Myrtle’s Garden

Where I will post photos and updates of our very first gardening experience!

[Valuable information about gardening that I want to save, and hope that it will profit other gardeners visiting this site as well!
https://gab.com/Schaafcraig/posts/110751438773322584 – Avoiding Prejudice in the Garden]

Sept. 9, 2023

It has been several weeks since anything has happened in the garden. Nothing has grown or ripened. Nothing. It is like everything is dormant. I have had some squashes rot and others – and tomatoes – eaten by wildlife. So many leaves have gotten brown and crispy, and so many vines have rotten or died (and I have cut them away) that the garden looks sparse. Most of my herbs and greens got tall and spindly and, while edible, the leaves weren’t as tasty and were also rotting from the bottom. So I cut those down as well. It has been very sad. Here are some photos and I posted a 90-second narrated slideshow HERE.

August 16, 2023

The garden seems to be slowing down a bit these days. There are some bare spots in the dirt, and every day there are some dead or dying leaves that I’m cutting off. (Am I supposed to? I don’t know…but they are unsightly and I don’t think they are productive in any way.) Though we still have a ton of tomatoes of all sizes and tomatillos thinking about ripening, there are only a couple of misshapen cukes left and their plant is turning yellow. I have a few spaghetti and butternut squashes still growing, and an acorn squash. A single zucchini and 4 yellow squash, plus a couple of banana peppers and pea pods are all that have popped up in the last week. I still have 8 cabbages forming heads though, and plenty of greens for wraps and salads, though a few of the plants have grown tall and spindly, with only a few smaller leaves at the bottom. But they’re pretty. And of course, we still have the potatoes to look forward to! I am hoping for grandkids to help with those! (The trail cam is set up too!) And that is the state of the garden today. I just took a few photos this evening before it got dark:

August 11, 2023

I spent a good bit of time in the garden earlier today, it’s been a few days since I’ve been able to get around and get out there! Did some cleaning up, picked a few peas and a tomato…have lots of food that will be ready soon though! I made a slide show of some of the photos I took, in no particular order, I hope you enjoy them…quite the difference from the photos I shared just under 2 weeks ago!

July 29, 2023

Lots more photos today, but these were the more special ones, showing new fruits, and the beautiful colors! We had a lot of rain overnight and this morning everything was so fresh! It was a joy to spend time in Myrtle’s Garden today!

July 24, 2023

I took dozens of photos of Myrtle’s Garden today and this slideshow seemed to be the best way to share them with you.

July 19, 2023

Wow, we are getting so much food from the garden now, and so much more on the way! This is EXCITING!!! Here are some photos from today!

July 15, 2023

An updated video tour of the garden

July 12, 2023

IT seems as if these plants are growing by the minute! Hard to believe how much they change from one day to the next!

July 9, 2023

A quiet garden walk…well, quiet except for Bubba, our neighbor’s rooster, who was also up early greeting the day! I love that Bubba is included in this video though, he’s definitely part of the atmosphere! This is my first-ever garden and I am very proud of it! I have some things I see I need to trim up a bit (didn’t get out there yesterday because it was raining all day!) but so many little baby vegetables are growing! It’s a miracle every time I look at it!

July 6, 2023

Another early morning garden check…the plants change so much, so quickly – overnight, even! When I woke up this morning it didn’t even look like the same garden as yesterday 😲

July 4, 2023

I was up and outside early this morning to check on the garden and take some new photos! It is magnificent!

July 1, 2023

We’ve harvested greens and lettuces for salads and sandwiches, and herbs, and soon we’ll be able to get some squashes! It will be quite a while until we can harvest our potatoes, but it is encouraging to see how quickly their plants are growing! I don’t understand how they work, exactly, and can’t imagine what’s going on in the dirt, but seeing the growth topside is exciting :).

June 28, 2023

A bunch of photos in no particular order. I think it’s time to make some salads, those greens are getting out of control, eh? And it won’t be long until we’re be eating the yellow zucchini! E always finds stuff that I don’t see; they will be here on the 30th so I will have more pictures, or a video!

(Click on the first picture to open them in a larger size in the lightbox, you can scroll through them all from there.)

June 27, 2023

This photo is from yesterday – compare it to the one from just last week (18th), you can see the BIG changes in the plants!

June 26, 2023

June 25, 2023

I shared a video tour of Myrtle’s Garden via THIS POST as this morning, as little Luna and I have been out looking through the plants each morning that Luna has been here; today I recorded it.

June 23, 2023

I have some misc. photos from today that I’ve put into a little slide show…but what do you think of those yellow zucchinis, eh???

June 21, 2023

Our helpers were here today, and E showed me SO much stuff in the garden that I didn’t even see! I couldn’t get pictures of all of them, like the teeny-tiny tomatoes that were starting to grow in a blossom…how to tell the difference between male and female squash blossoms, and that I can eat the male blossoms! She also showed me how to harvest some greens for our supper tonight…so I took some close-up photos of some of the garden wonders and am sharing them below!

