August and the Garden is Terrific

It's late August and time for another garden update. Carrots, tomatoes, beans, and onions are going great right now. If the season is normal we have six weeks left before a killing frost. The past two years we were well into October before the big cold night hit. This year the weather looks like the middle of the month will be more likely. There have been years when the first big frost came in September but it has been quite a few years since that happened.

Here's to a few more weeks of great garden produce.

Wyoming Garden Flowers

I love this time of year - garden produce time.

We are well into radishes, peas, green and wax beans, carrots, cucumbers and tomatoes. I also dug my two hill potato crop. Have eaten a few strawberries, they had a tough winter but am still waiting for raspberries that also had a bad time last winter. Looks like we will have some late ones.

All and all I am happy with my garden this year, the flowers have been especially nice and my lawn is staying green on its every other day water.
But this year it seems to be mostly about the flowers.

Got one of my books yet? See them all here. What no garden book? Nope, but one is in the works.

Wyoming Garden Update

Gardening can sometimes be tough in Wyoming. But if we are patient and try real hard it is not so difficult. One year I grew nearly 200 tomatoes in my Laramie backyard, now 3,000 feet lower its a piece of cake or maybe a piece of a veggie.

Have been eating these cherry tomatoes for a couple of weeks

Coming soon - pickles

Beans are terrific this year

I like the way our wildflower mix came out this summer

Back garden view

Growing up in Nebraska I just must have a garden every year, but I leave the corn to my Nebraska gardening friends. Hope your summer is growing well (play on words) happy gardening

Wildflowers on the Hike

Seems late in the year for wildflowers but with the abundant rainfall we are having they are still looking great. 

Wonderful hike in Guernsey State Park this afternoon. It was cool, a great day for a long and rugged walk. 

All for the Want of a Phone

Seven pages of forms to fill out for a new phone - wow! Is it really that big a deal?

Seems as I get older that life is getting more complicated, maybe it's just me. The  first phone I remember, in the 1950s, we picked up and an operator would say, "Your number please," and we would tell her. Then she would connect our line to who we were calling, seemed to work okay when I was a kid. Now I fill our seven pages of forms, pay a small fortune for a phone and it takes me a day or two to load all of my, I can't live without apps.

Seems to me that most of my life I made it through each day without checking the weather every few minutes or checking the GPS as I travel to a place I have been a dozen times. No more.

I also need to rest most of the day after mowing the yard. When I bend over to pull a weed in the garden I stay there and look around for something else to do while I am down there. Once I get back up, I might not want to go back down again - that's a lot of work.

We are getting ready to paint the house, that might be interesting. If we get started this week we might be finished, oh - around Holloween.

Well, life goes on, hard to believe that I have been retired for more than three years and 70 years on this earth is only a few away.

The garden is growing, needs a bit of weeding, but looking good.

Old Time Flower

Although they are a bit short lived, nothing beats the sheer beauty of the old fashioned Iris.

Garden Set Back

Might be a few days before I can do some more planting. We had nearly two inches of rain followed by a foot of snow.

Back Deck

But, here in Wyoming, we are not complaining, we needed it.

I may be out of the garden and off the golf course for a day or two, but this will help.

Peas up and growing - 6-8 inches high in this photo. Don't they look wonderful?

Bluebird loving the snow

Wonderful moisture and I have only run the sprinkler system two times so far this spring.

Onions, looking good, but a might chilled. These are in rows, don't look like it here

Tending to the Perennial Beds

Tending to the Perennials

The last of the daffodils are dying back and the first tulips are showing that great spring color. Now how do I take care of my perennial garden to ensure it will be nice for another year.

I add much, some every year, this spring I will add ground leaves that I bagged with spring cleanup. In the fall I will add a commercial, garden center, manure mix. Our beds have been doing so well the past few years that we have had to thin. That is another good tip, especially with Iris. Iris blooms will get smaller and seem to loose color if too crowded.

Good luck with your gardens, almost time for spring veggie planting.

6 Weeks Till Garden Time

Warmer weather and it is looking more and more like garden time. But not too much, not yet anyway. Our back garden is colorful with early blooming perennials.

On our hikes, we are seeing the first of this year’s mountain wildflowers.

Still too cold at night for even my early vegetables to come up. I have planted peas and radishes and a few onion sets (I wait a while yet before setting out onion plants).

Still about six weeks from setting out my first tomatoes and flowers. In the meantime, we still have some color in our family room with our Christmas Poinsettias, still nice to look at. 

All photos shot today April 6, 2015 - come on spring.

Time to Gardern

Spring is coming to Wyoming. How do I know this?

Hiking Monday we saw our first wildflowers of the season.

SPRING!

The first annuals are opening in our flower beds giving the yard some nice color.

Spring and the first warm up is always my favorite time of the year.

Here a brand new baby Hollyhock is coming up, but as they often do, not where I want one. It is in the middle of my vegetable garden. I can’t simply turn under this little guy and plant tomatoes over it, so it will get moved to a suitable location in a week or two.

Think Spring

Wow- Seed catalogs from: Gurney's, Burpee, Henry Field's and the Territorial Seed Company all in one great day - yesterday. For a gardening junkie like me it's Christmas all over again.

What should I plant and how much? Something new? Time to sit back watch the fire in the fireplace and dream of green.

Below are three wildflower photos from June in the park - Think Spring!

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas with wishes for a wonderful garden next spring and summer.

My All New Wyoming Onion

My northern sweet onion experiment has been a success. Although the Granex Hybrid 33, (from Texas) is considered a southern onion (This is the seed used in Georgia to grow the Vidalia) and not particularly suitable as a northern onion I have had great success with them the past two years. Sweet onions are known to be notoriously bad as storage onions. Maybe it’s the northern climate but these have done pretty well in storage.

I harvested my onions in August and am still enjoying them. Four months is a good bit of storage for these. Sadly I now have only a few left. I gave quite a few away, wish I would have saved more as it looks like they will go another month or two.

Unlike the fall started sweet onions in the south, I planted my seed in February and set the plants out 10 weeks later. My secret? Even water and I give them quite a bit.

The Onion pictured below will be my all new, Wyoming Hybrid Happy Face Onion, on sale in all great vegetable markets near you soon – just kidding, but I thought this was a pretty cool looking onion.

The smile is created by the onion reaching near the end of storage life

Winter Time and Spring Dreams

End of the Green

Winter looks like it has made it to Wyoming. Had a great gardening year and am already looking at seed catalogs for this spring. I will start my first indoor seedbeds in February. Below find a few of my winter photos taken over the last couple of weeks.

River Ice Starting to Form