Good start - Genovese Basil

I love pesto, and have made small batches over the years. My late husband didn't care for it at all, so it had limited exposure to the dinner table. Now that I'm on my own, I'm growing more basil. 

The first seeds have sprouted and are doing quite well. It's going to hurt my heart when it's time to thin them as I move them to larger cups to continue growing. 

I have a second tray of the Dark Opal basil and it too is doing well, but is a good week behind the Genovese. I staggered sowing the seeds intentionally, and have one more seed packet to sow. I hope to have a lot of basil growing in my garden this summer. 

The weather has been a mixed bag so far in March. Of course it has! It's March! But I was able to get the new Greenstalk filled with potting soil and cultivate the two end raised beds.

I left leaves on the raised beds over the winter so I could cultivate them in. They'll slowly decompose and feed the soil. Then I sprinkled bone meal, blood meal, garden lime, and a general pellet fertilizer on top and used the cultivator to mix that in. That should give me a good starting medium for tomatoes, basil, and other herbs. 

And that's about all the weather allowed me to accomplish. I didn't get the leaves raked off strawberry bed, but that's next. March is a fickle month. We had a stretch of sunny days with temperatures in the low to mid sixties (Fahrenheit) and then the weather quickly reverted back to chilly and damp. 

No matter. Every thing done is one thing done, eh? 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor/The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, gardening, Greenstalk, soil, Genovese Basil, rural living, country lifestyle, weather watching, raised beds, garden planning, herbs, KC Kendricks

Honey Bee jars

I confess. I love the Ball Keepsake jars.  I scored eight of the Honey Bee keepsake jars and now I need a special project to use them. 

Part of my garden plan for 2024 is to grow more herbs and freeze-dry them. That may be the perfect use for these honey bees. We'll have to see as the season develops. 

It's never silly to use and enjoy the things you like. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor/The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, Ball jars, Honey Bee, gardening, herbs, home food preservation, collectors

Do it to enjoy now and to build for next season

Very little happens here on the Manor that doesn't take the next season into consideration. Sometimes - most of the time - a current project is all about the future returns. Revamping the area at the gable end of the house was a project like that. I know how I'd like it to look next year, with pots of daylilies and annuals and herbs among the stepping stones, and the Greenstalk at the end full of growing things. 

The last week of August, I scraped back the pea gravel and pulled up the old, rotting landscape cloth, and put down a woven ground cover from Grower's Solutions. It was a lot of hot, sweaty work, but I was very pleased with the results. 

More dirty work was ahead. I repotted all the daylilies. Thank heavens for the John Deere 1023! Carry heavy pots? Not me. I slid them into the bucket and let the tractor do the heavy carrying. And I didn't just repot the plants, I amended the soil to ensure it will be many years before I need to disturb the roots again.

Now that the bigger pots are in place, I can fill in around them with smaller pots that will hold colorful annuals and herbs. Except for the blueberry bush in the center and the Greenstalk by the walk to the patio (just out of the frame), none of the placements were planned. I grabbed a pot from the tractor bucket and plunked it down in an empty hole. It could not have worked out better! I wanted it to be an eclectic mix and it will be. 

I need to spend some time investigating what herbs have the best chance to grow in this location. It gets a lot of sun and the house keeps that area hot. As for annuals, I'll stick with marigolds, zinnias, and begonias. Those are about as maintenance-free as it gets. It's another project that I can strike off my To Do List for this year. Next year, I hope to be able to stand back and enjoy the flowers and herbs. 

Hard work, yes, but well worth it. 

The Lady of The Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, To Do Lists, gardens, daylily, seasonal work, John Deere 1023 tractor, herbs, annuals, rural living, simple country pleasures, a writer's life, looking ahead, Greenstalk, Grower's Solutions

It's at the end for 2023

As much as I enjoy having a garden, I'm not sad that the 2023 garden is all but finished. By this time of the season, it's more work than fun, but even then it's not hard work. It's merely persistent work. 

All things considered, such as heat, smoke, and not a lot of rain, the plants produced. I was extremely disappointed in the tomatoes due to a screwing I got from Ferry Morse seeds - read about that here - but even cherry tomatoes can be used for sauce.  Any tomato can be used for sauce. The variant is in how long you need to simmer the fruit to cook the water out. The plan was to make ketchup, but I made pizza sauce instead. I think with this last harvest and what is in the freezer, I can make another batch of pizza sauce and be good on that for a few years. 

