Garden Post - Tiptoe through the Tulips with Me...

OOOOOOOOOH.

Because if I'm going to have nightmares you need to... too!


Anywho...
I AM SO EXCITED FOR SPRING!

Aside from the obvious reasons of yay sun, and yay wedding coming up, and yay experiencing warmth and overall happiness. I am excited for my tulips... and my soon to bloom ability to tiptoe through them.

Tulips are in the purple pot with the towel
draped over the top. Gotta keep them safe! 

Last fall, as the winter winds began to creep through the trees and found their ways to JR P.I.'s and my porch, I planted some happy little tulip bulbs (what color, I'm not sure, because... it's me). I had determined that I was going to do my green-thumbed grandmothers proud and grow tulips.

So JR and I went to the Home Depot... or maybe we bought them from Burpee, but needless to say we bought some tulip bulbs and some garlic (this one definitely came from burpee), and we began planting for our spring crops.

We're going to ignore the fact that the garlic died in the throws of winter, because of all the damn snow, and instead revel in the the fact for some bizarre reason, they survived, because
through all the snow, the unthinkable happened, they started to sprout.

And now I have happy little tulips "popping out of the snow, like daisies!" If you can name that quote you get a high-five!

I've been tending them with a gentle touch and plenty of water (most of it snow based). Hopefully in a few weeks, these tender plants will produce gorgeous flowers... hopefully. I am so, so, so excited that I can barely stand it, to get back into the "garden" again. I use the term loosely, because my garden is a series of pots and planters, but I am still really excited to see what we'll be able to grow and eat this year. 

I've got high hopes for our batch of pea plants that we started from seeds, as well as, a bunch of lettuce that started as seeds too. The radish sprouts died quicker than I could say, "Oh my gosh! Yes! Radish plants!" So... yeah, but we've got a couple of hybrid on deck corn sprout-lings still going and a few carrot seedlings. I'll bring those around to you next post! 

Tasty, Tasty Pineberries

Happy, Happy Chives

And on another, happy note, I had a whole heaping of chives that actually over-wintered, so that's ober exciting. They've actually already started to really hit their growth spurt. And, I have gotten a new pineberry plant to replace the one that I killed this winter as well, so soon I shall have delicious pineberries to snack upon.

Happy Gardening! 

Much Love, 

LoRo

Prepping for the Big Move

So last you heard was the big engagement. Now, it's time for the big move. I have 21 days to pack up and move into JR's condo in beautiful Virginia. It's going to be tough (seriously you should see how much SCHTUFF I accumulate), but someone's got to do it.

The combining of the households is requiring a storage unit, because it just doesn't make sense to get rid of a perfectly good bed (the crappy bed frame, yes, the bed, no) and my perfectly good IKEA chair bed (also amazingly comfortable). So we've been packing boxes for a few weeks, separating things that are going to his place and things that are going into storage, while also getting my place in tip top condition so that I get my deposit back (I have a lot of things I want to buy with that deposit).

The combining of the household is also requiring an incredible amount of new storage over at JR's. Let's just say "WALL OF BOOKSHELVES" together! Now a little quieter we'll say "wall of miss-matched bookshelves." We have IKEA bookshelves ranging from Beech to Dark Brown. We'll see how it works...

In the meantime, we've been prepping for the wedding and cooking and I have been steadily researching plants to grow in next year's garden.

Right now all we have left in the pots are Silver Rose Garlic (which are growing quite nicely, we should be able to harvest a couple in the next few weeks) and some China Rose Radishes that are really FREAKING stubborn. I thought anybody could grow a radish! I planted the seeds when I supposed to and everything, but those DAMNED Radishes refuse to plump! We'll try again in early spring to see if maybe the spastic freezing is what's stunting their growth, but who knows.

So next year's garden (let me tell you JR is ober psyched about the new planters coming to his porch - emphasis on the ober) is going to be bigger, we're going to be moving some planters up onto the balcony railing to improve light-reach, and we'll get a few bigger pots for the balcony floor to grow some really tasty things.

The key to next year's garden is going to be edible. Everything will be edible. EVERYTHING (okay maybe some marigolds wont be, but everything else is edible). Burpee.com has become my new favorite website. I visit it basically every 20 mins. Who knows if there's a plant that missed my eye before! I have to see! I HAVE TO KNOW!

So! Next year's garden, I'm thinking:
Chives
Oregano
Basil
Scallions or Onions of some kind
Born to Be Mild Jalapeños
Cayenne Peppers
Sweet Flavorburst Hybrid Peppers
Bush Belle Hybrid Peppers
Container Corn (This is a thing)
Baby Boomer Tomatoes
Shooting Star Eggplants
Peas in a Pot
Caracas Carrots
More Silver Rose Garlic
More China Rose Radishes
&
Pineberries (currently have a plant to see if it can weather the winter, so far it's doing fine!)


