Never would have dreamed!

We could grow carrots this big! These carrots are on a 2 x 6 railing to give you perspective on the size. The taste, well a lot better than store bought. You know those pre washed baby carrots that everyone buys these days, no taste at all when compared to freshly grown organic carrots. If you can't grown them, try buying some at your local farmers market, worth every penny trust me.

Our trick on these? We, OK Meg planted them in late fall and they were in the cold frame. We mixed lots of compost in the soil every year for the the past several years.  We also have spring planted carrots that are tiny right now, but growing every week. Just ate one of these so hard to resist.

 Here is the labyrinth bed of potatoes planted a few weeks ago. It starts on the lower left with a basil plant then potatoes go almost to the center. The after the potatoes pea greens in the center.

 Our larger garlic bed. You can see our onions on the left of the garlic, they are huge. The lettuce in the front is almost past prime at this point. The pepper plants on the lower left were grown from seed.

Meg you need to pick these Sugar Snap Peas! This is half on one of our three trellises of peas.

 Our latest blooming clematis, forgot the name of this one. Last year we had more blooms...

 Meg finally got some Comfrey. As you can see it is doing great in our garden. More on comfrey.

 Black Cohosh, Actaea racemosa Meg brought this home from an Women's Herbal Conference last year. Doing very well.

Self sown larkspur in the cold frame.

 In the past few years I have been taken in by spiderworts. I think this is the one I got from SweetBay. Just love it!

 Oh so beautiful.

 This one is the largest flowering one I have. It has been here for 10 years or so, my one plant in now 4 plants, not a fast spreader by any means.

This spiderwort is pale blue, the camera lost the blue in the petals. Saw an alba "white" spiderwort yesterday on a blog...

More on the 13 year cicadas, I found one casing on the deck earlier in the week and a confirmed one dead in a pan of water here in the yard this morning. We must be slightly out of the main brood. . I read a report of hundreds of thousands of them being seen and heard at Jordan Lake an hour from here.

Bees and Peas

The time is finally almost here, my bees are due very soon. Not sure I'm ready, we'll see. The hive is in the screened porch. I need to level in 2 concrete blocks over looking to pond for the bees and place the hive on it.

 Not sure  many of you know that Tulip Poplar flowers are the main bee pollen source right now in our area. Followed by blackberry flowers. This Tulip Poplar flower was one of many that were on the ground after high winds the other night. If not for the fallen flowers many of us would not even know the poplar was flowering high up in the trees.

 Here is 'Carolina Moonlight' baptisia, doing very well for a three year old plant. To the right of it is Meg's Sugar Snap Peas, just started flowering two days ago. Oh and that is the garden watch kitty Grumpy on the railing.

Here is another trellis of Sugar Snap Peas nearly 4 foot tall. I see peas on lots of blogs nobody seems to know the best way to plant them. I don't mean to insult anyone by that. This is how Meg plants them. Two rows about 1 foot apart plant the peas thick almost next to each other. Yes I said almost next to each other. You got to plant lots of peas as birds and other varmints will get them, other wise after they get what they can your left with very little pea plants. The yellow flowers at the top of the peas is our kale flowering in the cold frame.

This iris I have had for years, I used to know the name, great showing with three flowers at a time.

Clematis henrii in full bloom. I have had this plant for nearly 15 years. I counted 32 blooms this morning, once fully open maybe 60 flowers will open. Wish I knew how to control it better?

Spiderworts in bloom. I know many of you further south hate these as they are so invasive. Our hard clay and dry summers makes them stay put, so far.

Here is part of the garden. Fava beans in flower in the lower front center, peas at the back left side, the cold frame has bolting kale, to the right of the cold frame bolting mustard greens and rape. The dark green mass in the enter is Swamp Sunflower, massive isn't it. I trimmed it back a lot too!

 This peony I just happened to have a tape measure with me when I took this photo. The tape measure read 6 - 7/8 inches across! I believe the clematis henrii would match this in size too. Hard to believe we get 7 inch blooms in our garden!

Back in the fall when I planted these pansies I never imagined they would look this good in the garden. The pansies will falter once it gets in the 90s here and they will be pulled out. These were grown locally from seed less than a mile from here. The primrose next to it is my oldest primrose over 12 years old, it barely flowered this year and the flowers were stunted.

Sometime this weekend we have to pull up the kale, rape, mustard greens, arugula, muzuna all of which are bolting. And we need to plant potatoes (very late) tomatoes, peppers, basil and other plants we grew from seed.

Mothers Day!

Happy Mothers Day to all you ladies out there!

Here is a Delphinium gaurdian blue that I picked up for Meg, the entire bloom head is about a foot tall. Meg loves showy stuff and this fit the bill nicely. The tag from the Durham Garden Center said gaurdian, not sure it was spelled correctly, but that is what it said. Never have much luck growing Delphiniums, anyone with some good pointers please do chime in! Helga down the street that runs a nursery I told her about this plant and she too said she had poor luck with Delphiniums.

