Week 2: A long day's work in the garden.

I'm being rewarded with my first big bloom on a plant I bought with no sign of flowering: a deep orange-colored flower on the Maltese Cross I planted (above).

The other plants in that bed are doing fine, growing slowly but surely.

At the end there (above), you can see the cilantro and parsley are holding their own. I think they're not liking the hot days we've had intermittently, but I spread the bed with a bit of compost and manure and cocoa bean mulch after taking these photos, so I hope that will help all the plants along.

In the front of that bed, the phlox and zinnia seeds I planted seem to slowly be peeking out:

Also pretty happy is the hydrangea plant, and beside it, the butterfly bush, below:

The purslane bed on the right is doing splendidly:

The one on the left (below) is still growing up from tiny little plants.

In that same bed, the mint is much happier:

Behind them, the eggplants are growing slowly. I saw a little purple bloom on one of them, but sadly I knocked it off after I took the photo while I was watering.

The tomatoes seem to be growing slowly. I hope the compost/manure mix and mulch will help them a lot too.

The herbs generally seem pretty happy.

The only one that really doesn't look too happy is the lemon verbena, there between the basil plants and the variegated sage above. I'm not sure what is going wrong there.

The pineapple sage and horehound above seem to be growing steadily, and the chocolate mint is thriving.

My fight with the "lawn demons" continues, though. Since they weedwhacked the best bed of mint I had, below, I surrounded that one too with a ring of rocks (below). I would have done before, but they got to me before I had a chance to, while I was in Ann Arbor at the end of the long power outage. I'm mad, but I know that the mint will come back, probably even hardier than before.


I'm taking similar precautions along the border, where I've also planted mint. Now I'm experimenting with other kinds of materials, including tree branches and broken pottery, since I'm not sure I have quite enough stones to cover every boundary clearly.

Despite their best efforts, the mint still is growing nicely there, and I don't think it will be long before I really do have a nice (edible) border covering that ugly PVC.

That other variety of mint is also thriving in the little bed at the front of the walkway:


The walkway is also improving in appearance as the purslane and that other succulent fill in a bit. Some are still pretty small, but I expect that they'll grow in time. Their older siblings are already looking nice and bushy.


And despite my having thinned it considerably, the purslane is still growing in in patches of grass where the sod is thin.

In the garden plot, I know I have some more work I ought to be doing. Things are dry, and I know they want more organic material to thrive. It's hard, though, because the mosquitoes have been so thick over there, and every time I start working the soil, they're on top of me and I have a couple dozen new bites almost immediately. The peas, especially, have been suffering.


Still, there's been some growth. The okra plants below are shooting up.

And the vines of the squash and melon plants are moving along.

The melon plants have begun to flower.

The beans are growing (below), though I think a rabbit or other critter may have gotten to one of them.

After taking the photos, I did a ton more work, adding compost/manure almost everywhere, working it into the soil where I could, and adding topsoil in some places too, and cocoa bean mulch in some. I also did a BUNCH more planting, including Oriental poppy, larkspur, sunflower, more zinnia, marigold, black-eyed Susan, purple cornflower, snapdragon, lettuce, spinach, carrot, radish, zucchini, redbud, strawberry, sweetpeas, and mixed wildflowers.

I'll update ASAP to show how things are getting along.