I think we're going to need a bigger balcony....

Peeking at a Peck of Unpicked, Unpickled Peppers - Garden Post

So as last you heard, spider mites were tenaciously taking over JR's and my garden. They had latched onto all of the marigolds and essentially made it their cesspool of a house. Having NO idea what was happening, we had left them there for a while, thinking well... it's spiders, just hanging out building a web, but NOOOOOOO. Effing little spider mites surreptitiously took over my favorite flowers.

So into trash bags they went... then a week later, I noticed the stupid little flecks of vermin crawling on our basil and pineapple sage plants.

Be gone with you! Into a trash bag.

After that I started sniffing out any trace of the red devils I could find, and I found some on our Serrano pepper plant, but you know what else I found on our Serrano? A PEPPER! I FOUND A PEPPER! There was actually a single beautiful Serrano clinging for dear life to the plant. So since we had a beautiful few days this weekend, back out into the garden I climbed, eager to prune and feed all of our little plant-ies!

So FIRST! I put my new beautiful cover onto our Chaise Lounge, because seriously... Never knew how disgusting they got without a cover... and this cover is absolutely perfect, because I can take a shower, throw on a dress and let my hair dry Au'naturale via the gorgeous sunlight. And this cover was made 100% better by the fact it was on clearance at Target! Love Target - Love Clearances!

So now that the furniture was looking good, I watered our plants with some high quality plant food included. Gotta feed those peppers! Here's our Serrano as I first saw it. It's absolutely gorgeous. It was about an inch in this picture, and you can also notice another pepper forming in the upper left hand of the photo.

We've been leaving it to get a bit bigger and as I write this it's now about two inches... yes I've been naughty and haven't written about it in a few weeks, but I wanted to save it for the really exciting news...

Not only is our Serrano kicking ass, growing some tasty peppers, but our CUBANELLE and Banana Peppers are too!!!! The Anaheim is taking it's time, so I've started calling it the Anatime sucker. Soon (aka like 2 months) we'll have beautiful Cubanelles grown straight from our own (HIGHLY pesticided garden)... so... yeah... really concerned about eating them. THEN, I sprayed the ever-loving-hell out of every single plant with a heavy dose of organic pesticide, because, they all needed it.

Banana Pepper!!!! 

Why so in love with all this pesticide-y-ness, do you ask? Well first there was the "fungus," then the clear maggots, THEN spider mites, THEN aphids, THEN whatever pest is on it's way next, because serrrrriously, there's probably a swarm of killer bees coming our way carrying a flock of some bugs I dont even know about yet. Why killer bees you ask? Because they'd block me from going outside to poison the other bugs...

Because why would you even walk outside for a second if there were killer bees on your front porch? Me... I'd call animal control.

But back to the peppers... As you can see in my lovely photos (blurred ever so slightly by my phone case covering the lens... because it's waterproof, because you only drop your phone in a toilet twice, before you realize  it's time to protect your electronics).


 Our Cubanelle is a little behind the rest, but it's actually really exciting to watch the peppers form from the decaying flower buds. Seriously... if all flowers turned into tasty food stuffs, I would hoard flowers like you wouldn't believe... I'd be growing a veritable menagerie of flower-food. But since only a few do, I'll stick to the peppers!

OUR FIRST Cubanelle!!! 

So that's it for this exciting edition of what LoRo kills (hopefully not the pepper plants - though the anatime sucker does look like it has the ugly little flecks that appeared before the spider mites built their web - so we'll see). 

We are having some success with some of our other plants that are KILLING it! Seriously! We'll keep you posted! 

Happy Gardening! 

Stay tuned every Monday and Thursday for more posts!

Garden Post - WHAT'S A SPIDER MITE?!

So a couple weeks ago, I noticed that our marigolds were starting to... how do you say it.... look a bit under the weather... I thought, MORE WATER! HAVE SOME PLANT FOOD!

No avail..

They kept getting browner and browner...

and browner...

till finally today, I walked over to them to see what was going on...

and I thought, wow... is that a spider web? 

And it wasn't... 

What it was was even better (and by better I mean I'm officially the most grossed out person on the planet). 

Because you see all those little red specks?

Those aren't part of the web. They MADE the web. 

It's THIS!

This my kind friends is a spider mite... and they're ALL OVER OUR MARIGOLDS. 

I have the heebie-jeebies as I write this. I'm actually vomiting all over myself, because since discovering them. I feel like they're crawling all over me. The vomit is the only way to make me feel better... ugh. ugh. ugh. UGH. 

Lesson learned?

Spidermites like hot, dry climates. They thrive in them. Pro-tip? Water more often, because honey you can't kill them once you've gotten them. 

Now all of our marigolds are in white trashbags, to be thrown out Wednesday. 

I found out, so you didn't have to, 

Happy Gardening!