Here is a deep red iris that I have had for 12 years or so, it never fails me. This morning it looks almost done already.

My latest Tradescantia it is called Red Grape. The foliage is slightly gray so it does not look like most the others I have and it gets up to 24 inches tall. These are also call Spiderworts.

This Tradescantia I purchased at the Hillsborough Garden Club sale last year. The garden where the sale was have all kinds of tradescantias but this was the only one for sale, think it was 2 or 3 bucks.

Here is the oldest Tradescantia in my garden, it was purchased at the Raleigh Farmers Market 10 years ago or so. It was in the neglected garden for years and barely survived until Meg and I moved it int a better bed where it is thriving nicely now. These blooms are almost 40% larger than normal tradescantias. I would be willing to barter a little of it for other tradescantias like a yellow one or something different than what I have shown here? I do have a plain native type blue one as well here in the garden.

Here is my latest project I did for a customer in Durham. This is the brand new Trex Transcend decking with entirely hidden fasteners. Made from recycled plastics and it will last forever. But it is expensive being almost 3 times more expensive than treated pine. Notice the picture framing I did on this deck and the benches? While building it I watched  a barred owl who dropped in the visit me several times. There is a creek between the house and the deck so it is very wildlife friendly. I also built the 44 ft privacy fence in the background as well. The last day on this job I enjoyed watching and listening to Black-throated Blue warblers in the woods next to me.

Waterlilies and the garden update

Last Saturday I got out in the solo canoe and trimmed out the willow trees that had fell into the pond to clean it up some. Sadly it was the last time we saw the pair of Mallard ducks in the pond. But the next day exactly a week ago, the waterlilies came out, only 3 but a start. Below is 2 of the 3.

I planted the waterlilies 6 or 7 years ago, they now cover 3/4 of the 70- 80 foot diameter pond. In a few years I'll likely have to do a major thinning to keep them under control. We also have several nice clusters of Pickerelweed in the pond.

Today a portion of thew waterlilies in the pond.

This iris is either an Louisiana Iris or a Siberian Iris, the blades seem too thin to be a Louisiana, could it have crossed with the Siberian nearby?

This is an Louisiana Iris for sure and only a few feet for the other iris.

One of my seedling tomatoes in the garden, we have had a terrible year for growing seedlings.

This was last Sunday nights dinner Swiss Chard from the garden finally. The next morning Meg found a pile of chard leaves on the deck that I must have dropped.


Beets and carrots growing in the garden today.

You know I'm legally colored blind, only greens and reds. Meg pointed out to me that this spiderwort was a bit pink and not blue. I stopped at a garden club plant sale yesterday, the garden they had the sale in was full of all kinds of spiderworts and none for sale. I did get 6 plants including a cultivated goldenrod, exciting.

Lemon Cucumber for this morning in our garden. we have an old fashioned tripod set up over it to grow on.

The upper half of the clematis growing along our walkway I featured last week on my blog entry.

The latest project here, Meg wanted dog protection for her batchler buttons. I made the lattice from scraps left over from a customers recent project. Each panel is removable too.

CSA First of the Season

Below is our first CSA it contained arugula & salad greens, green garlic, kohlrabi, black seeded Simpson lettuce, parsley, radishes, strawberries, sweet potatoes and tatsoi. Each week we also get a menu plan and shopping list to help us figure out how to eat our box of veggies.

We cooked the half the tatsoi and green garlic last night using my standard greens recipe. Greens (Swiss Chard or what ever) add minced garlic and minced ginger to taste to the cast iron skillet with olive oil. Add greens cook until wilted, add soy sauce to taste and cook another minute.

Even though we have a garden, Meg and I decided this winter we'd sign up for a CSA. For those of you that don't know what a CSA is it stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You sign up and pay in advance of the growing season for a box of vegetables every week picked up at an assigned location every week (ours is 22 weeks). Our CSA is provided by Harland's Creek Farm they are a certified organic farm that has been providing CSAs for years. We buy organic when ever possible anyway.

One of our clematises planted 3 years ago. this one is growing very well. Lost the tag so I don't know which one it is.

Years ago I bought this spiderwort, it has been neglected for years. Two years ago we gave it a new home in better soil. It is very happy now!

OK any guesses on what this is? it is an exuviae from the larva of the Common Green Darner dragonfly. Must have emerged from the pond last night. In the next few weeks after 10PM (usually) these larva will climb our of the pond and cling to blades of grass or whatever and emerge into an adult dragonfly, this takes about an hour. An earlier post here shows the dragonfly breaking out of the exuviae it is the second photo.