I’m sure most of you, if you were paying attention to The Frilly Apron last summer, remember all of the posts regarding The Frilly Garden. Unfortunately last year, although we gave the garden a lot of attention and love, we didn’t get the vegetable yields we’d hoped for.
We didn’t give up. We never do.
This year, we’ve made a few changes to The Frilly Garden, and it’s back better than ever, despite the late start to the Atlantic Canadian gardening season. We’ve put up a fence for starters – we got tired of looking out our kitchen window to see a fat ol’ groundhog chowing down on our tomatoes. We’ve invested in a much nicer sprinkler, keeping care to water the garden daily when we aren’t getting drenched with the crazy amounts of rain we’ve been getting here lately. We’ve also fertilized with organic fertilizer spikes instead of trying to fertilize with the worm castings we used last year.
My husband and I really think that all of these changes have made a world of difference to the garden and we’re keeping our fingers crossed that we’ll start getting lots of great stuff to eat soon.
A lot of the crops we planted this year were things we knew we’d have success with, based on previous years’ successes – zucchini, tomatillos, lettuce, ground cherries, and tomatoes. We also branched out a bit with some things we knew would do well in a cooler climate – chard, brussels sprouts, leeks, and cucumbers. Since Husband always wants to try growing corn, we planted some of that too (from seed). And we planted most of our peppers in pots to give them a fighting chance.
Here are some pictures of how things are going so far. I think we’ll put some epsom salts around our tomatillos and tomatoes – I’ve read that it really is the best fertilizer. I’ll read a bit more first.
I’m so proud of my herb garden – it’s growing like mad, I’m using the herbs as much as I can, and I still can’t keep the size of the plants under control. I love it!
The basil plant is HUGE – at least a foot tall, by about a foot and a half wide. We’ll be eating the spoils from this plant for the entire year!
And the parsley! I’m going to make some parsley jelly to use some of it up – we have both the Italian flat leaf and the curly varieties:
We’ve also planted thyme, lemon thyme, thai basil, rosemary, cilantro, oregano (HUGE!):
Our sage came back from nothing – we didn’t even have to replant it. Amazing.
In the main garden, we’ve got our bed of zucchini (both golden and dark green), corn, and winter squash.
Our tomatoes and tomatillos are really taking off. We’ve planted green zebra tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes, along with a couple of other varieties.
Red Swiss chard, brussels sprouts, eggplant, leeks:
Our lettuce box, overrun with greens:
My favourite crop of all, the ground cherries.
I’ll continue to post pictures as we make progress.
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