Stay Tuned every Monday and Thursday for new posts!

Sevin Snow - How to Kill Those Garden Pests

I have a love/hate affair with just about every kind of spider you can imagine. I love what they do, but I hate their entire little creepy being with all the living breath I have in my body. Because the ONE time I need them to eat little bugs to save my plants... They frolic with me in my bed instead.

I nearly had a heart attack last night from a spider crawling across the sheets as I watched Pretty Little Liars (LOVE IT!). I immediately started screaming my head off and JR came to the rescue!

However, on the upside this set me to thinking, since the spiders aren’t doing their job in our garden. I have done their job for them. JR and I went to the Home Depot a few days ago looking for pest killer. We found the Sevin Dust (also comes in easy to use spray - if you have a water hose, which we dont).

There will be no mother effin’ bugs on my mother effin’ plants.

After talking to just about every person I knew who grows plants they basically said that I had bugs or a fungus, but after seeing the creepy little clear maggot you can see here...

The maggot is in the upper right hand corner on the edge of the buried Jiffy Cup

… I decided it was bugs. The organic insecticidal soap I had been using was not doing the job, so Sevin Dust it is.

I DOUSED my plants in the lethal snow.

And then the rain came and washed it off.

And then I came back with a vengeance taking the death blizzard to a whole new level. I dusted EVERYTHING. The plants, the soil, the boards of the porch. EVERYTHING.

Those bugs have met their last day on this planet.

They will die.

I shall kill them for what they did to my plants...

I shall kill them dead.  

I also had gotten some advice that was essentially, pluck the affected leaves off the plant, which I did to the new basil plant We’d gotten to replace the one that the roofers destroyed, but every time I plucked off a new leaf two more were showing signs of deterioration.

Needless to say, that plant saw it’s last day. I literally plucked a plant to death. Don’t be like me.. don’t be a plant plucker.

So for our summer dead plant list, we’re now up to two.

R.I.P.

Thai Basil

Dill

Thai Basil, You'll Always be Remembered 2013-2013

I actually think that this plant is the one that originated the bugs, because it had the highest level of contamination, so it’s only fitting that the afflicted should be sent on to a better place. A happier place, where spiders do their effin’ jobs!

Only downside now...

We have to wait 14 days to eat the herbs

LAME!

The Great Memorial Day Plant Project (Part 2 of 2)

WOW so after all that work and trust me... it was a LOT of work, I thought I'd show you the fruits of JR and my labor. Look how well the light purple and turquoise pots go together. The marigolds look gorgeous. We picked out a lot of the ones with buds on them so that we will have blooms for the next month or so. 

That's my lesson number one for this post. When buying plants from the hardware stores or flower shops or nurseries, always make sure you have an even amount of disbursement of blooms and buds so that you'll be able to experience the beautiful flowers for months to come. 

Bought a new chive plant since the ones I'm growing from seeds are taking a while, and it came with an awesome bonus of oregano!! How cool. Hopefully it's not cutting off the root supply. 

We also cut apart the jiffy cups with the most growth and planted them! The empty cups closest to us had no growth in them at all, so JR planted some Cosmo seeds... We should have a steady rotation of plants as everything is growing (and dying, because hello, have you met me?)

More of the replanted jiffy cups, you can see the cup shape in the larger pot... clearly, we were really concerned about hiding them. 

So the rest of the post is just a lot of pics of the garden in all it's new glory. 

SO MANY SEEDLINGS!!!! Let's see if I can grow them into adults!

Another pot of low-light plants. 

Here's our low/no light plants, hidden behind the chaise lounge. I love the big green/pink plants.
We used to have some when I was growing up in Beaumont. 

I AM SO EXCITED FOR THESE PEPPERS! I LOVE CUBANELLE PEPPERS! 

The upper pot is a 8 in pot from Home Depot and then the plate is a STEAL from Ikea at 69cents.
They were in the As Is section of the store, so we bought two to put under the part light plants to give them a bit more interest in contrasting colors. 

Look I have a Thriller, a Filler and Spiller. Just call me Betty Container-Gardener

JR had to clean up all the dirt I dumped off the patio...

He was a great sport about it though. 

This is definitely a great cross section of what's going on on the porch. You can see the pepper pot (Haha! Pepper Pots!), which are up on the stool we built. And underneath you can see the corner of our part-light plants. In the large purple pot you can see marigolds and verbena and a firework plant that I've had now for 3 years... there used to be more of them... but like I said earlier, we're rotating plants that die...

Lesson number two I learned - PLANT FOOD.

PLANTS LOVE PLANT FOOD.

This might seem a bit like common sense, but here's the lesson. Follow the instructions on the label, but also on top of regular watering according to instructions, buy a spray-water bottle and fill it with a mixture of the plant food and water. Spray it on your plants in the morning and watch how happy they look by mid afternoon. Seriously.