The cucumbers produced well. I ran a couple of batches through the Harvest Right freeze dryer to preserve them, and I canned one batch of cucumber-pepper relish. 

Cucumber pepper relish

This year, I planted green beans for the first time ever. My grandfather always planted a type of pole bean, or climbing runner bean, but I chose the Contender bush variety. They did well and we had fresh beans for our table. Next year, I hope to expand a bit.

Sugar snap peas. I love 'em! He hates them. I've used up all the seed so they're off the 2024 garden plan. So are watermelon and cantaloupe. The melons were a bust. The ONE watermelon that formed wasn't edible. 

I am, apparently, a good grower of cabbage. We love fresh coleslaw, so cabbage is on the list for 2024. I'll stagger starting the seeds so I hopefully get a staggered harvest, and I'll go for a smaller number of heads. Coleslaw is great, but not every day for a month. 

The green bell peppers were an afterthought. I found a few seeds and planted them late, but there are pepper strips in the freezer again. I'm not sure the Great Stuff variety is the one for my garden. 

The Brussels sprouts were about 80% bust. Sprouts formed on two out of seven plants. I do have some seeds left so I'll give it one last try in 2024. Brussels, and cauliflower which died at transplant, are likely going to end up being off the plan for good after 2024, but we'll see.

Only one thing remains - butternut squash. This is the first time I tried this one and the results surprised me. There are ten butternuts growing but not yet ready to harvest. I'm watching for the stems to turn brown to pick them. Once they're all in, I'll process them to use for soup and pie filling. Butternut squash makes a sweet "pumpkin" pie. Just puree it and use the same as pumpkin puree. The flavor isn't that different.

Over the course of the next week, all the tomato plants will come out except for an experiment I'm trying that I saw on a Living Traditions video. The basil needs to be harvested and dried, and the calendula seeds will be ready to store. 

The bees are still prolifically working the tall Cracker Jack marigolds which has made me reconsider them for next year. I'm gathering those seeds and will cast them about the property. What grows in 2024 will grow, and I'll harvest those seeds to spread again. Doing this should develop a strain of plant that thrives in my micro-climate to keep the bees happy. The more bees the merrier! I'll plant a much shorter variety of marigolds in the garden. 

The year 2024 will bring its own successes and failures. I can dream, plan, and implement, but in the end, the garden does what the garden does. 

The Lady of the Hideaway

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, gardening, bees, pollinators, vegetables, flowers, herbs, cabbage, butternut squash, saving seeds Great Stuff peppers, Straight Eight cucumbers, rural living, country lifestyle, a writer's life, home food preservation, freeze dryer

Little green sprouts 2023

The cabbage and Brussels spouts forced my hand. Yesterday, I transplanted some very tender and very leggy seedlings.  They seemed to shoot up overnight and then, of course, they began to fall over. I transplanted eight of each which is all I'm doing of them for this year. 

After that, I planted marigold seeds for the third time. I sure hope the old saying is correct and this time is "the charm." The two previous plantings both damped-off on me. I'm using a different approach this last time. If this batch of seeds doesn't produce, I'll just have to purchase marigolds from the nursery. 

Then I moved on to tomatoes. Last year I planted a lot of Roma tomatoes and they did really good. I canned diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, and pizza sauce. Between what I canned and what was already in the pantry that is commercially produced, I doubt I'll need to can many tomatoes this year. I planted Beefsteak and Pink Belgium seeds and hope to get some nice slicing tomatoes to eat fresh from the garden. 

There is a lot more to come. I have herb seeds to plant in the Greenstalk, and some Kennebec seed potatoes to plant in the raised beds. I just need to be patient and wait on the weather. 

I hope that in three weeks, I can move the cabbage, Brussels, and begonias to the greenhouse and free up space on my shelves. We'll have to see how that goes. It all depends on the weather. 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, gardening, tomatoes, herbs, Greenstalk, rural living, country lifestyle, a writer's life, pizza, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, Burpee seeds, Roma tomatoes

Greenstalk

Sometimes you've got to treat yourself. For example, if you've hoarded your rewards points you should use them for something you really, really, really want but would never pay full price for. Like a Greenstalk. 

