Garden April 6th

My updates will always be behind I guess. By the time I get the photos on the computer and then do a post about them, it's usually at least a week later. So all of you in gardening Zone 6b should be seeing what I'm seeing about now or next week. LOL

This is my grape vine budding. I have 4 grape vines now. They were supposed to be seedless but I discovered last year that they weren't and they taste more like muscadines. So instead of eating them straight, I made grape cordial and we drank them. I have ordered 6 more vines from a nursery coming now. Hopefully, they really will be seedless. I have 3 green grapes, 2 red grapes and 1 black grape ordered. I figured a respected nursery would be more apt to get it right than what I found before at Lowes.


The strawberries are blooming away. I can't believe how many there are already. Tigger will be so happy when they're ready. He discovered last spring that he loves strawberries. He wouldn't eat them before because Pooh doesn't eat them (seeds on the outside you know). However, I convinced Tigger to taste them as he helped me pick them and wouldn't ya know? Success!!! That's part of the wonder of gardening-convincing your kids to try new fruits and veggies and then they'll start expanding their diet.


The onions have really shot up. We'll be eating fresh ones soon!

Here's my asparagus. I'm harvesting about 8 spears every other day this year. They taste delicious. The King came up with a very good description of eating them raw. Sugar snaps. They taste a lot like sugar snaps when they are raw. Yummy! I was so excited this past weekend to see tiny baby asparagus plants that had seeded themselves. See, most people are very diligent in their gardens and get their asparagus cut down quickly in the fall. I always tend to be a bit behind on gardening duties. So by the time I cut down my asparagus, it has dropped lots of little seed berries onto the ground. How that has paid off! In about 3 years I'll have tons of asparagus to trim every day.

The sugar/snow peas are vining now. They are starting to latch onto their support. The broccoli and cabbage aren't taking off yet. I'm hoping they start soon or they'll end up going to seed in the heat instead of giving me some nice veggies to eat.

This is a front flower bed. It was cleaned out and weeded a couple of weekends ago. I threw down some leaves in their too. Only one garbage bag worth because that's all I had, but hopefully, the worms will like it and get to work. I discovered that the soil in there is still too clayey. I'm hoping to get some compost to work in a bit better in there. I found one of my plants had rotted from all the rain and the poor drainage. So that's something I have to work on.

Despite that, several plants do really well in here. I have echinacia, salvia, french lavender, lamb's ear. There is a clematis against the wall that I'm trying to get to go up so I attached some new string. I just planted a climbing rose, transplanted another clematis and put in a peony.
This area was cleaned out of english ivy. My purpose in planting that was to have something nice growing against the brick even in the winter for color. However, it just takes over too easily and, I found this out later, is considered an invasive species for our area. So, it was dug out.

You can see the lavender here with a Queen Elizabeth rose behind it. That rose is gorgeous. It had gotten way too tall over the years so this February I cut it back severely. I thought I had killed it. However, it has some wonderful new growth coming and I can't wait for the show it'll put out soon.


This is an arbor the King built for me. It is the entrance to the sidewalk leading to our front door. I have Carolina Jasmine growing up the left side of it and along the fence of the driveway. It smells wonderful every spring when it blooms.

Here's a better look at the flowers. Another nice thing about his plant is that it's an evergreen.


Here's my survivor. It's in a hanging basket on my greenhouse. I did nothing with it the whole winter and it came up from seed. Isn't creation a wonderful thing?