attracted by the flowers...like parasitic wasps that attack aphids, ect. Oh and BTW each spring I side-dress with a little rabbit manure/bedding mix. The rest of the clumps I have came from the Original 3. In fall 2006 I dug them all up and separated them into 4 individual hunks and replanted. Didn't take but half a season to see them all just as full and big as their parents! I love my chives :D Pvick... Yes, I haven't tasted common mustard greens; the Giant Red were my first ever to enjoy. I assume the flavor would be pretty similar. This one is supposed to have originated from Asia. All I know is they are nice and tasty and I think you should try these on your balcony LOL! Vera

Looks like everything is growing well! For tomatoes, we've done several things. My DH used to keep them trimmed to one stem which he would tie with soft fabric (old nylons are great) to 6-7 ft posts (just saplings, trimmed back to the trunk) that he had pounded a foot or so into the ground. Regular tomato cages only work for short determinate tomatoes, like Romas & yours look too big already for them. I've tried those spiral stakes, but they aren't big enough and the plants need trimming to one stem. I don't like handling tomato plants since they make me itch, so since DH stopped doing much garden work anything that requires tying up or trimming doesn't really work for me. I've been using really tall ones made of large wire mesh that the tomatoes can grow up within, but my hands can fit between the mesh for harvesting or removal of the occasional tomato hornworm. Something like the steel mesh that they use in concrete would make really stout ones, but might need to be held upright by stakes of some kind sunk into the ground.