L-R, 1st row: the peas are getting so long! Beautiful yellow ball the dill plant has given me! Was concerned that my delicata squash which was planted from seeds wouldn’t grow but, as photos 3 & 4 show, there they are! 2nd row: Pete loves banana peppers, and here is his plant! And his potatoes are poking up plants all over the place today (both shots are from his potato garden); mine haven’t shown themselves yet. There are the greens that we picked for our first meal out of our own garden! And my salad tonight!

June 20, 2023

The garden is growing SO FAST!!!!

June 18, 2023

Pete took this photo of me out in Myrtle’s Garden about a week ago. The garden makes me so happy!

June 17, 2023

The pictures speak for themselves. These are amazing! I have a couple of questions for E next week but in spite of my ignorance the garden is going great guns! (As I used to tell my Itty Bitty Birdie Bites customers who were intimidated by the thought of sprouting for their birds, “These seeds and grains have been growing, all by themselves, for thousands of years! With no help! You almost can’t mess them up, they’re made to do what they do!” I need to take my own advice, I guess!

June 15, 2023

Since I’m unable to get up and out today, our helper E took some pictures on her phone of BLOSSOMS!!! AND she said that I can start harvesting some of my lettuces too!! OUR FIRST FOOD and we (er, actually J & E) only just planted it 15 days ago! I’m SO excited!!! On the left is some thyme…squash in the middle…and tomatoes on the right! She said we can eat the whole thyme plant too, flowers and all, so I’m anxious to try some of that…and it shouldn’t be long until we can be eating some of these tomatoes (they little tiny sweet ones, I forget what they’re called), either! This is the greatest thing – well besides all of the other greatest things – I’ve ever done!

June 14, 2023

My PEAS! I think they’ve doubled in height since 2 days ago!!! They were started from seeds, unlike most of the plants. So I didn’t really expect them to grow so fast! And you can’t see nearly as much dirt compared to the 12th! Anyway, here are today’s photos:

June 12, 2023

We finally got some rain yesterday and my garden is SO HAPPY! To celebrate, I made this collage of all of these happy babies! Everybody is so green, and the baby peas are several inches high…they’ve doubled in size in just 2 days which AMAZES me! Plants that were sad and droopy just a few days ago are now getting huge, and wearing big smiles…see for yourself!

June 10, 2023

The weather is now normal for this time of year and the plants are showing their appreciation. Look at the difference since a week ago! There were little seeds for some peas (and something else, I think?) planted around the edges, and those little babies are reaching toward the sky! Some of them are 2½” tall already! It’s really getting exciting now! Below is a photo of the yard – we put everything very close to the front door so that I have a better chance of getting out there every day that I can. (I probably should have waited for the top picture for a day when Pete wasn’t washing out the trash bin, and had been able to burn our boxes! We haven’t had real rain since May 9 so no burning of any kind is permitted for now.) This is how the yard looked today, with the red and blue pool noodles applied to the sharp and rough edges there is so much more color out there too! The top picture shows everything that J&E did on the 7th, the bottom set of photos shows the progress of our 4 beds.

June 7, 2023

J&E were here for their weekly visit, and checked all of the plants over very thoroughly. Some of the plants that I feared were on death’s door actually weren’t, and E explained how plants work. The big leaves that were dying were not, after all, an indication that the whole plant was dying, but it was taking what it needed to support the new tiny leaves coming in around the base! And she told me I could remove leaves that were drying up and crumbling if I wanted to. The hot weather is moderating now, but these babies are still needing daily water. Fine with me! They also planted our potatoes while they were here! One has some good starchy potatoes that Pete likes, and one has the tiny waxy potatoes that are lower in carbohydrates that I eat!

June 5, 2023

June 3, 2023

Still very hot; plants still not too happy, some look pretty dismal, to my untrained eye. And the dirt was dry…this heat. E reassures me that they just need to recover from the being replanted and it’s hard with this heat. So I watered the dirt pretty heavily again.

June 2, 2023

We were in the midst of a very hot spell this week, and, as J&E explained, the plants were stressed by being replanted, and then having to deal with the heat as well. They told us to make sure we water the DIRT and not the LEAVES, and to check if the dirt was too dry by poking a finger in to see how it felt a couple of inches down. With this heat and sun, it felt barely moist, so I watered the dirt pretty well. They don’t look like happy plants though…

June 1, 2023

Today we met our helpers – who are BIG TIME gardeners with a huge passion for anything they can grow – at Elm Creek, LTD in Farwell, MI to choose some plants and seeds. Last fall they had brought us some containers on legs, which they called raised beds, and we had created some compost since then. Last week we had a load of topsoil delivered. So we were prepared enough to get started and J&E got us all set up!

Aren’t they beautiful?!? I am so pleased with the aesthetics as well as the future practicality! They did an amazing job!

Now we’ve gotten this far – THANK YOU, J & E! – I can’t wait to start getting some flower (in pots) to put around the area too!