It is officially Spring in our backyard! Check out the leaves on this tree.
Last week, nothing; this week, a whole tree full. I feel like you can see them growing! To celebrate, I decided it was finally time to plant some flowers. I might have gone a little overboard, but flowers make me happy. These two pots are going to live on our back porch.
Random garden tip of the week: you don't have to fill massive pots up all the way with potting soil. I turned a smaller pot up-side-down, put it in the bottom of the big pot, then filled it up with potting soil. It's cheaper and lighter!
I had some extras after I finished the two big pots, so I filled up the little boxes I showed you in
Week 3.
They got a new home near my garden.
The garden itself is moving a long nicely. Still nothing but herbs to pick, but it won't be long before there are cherry tomatoes and strawberries. The potatoes that were just peaking out of the ground last week actually look like potato plants this week.
The zucchini and acorn squash seeds are up and growing.
A few unexpected visitors have popped up throughout the garden as well. Lots of cucumbers or zucchini and one rouge potato. This is what I get for not letting all those kitchen scraps turn to compost before putting them in the garden beds!
Not satisfied with our progress on the planting front, Chris and I ventured out to a local nursery to find some inspiration for a new project. Some of you may have seen the work we've done so far in our side yard.
We still weren't happy with the view from inside, so we decided to screw some trellis to the fence and plant three pink jasmine plants. They smell amazing and are going to look beautiful when they're all grown up.
Finally, I had a request on last week's post to talk a little bit about how I managed to grow 50+ pounds of sweet potatoes in our garden in Kansas. I looked and looked for a picture of the garden that summer, but this early-season photo was all I could find (I hadn't started blogging yet and, therefore, didn't have a camera attached to my hand all the times).
Here's the story: One day, not long after we planted our garden, I was looking through the pantry and found two sweet potatoes that had been in there a little too long. They not only had eyes, but legs too. I went outside, dug two holes in some of the worst dirt I've ever seen, threw in the sweet potatoes, covered them up, and hoped for the best. Within a few weeks, two little sprouts were pushing up out of the ground. By the end of the summer, the sweet potato vines had taken over half of the garden. I had to cut it back away from the rest of the plants on a near-daily basis.
In the fall, when the vines started to die back a little, I got out the pitch fork and dug around to see what I could find. I honestly expected to find nothing. What I found was one sweet potato after another. I filled up a cloth grocery bag and called it quits for the night. I followed the same routine for the rest of the week and eventually gave up when I reached the limits of the garden. No way I was going to dig up the four blades of grass that had decided to grow in our lawn that summer. I ended up with more than 50 pounds of sweet 'taters. Needless to say, I was way more popular at work than the zucchini lady!
If you're looking for a little more direction, read up
here. Or, throw something in the ground and see what happens! Just make sure you have lots of space.
If you want to see what the garden looked like last week, read
In The Garden - Week 4.