Betty, Thanks for the reply. The pottery beads look so cool! One way to test your soil is to pick up a handful of it in your hand. Use your hand to squeeze that handful of soil into a ball, and then release your hand. If the soil remains in a compressed fist-sized ball in your hand, it likely needs some organic matter added to it to loosen it up. If it falls apart in your hand, then I think it is loose enough. This test works most of the time, but if your soil is incredibly saturated from heavy rainfall in the last few days, you might want to let it dry out for a few days before you try the squeeze test. I hate CPBs. I cannot even describe how icky I think the larvae, in particular, are. I had hand-picked a few in mid-May and didn't think it was going to be a bad CPB year. Then, we had many rainy days in a row and I barely stepped foot into the front garden for about a week. I just stayed busy in the back garden which drains much better with its sandy soil. Then, when I went back to the front garden, there were what looked like dozens of CPBs, mostly in various larval stages. I put on a pair of disposable nitrile, medical-type gloves, got a bowl of soapy water and went to work. I thought it would be fun to count them as I went along so I could send Tim a text message at work saying something like "I murdered 48 CPBs today". So, how did that work out? Would you believe 229 of them? Granted, I have a huge number of potato plants, but that is a ridiculous number of them. Of that 229, maybe 5 were mature adults. I guess on all those rainy days when I stayed out of the garden, they were hatching and feeding. The next day I found maybe a dozen more, and then the next day about 4 or 5 more. Now I haven't seen any in that garden on any plant or any time in about a week, so I think I got them all. This week's challenge is a vole who has moved into the garden near the potato plants. It is always something. Susan, You're welcome. I hope the seeds sprout and that the plants grow well for you. You know, the first garden I planted here after we moved here was a butterfly garden outside my kitchen window. While I was able to enjoy it for many years, now that we have been here for 15 years, the nearby trees have mostly shaded it out, and I have contented myself with mixing plants for butterflies into the big fenced garden. I've always had planting a new dedicated butterfly garden on my to do list though. Lantana is one of my all-time favorite plants, but I couldn't keep it alive here even in well-amended clay. It might live for a couple of years, but then a rainy winter would kill it. So, having the new sandy soil garden gives me the chance to grow all those plants that demand well-drained soil. It is sort of like being new at gardening....because I get to grow so many things that just didn't grow well in the clay here. Some of the plants I am growing now have repeatedly failed here in clay, but I feel pretty confident that they will be fine in the sandy soil. I raised a lot of Echinacea 'Cheyenne Spirit' from seed this year and put most of the plants in the new garden, though I did put maybe 8 or 10 of them in the NW corner of the old garden, which is the sandy end where drainage is better. We'll see how they do. I also planted PowWow Wild Berry and PowWow White in the back garden and Veronica 'First Love' which is just so gorgeous. I love growing veggies, but I have got to have flowers too, and I didn't plant many flowers in the last two drought summers because that just would have been that much more stuff to water, so I feel starved for flowers. Don't get me wrong. We still had lots of flowers, but this year we have FLOWERS! lol With the expectation that his year would be a rainier year,I have gone totally berserk and am growing flowers everywhere. I have no intention of stopping either. Once I have succession sowed some southern peas and bush beans to fill in the area where broccoli and cabbage are now being harvested, then with the rest of the big garden this summer I am just going to succession sow flowers as crops finish up and I remove the plants after harvest, at least until it is time to plant for fall. I guess I'll have to save at least one big raised bed for fall greens, but probably will put all the fall tomatoes in big containers so I can move them into the greenhouse when freezing temperatures threaten. That will leave lots of space for flowers. I have about a gazillion flower seeds so the butterflies should be very happy here all summer. I've planted 6 or 8 types of zinnias already (maybe more, I haven't kept track) and have about a dozen more varieties to plant whenever space becomes available. We usually have plenty of native plants in our meadow and woodland for the cats to feed upon, so all I really have to focus on at this point is nectar plants....except I always grow the dill, fennel and parsley for the swallowtails. Some years I can smell wild dill in the air, but even when I look and look and look for it, I can't find it, so it must be growing in the pastures adjacent to our place. After we finished fencing the new garden area in latest April or earliest May, I quickly planted the veggies I wanted in there...sweet corn, cucumbers, sweet peppers, winter squash, and later on watermelons and a dozen or two leftover tomato plants. I put almost all of that in a certain part of the garden, but mixed in lots of butterfly plants and hummingbird plants. When volunteer okra plants popped up in the asparagus bed (last year's okra was one row over from the asparagus), I dug up the okra volunteers and moved them to the back garden. Once that big new area was mostly full of veggies, I looked at the area that was left and asked myself "green beans or purple hull pink eye peas?" and the answer from my brain was "Lantana! Fennel! Dill! Desert Willow! Sunflowers! ! Zinnias! Parsley! Echinacea! Catmint! Salvia!"....etc, etc., etc. So, clearly my brain was yelling at me and demanding a garden for the butterflies, bees and hummingbirds and that is what I have focused on for the last couple of weeks. It won't be just outside my kitchen window where the shade of the oak trees now rules, but the flying critters will enjoy it no matter where it is, and I will enjoy seeing them when I am out there working. Unfortunately, the area we plowed up for the new garden used to have lots of wildflowers and those are gone now, but when a 'weed' pops up that looks like a wildflower. I dig it up while it is still tiny and move it to the area just outside the garden fence, and I planted a wildflower seed mix in the adjacent meadow to help make up for taking out a large section that once was filled with wildflowers. I also stopped breaking up ground when I reached the area where we have goldenrod every fall. I didn't want to plow under that land because we don't have a lot of goldenrod and I didn't want to lose it. This is the best butterfly year here since at least 2010, so I am really enjoying having so many of the butterflies back again. I don't grow PV here, though I keep meaning to get around to planting one and didn't know there was a flea beetle that eats only those plants. When I grew it in Fort Worth for the butterflies, I guess we were lucky because we never had anything eat it except the gulf frits. When my brother planted a PV and then began to complain about the caterpillars eating it, I worked hard to convince him to leave them alone and let them eat and then the plant would recover after they were done. He was skeptical, but he soon saw that the plants could regrow and recover just fine even after the cats ate them down to the ground. . Kim, Gardening with kids is just oodles of fun. Nothing will make you slow down and enjoy every rock, every dandelion and every lady bug like a toddler who is fascinated with each and every one of them. I love it when children visit the garden. I don't think we've ever had a child of any age come here and not want to immediately go out to the garden. It is the same thing with the chickens and the chicken coops. Kids are drawn to them. Tim's best friend had a small grandson in the early 2000s who wouldn't eat eggs. After he started coming here and collecting the eggs himself when he was 3 or 4 years old, he started eating eggs but only "his" eggs from our chickens and guineas. I think gardening also gets kids to try veggies from "their" garden that they otherwise wouldn't eat. I think that gardening with kids is about ten times as much fun as gardening without kids. Dawn

They are looking pretty good now. By the end of the summer I think they will be pretty close to normal. I dont think it will be able to handle another tree cut for at least a few years so they will need good protection for the next few winters. But after seeing such a will to live, I think they deserve to be a little babied for a few winters. Thanks for updating us on this! I give this method an A+ for palms that have spear pull and appear dead. It probably wont work for more tropical palms but they work fine on the tolerant ones. Good luck! -Alex