Garden Tour: Week One.

Looking at vegetable garden advice is getting me so excited, and wistful. I wish I had planted even more in my garden: carrots, lettuce, beets, broccoli, potatoes, kale, spinach, chard, peppers, zucchini, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cucumber, more green beans, bigger tomato plants, fava beans, and rhubarb. I think I can still add some of these, for a fall/early winter harvest. But next year I'm going to be prepared by spring, seriously.

Anyway, I promised more photos of my garden. I'm going to try to be be annoyingly diligent about keeping track in my blog of how it's growing, so be prepared. Complete identification of the plants to follow in an edit tomorrow.

WEEK ONE.
Here we are, after a week of planting. From what I remember now, I bought the plants two weeks ago tomorrow, on June 15, and started planting on Saturday the 21st, starting with the herbs and perennials. I moved onto the beans, eggplants, and tomatoes early this past week, and finished up planting the rest of the vegetables today.

Above: The herb garden, clearly delineated to protect it from idiotic landscapers who weedwack everything that's green. From the back, going in concentric clockwise circles from the outside, there's chocolate mint, sweet basil (ocimum basilcum), French tarragon, thyme, oregano, sage, dill, mother of thyme/creeping thyme (thymus serpyllum), rosemary, horehound (marrubium vulgare), pineapple sage (salvia elegans/s. rutilans), basil (variety unknown; Thai, maybe?), more sweet basil, more tarragon, Russian sage "Taiga" (Perovskia afriplicifolia), salvia, lavender "Munstead" (Lavandula angustifolia), Sonata carmine cosmos, rosemary, variegated sage 'tricolor' (salvia officinalis), lavender, English lavender, and German chamomile (Matricaria recutita). I also sowed in seeds for phlox and zinnia, along the borders, that obviously aren't visible yet, though I thought I saw a little sprouting already today.

Above: The path leading to my cottage, along which I've planted mint borders. You can see a little patch of it there beside the light on the right side, and smaller plants on the far side, beside that black PVC piping they seem to think makes for neat borders beside lawns here in Michigan. To my aesthetic, it's just ugly.

Above: Another patch of mint of a different variety from most of the other stuff, at the very beginning of the path on the left side. I think it is Moroccan mint, but I can't remember: I bought and planted it in the garden plot last year.


Above: To one side of my door, here, I've got the eggplants, and in front of that, a new little bed with mint and purslane.

Above: Close-up of the eggplants, week 1. They're the Japanese variety.

Above: Close-up of the mint, which I transplanted from the far side of the garden. I'm pretty sure it's standard spearmint.

Above: The other side of my door, where I've got another bed of purslane and a little more mint.

Above: Close-up of the purslane. I've been digging it up from ALL over the garden and transplanting it into these beds to cultivate consciously since Scrumptious kindly pointed out to me that it is rich in nutritional content. Since then I've also been reading rather obsessively all about it.

Above: The tomato plants, which I fit in on the other side of the door, behind that other bed of purslane and mint.

Above: Being out in the garden inspired me to cut the dead growth off the butterfly bush (to the left). Now it looks so pretty next to the hydrangea (to the right).

Above: Some of the perennials I planted. From left to right, they're Maltese Cross 'Molten Lava' (Lychnis x haageana), summer sun (heliopsis), Columbine 'Music pink and white' (Aquilegia), Beard tongue (penstemon dwarf hybrids), and Blue Queen salvia. I also planted flower seeds -- a kind of daisy, California poppies, zinnia, and phlox.

Above: In that same bed, there's Italian parsley and cilantro on the far end to the right.

Above: My raised beds on my garden plot across the way. They aren't tidy or pretty, but I hope they'll do the trick.

Above: From back to front, on the left: Something I lost track of the label for and can't identify, but I think may be okra, garlic, butternut squash, and acorn squash. On the right, Blue Lake beans, sugar snap peas, cantaloupe, and a sweet potato.

Above: Some close-ups of the veggies.

Above: Sunset dappling the herb garden with light. You can see the lake in the background. So very peaceful here.

After snapping all these photos, I went for my first swim in the lake this year. It was simply glorious, alternately warm and cool, so refreshing, so fresh against my skin. I breathed deeply and looked up at the sky and felt somehow more human than I have in quite a while.