Come Into My Garden

Stop, and smell the roses

Toast decided that I’d started work at five, it was nearly eight in the evening, and it was time to stop work. That’s a magnetic power adaptor. She knows what she’s doing.

So I got up from the desk where I’ve been busy with graphic design all day, and went out in the garden. Toast will leave the laptop alone once I’m not there to react to her mischievous ways.

It has been an unusually long, wet, and cool spring. Today’s high in the nineties after rain this weekend meant it was lush in the garden. Also, sticky, mosquitoey, and everything is blooming or setting fruit.

There will be a few peaches, unless they ripen while I’m traveling at the end of the month. Hopefully they come close sooner, and I can at least ripen them indoors. I’m very excited about the prospect of peaches.

This is a little container tomato, and it’s loaded. Peeking around it you’ll see onions and thyme. A whole flavorful dish right there! A determinate tomato, it came to fruiting age quickly and will bear heavily and then be done, so I can take it out and let that little thyme have breathing room.

The grapes are prolific. These cattle panel arches, staked in with 6 1/2 foot t-posts, are bearing up very well. I may do more like them if I find places to do it. I also highly recommend drip irrigation on your grapes if you want sweet, juicy, plump fruits with consistent watering.

This little bed is edged with Desert Bluebells, but behind it are pole beans planted to go up on the bedframe trellis and beginning to do so as it gets warmer. Beans like it hot. The tomato is getting lanky, I’ll have to stake it up this week.

I’ve staked up these hollyhock seedlings, self-planted last fall from the huge hollyhock I had there. I was pleasantly surprised they weren’t all the pale pink of last year’s parent plant.

A Kern’s Flower Scarab, and there was a bee on another flower, but it left before I could take it’s portrait. This Blanketflower is a domestic variant of a wildflower native to the area, and it is just covered in blooms and will be for a while.

When designing a garden, you want to plan for a long flowering season. If, like me, you lean into perennials as low-maintenance in the long term, layering and interplanting can keep you in spots of color all season. Annuals are more likely to bloom, bloom, all summer long, but will need to be replaced every spring. Unless they like you and reseed like mad. I have Thai Basil popping up in random places from last year’s plants!

And I don’t limit myself to the edible here, and the decorative there. No, it’s all a mad jungle of yums and scents and eye-dazzling colors. Even on a muggy evening, but you know, the reward for going out into that is the fragrance hanging in the air you can gulp in like sipping some exotic crafted cocktail.