Still Here

I've been absent from this blog since the end of January but not absent from my garden. Last fall, my daughter gave me snapdragons she had grown in her college greenhouse management class, and those snapdragons are still flourishing in the flower bed at the back of our house. You can see them in the photo at the left. I found the football in brush at the southern edge of our lot that runs along a neighborhood street. I'm thinking of painting it with bright colors and using it as a garden decoration. 

We had a mild winter with only light frosts until March, when we had a couple of late freezes. Most of the garden plants survived since we protected the delicate ones though we seem to have lost one of our banana plants. I planted sunflower and zinnia seeds a couple of weeks ago, thinking that temperatures would stay above 50⁰ at night. However, we had a couple of cool fronts that brought temperatures down into the thirties and forties at night, so those seeds have been slow to sprout. I'm waiting for even warmer weather before I plant basil seeds, but I did buy some purple basil sprouts and lemon basil sprouts from a vendor at the Covington Farmer's Market. I planted those last week. Also, I planted poppy seeds on February 18th; those have sprouted, and I thinned them last week. Poppy flowers enjoy cool weather, I think, so I don't know how well they will do as the weather gets hot here in southeast Louisiana.

My husband successfully sprouted about sixty tomato plants, and he planted fifty-six of them. We didn't have enough room in our big garden, so I suggested he plant the remaining ones in a couple of beds that I had prepared for flowers. These are heirloom tomatoes--Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Brandywine, German Johnson--and I am hoping that they will all produce a lot of tomatoes for canning and for making salsa. Last year our tomatoes were infested with stink bugs; I hope that this year's late freeze will have slowed down the bug population. I'm not looking forward to doing bug patrol on fifty-six tomato plants, but I'll do what I have to do.

In addition to gardening, I've taken on a few more craft projects, have become involved in some community activities, and am still scanning and transcribing Armstrong and Nugent letters. My virtual world may be dormant, but the real world continues to revolve.

I created the trellis for morning glories and purple hyacinth beans.

Last summer's parsley is now bolting.