Garden Part Two

The Garden has prospered!  I try to pay really good attention to my little flower-spot and it seems to have paid off.  During the horrid heat and no rain, I watered it every other day or so.  I started off with a soaker hose for the area, but quickly determined that the hose wasn't long enough to provide ample enough water to everything in the garden, so I added another 10 foot section of hose.

After a few weeks, the garden started to grow like a weed.  The dehlias put out a ton of blooms, the columbine plants actually went into a second blooming phase, the stepables spread, the herbs started to be identifiable, and I started reveling in my little green creation.

Of course, with growing plants come growing weeds, but in this little of an area, weeding isn't a chore at all.  It's nice getting my hands in the dirt and spend some time outside playing in the garden, taking care of my own little spot.  I've had some issues with my soaker hoses - one of them sprung a leak.  Mom bought me a couple of hose repair pieces and I tried removing the section of hose with the leak only to have the fittings be a little too large for the hose.  It kinda worked, but the hose sprung a second leak the next day, so I just gave up on the soaker hoses all together and got a tiny sprinkler.  The sprinkler works so much better anyways - the entire garden now gets water.

Just tonight I did some garden maintenance.  After doing some yard work and watering the garden, I pulled weeds, cut back the basil that is now 2 feet tall, cut back the lemon balm which was overgrown, pulled out the portulacas (they were just not quite what I expected and were way too spindly and leggy), cut back some other things, and deadheaded the flowers.  The garden is going through it's summer phase now - a lot of the flowers I planted are spring-blooming plants, so the garden looks a little on the ragged side.  I've had to pull out most of the colorful fuzzy flowers as they became ugly and weird looking, and one or two of my other plants didn't make it at all.

However, everything else has grown!  The tomato plant, which I didn't think was growing at one time, far exceeds my expectations.  I've gotten dozens of tasty yellow cherry tomatoes off it (as well as from the ones in the pots on the porch!).  I'm going to have to reposition the red dehlia as it is nearly three times the size it started out, and my stepables are out of hand.  ...guess that second tier is going to have to come sooner rather than later.

Happiness is dirty hands!  :)