No way would I pay just under $160 for one of these planters. I simply would not. But getting it for a mere $55?? Oh, yeah. I clicked on the button to place my order. So what if I burned all my points? I'll accumulate more as I go along. Somehow.

The Greenstalk has thirty planting pockets and an internal watering system. The plan is to use it for herbs with a few red begonias scattered around for a bit of color. I'm not one hundred percent sure where I want to place it, but I'll figure that out this fall and not put soil in it until next spring. 

Planning ahead is one of the fun aspects of gardening. I remember my grandfather anxiously awaiting the arrival of the yearly seed catalogs from Burpees, Gurneys, and a few other companies. I have it easy. I just go to the Internet. I wonder what Pop would make of the Greenstalk? 

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, Greenstalk, country living, gardening, herbs, rural lifestyle, a writer's life, homesteading, home food preservation

We upgraded the greenhouse

There's never a shortage of things we want to do here at the Manor, and it seems there's always a roadblock or two on the way to getting it done. I want to grow more veggies, and you'd think it would be a simple matter of tilling up a spot for a garden. Nope. Deer. We have a DEER PROBLEM. 

To go off on a tangent, this past hunting season was a bust. As in there were not many hunters in the woods. Why? Well, they couldn't get any ammo! Now all you left-leaning folks probably think that's a good thing. In real life, next winter, the deer will starve to death because there will be too many of them. Good going. 

But I digress...

With our local deer herd population, that is to say the little herd that lives in my woods and beds down in the thickets we leave for them, expanded to fifteen, there's no way in hell my veggies are safe. The small greenhouse I got two years ago is just that - small. So I upgraded to a 12x7x7 greenhouse, and amidst screaming wailing and gnashing of teeth from the spousal unit, it went up yesterday. I think it will work out fine. 

I should be able to extend the season for a few tomatoes and plant a few fall Brassicas. Next year, I'll be able to move my seedlings outside a lot faster, and that's always a plus. I may even be able to coax some herbs to live over the winter inside the greenhouse. 

This greenhouse is probably a stepping stone to a more traditional constructed greenhouse, one that won't need to sit on the leeward side of the house to be protected from the wind. I'll just have to see how I do with this one to more accurately gauge whether or not it's worth the investment in a more permanent structure. 

Like a lot of things in life, it's an experiment. It may work out, or it may not. This is just one more step in my life's journey to somewhere. It requires patience to allow everything to happen at a pace I'm not sure I control. No matter how it all shakes out, I know I'll enjoy spending time in the greenhouse on chilly winter days. Maybe it'll be a warm spot to read a book on a cold day. Wouldn't that be fun?!

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor (The Hideaway)

Holly Tree Manor, The Hideaway, simple country pleasures, greenhouse, gardening, Lady of the Manor, a writer's life, white-tail deer, hunting, ammo, veggies, herbs, stepping stones

Now that the fragrance is gone

Every year I look forward to the peonies blooming. We like to sit on the front porch in the early morning before the sun lifts over the trees and starts to cook us, and the fragrance is wonderful. The peonies are a sort of homage to my grandmother and mother. They were fonder of the plants than I am, but I like the visible connection to them and to my younger years. When the peonies bloom, I hope any rain holds off for a week or so because rain ruins the flowers. This year, we got to enjoy the blooms and the fragrance for about ten days but now it's time to deadhead the bushes. 
 

An unfortunate side-effort of peonies are insects, notably bees and wasps. They, too, love the fragrance but I draw the line a coexisting with wasps. 

This morning, before the sun topped the trees, I got the clippers and went out to do the deed. Much to my surprise my helper, although four-footed and black, isn't who I expected. Loki doesn't care much for work. 

His idea of help could have gotten him hurt. Every time a leaf waved in front of his face, he took a swat at it. It didn't bother me but I doubt he'd have enjoyed it if the clippers caught his paw by mistake. 

In the end, the job was finished without bloodshed. Next spring will bring new blooms and I'll remind the cat he doesn't enjoy gardening. 

I doubt my words will have any influence on him at all.

The Lady of Holly Tree Manor