Greetings and welcome to another little open-threaded, fuzzy-headed, community-flavored bit of fluff. This week I’m kicking off my usual Friday post of open-threadedness with a batch of photos taken of my garden last Sunday.
And it’s been a busy week. Sunday also saw Brilliant Brother-In-Law flying in with his kids, so I’ve tried to spend as much time with them as I could this week. Seeing as his wife is an only child and Amazing Sister-In-Law merely has an unofficial partner at this point, I believe I’ve got Favorite Uncle status pretty much in the bag.
Yesterday we had Fabulous Mother-In-Law’s funeral. The urn containing her ashes was interred in the family plot and although we had a smaller turnout than say, Princess Diana did, about 30 of us showed up to pay our respects and hear Mrs the Werelynx’s lovely little biographical tribute to her mother. A similar number of people (most of the same people) showed up at a nearby restaurant to enjoy some good food and chat for the rest of the afternoon. Mrs the Werelynx had prepared three photo albums of old family photos for everyone to page through and talk about.
I’d prepared a little slide show (under 250 photos, just under) of somewhat newer photos of Fabulous Mother-In-Law, but due to charming technical difficulties was unable to share it with the group. Perhaps I’ll relate that story in the comments later. Because, I fear this introduction may just take up all of the time I’ve allotted for diary writing today. And it’s going to be another busy day.
So let’s get into the garden that was, the garden of all of my delicate little seedlings that were surely gasping for water in the hot weather this week. We plan to head up again this evening, after dropping Brilliant Brother-In-Law and my nephews off at the airport. I might even manage a few updated update photos, but no promises. A damage report perhaps.
What better way to start than with a picture of the larger of the two Kalettes that somehow managed to survive a Czech winter. The lovely things are blooming. I’m planning on letting them go to seed. I’m wondering though, as a special hybrid Brukale, if the seeds will be viable. I hope to find out next year.
The Beets were poking up through the clay-heavy soil. The odd bits of white fluff are seeds from the nearby willow.
Some young onions in the foreground and two little clumps of radishes in the middle. The radishes are from leftover scraps of seed from previous years. A better look at that odd construction poking in from the right will be seen in other photos.
The construction is a makeshift greenhouse without a roof. A shelter to help some Habanero Peppers stay hotter while still allowing a bit of rain to get in. Here we see the interior with the Habanero I rescued from the garden last autumn and managed to keep alive over the wintry months back in Prague, plus the ridiculously tiny, fragile, probably dead as of this writing, seedling Habaneros all in a row in front of it.
There’s my odd construction. Two sheets of textured glass I saved from when we replaced the interior doors of our apartment, held up by some metal modular shelving posts. The shelves themselves were lost, so I’ve been finding other uses for the rest of the frame. The glass is held in place with bits of old hinges and brackets and those in turn are kept from direct contact with the glass with a few scraps of durable fabric.
Next to that thing I’ve got another thing, even more loosely cobbled together from a couple of sheets of glass scavenged from an old cabinet. I’ve got two tiny Cayenne Peppers in this thing.
The bits of blue you may notice in these photos are pellets that should manage to kill most of the slugs who decide to eat them instead of the plants.
The crumbling, raised, triangular, planter box has these three tufts of Lemon Grass growing in one corner. Some Garlic, Onion and a bit of spindly Asparagus and my favorite weed are also visible.
Peas and Sweetcorn
Another Sweetcorn shot
Some weedy Dill in need of thinning. I planted a lot of Dill this year.
In the background, a Mrs the Werelynx peels Rhubarb over the compost pile. Here you get a good view of the relative placement of my makeshift greenhouses and my two packed rows of pickling cucumbers with their rebar trellises. In the foreground there are some small Eggplant, then a long weedy patch of Onions before you get to the Radishes at the end beside the “Habanero greenhouse.”
While I’m out in the yard, a Rhododendron pic.
And standing over by the rhododendrons, I can look back over the garden. Bushy Black Currants to the right. Pale stripped willow poles and few old poles from last year mark where the tomatoes went in. The long rows are the Sweetcorn, Peas and also some old beans and squash that hadn’t yet (if ever) decided to poke some leaves up.
The short row area starts next to the fence with a row of potatoes from cuttings taken from some hairy leftovers from last year. Then a row of carrots (some probably too old to be viable leftover seed) and two rows of beets followed by a row of newer carrot seed.
Yes, the Rhubarb continues to flourish. And we topped off the compost heap before we left.
The encroaching leaves from the left is the Forsythia. Mostly this is a picture of the grassy path into the garden and the various herbs that take up the front section of the garden.
Foreground of Thyme, Bergamot, flowering Chives and Oregano. Between the foreground and the Rhubarb you’ve got the nearly blooming Winter Onions, lots more Chives, some still fairly weedy Garlic, and a bushy clump of Lemon Balm. Off to the right it’s mostly dominated by Oregano, I’ve got three varieties including a “golden” one that is peeking out from behind a big clump of a more standard oregano. A few Strawberries in bloom can be spotted by the sharp-eyed.
Between the Lovage and the triangular planter I’ve got the zuccchini. I put in a couple of copper collars to help them against slugs and tossed in a last minute strip of copper sheeting just to divert any onslaught. Considering we didn’t get any rain this week, I think drought will be a bigger problem than the slugs.
Then there’s my little “upper” garden plot. I’ve got some slug-munched pumpkins and a few tomato plants growing here. Lots of copper in there now and you might notice that there’s a spiky plant collar I made form a plastic bottle hanging on the fence. I’ve had better luck with the copper collars.
Here you can see the relative position of the little upper garden with the main garden. My white-framed greenhouse-ish thing is fairly clearly seen in the background.
The best laid plans of cats and slugs oft go awry. Why, hello there! This is a little update to get the garden news up to date. Just after we dropped Brilliant Brother-In-Law off at the airport he found out that his flight had been cancelled. But we didn’t turn around and rescue him. He did manage to get back to our apartment and is spending the night in the care of #1 Son. The Belgian branch of the family flies out tomorrow. We’re supposed to get some rain clouds moving in tonight. The garden is indeed looking quite dry, but that’s great news at least in terms of slug damage. Not even a sign of a nibble and the plants are looking surprisingly good. Even the delicate carrots are poking up. Everything’s a bit wilted from the lack of water, of course, but alive! I decided not to drag the hose out and give things a drink. We’ll give the rain a chance tonight and perhaps do some watering in the morning.
Thanks for stopping by. I’m sort of playing with the format this week. No captions, yet the text describing the photos is still posted below the photos. As an old reader of comic books, I’m used to reading the text of a picture before looking at the picture. And here I did everything backwards according to my comic book brain. Oh well, maybe I’ll try the text before the pictures next week to see how that feels …
This is an open thread.
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