Gardening Treasures

My dear old friend Doris just told us a week ago she is moving. She is 90 and feels like it's time to move in with her daughter because she's getting forgetful. She was our first neighbor here in Lehi and has been a sweet friend to our family.

This morning she showed up on my doorstep with her whole library of gardening books to pass on to me! I feel so honored and lucky, like I won the lottery! I can't wait to delve into them, as much to learn as to read her little notes and bookmarks throughout.

Also of note, I ordered my early seeds today on heirloomseeds.com. I am going to try tomatoes and peppers in milk carton greenhouses on my back porch! I also got my peas, spinach, kale, broccoli, and chard to start in the garden in about a month! Can't believe gardening time is almost upon us again... especially with this warm winter weather. I need to get out and do some tree pruning this week and take advantage of the sunshine!

Garden Outing and Red Potatoes!

IFA is always great for an outing with the kids. We headed there to pick up some more garden seeds and check out what they are selling as spring gears up.

My girls love pansies. They call them "fuzzy flowers" because of their velvety texture.

Of course we had to stop and see the cute chicks and bunny! Perfect timing for Easter.

I found just what I wanted--organic red potatoes. I've never grown potatoes, but there's a first time for everything! I've been told by two gardening friends that red potatoes are the way to go.  My mom always cooked small red garden potatoes with garden peas in a cream sauce... yum, I can already taste it.

The kids enjoyed riding on the wagon and lawn mowers while I admired the plant stock. Spring is such a dreamy time for gardeners... so many possibilities!

Strawberry Patch

This was the year to start our strawberry patch! I have been wanting to do this for ages, but the timing was never right. A friend of mine gave me her family's inside information on strawberries from a guru named E. Gordon Wells, Jr.

He suggests planting them in early April, and the variety he likes best is Albion, and ever bearing variety that produces first in the spring and latest in the fall. He says it produces large berries abundantly, instead of small berries with lots of seeds. We went on a field trip to Cooks Greenhouse in Orem to find them. 

They had them in flats, but the nice guy at Cooks gave me a little lesson in bare root strawberries and suggested I buy them 25 bare roots per pot, which is much more cost effective.

The wagons were so fun. That place is a gardener's paradise! Everything in the greenhouses is already blooming and just tempting you to bring something home. We spent a good hour wandering and admiring.

They don't look like much, but each pot really did have 25 baby bare root strawberries banded together. 

We weeded and prepared our plot under the fruit trees. The soil was amended last year with some mink manure, so we didn't add anything this year. Mr. Wells suggests adding peat moss and sulfur, but the Cook's guy told me to try what we've got and if the strawberries start turning yellow, we can always add sulfur or ammonium sulfate later. We have yet to get drip lines to each plant, so for now we are hand watering.

Sometimes gardening makes me nervous because you spend a lot of money on the front end, and just hope and pray that things are "fruitful"! But spring is full of promise.... we shall see!

Home Depot Garden Club

I just saw this update on a coupon blog I follow and thought it would be appropriate to pass it on to my gardening friends!

I just signed up and this is what they offer:

• Exclusive members only coupons and savings delivered right to your inbox.
• Timely gardening advice and regional tips, delivered biweekly.
• Answers to outdoor questions from and "expert", within 24 hours.
• Plant Library and Plant Care Guides
  

I hear their coupons can be pretty good, including occasional buy-one-get-one-free plants and trees!

So here's the link! I think I'll try the 'ask an expert"... I'm interested to see how expert they are! :)

Buying Bedding Plants

While we were in Idaho visiting my parents we visited their favorite nursery. It happens to be run by a group of Mennonites who really know their stuff. Their plant material is healthy, huge, and beautiful, and even better, at steal-of-a-deal prices!

Now is the time (in my gardening zone) to buy bedding plants! The general guideline is to plant after Mother's Day or after the risk of freezing is over, but sometimes you still have to be careful! Here in Utah we have had an extremely cool spring, and just Monday we had a huge hailstorm which stripped and damaged many plants! The forecast is looking better now and hopefully some of those April showers will turn into May flowers.

After visiting numerous nurseries and greenhouses in the last month, it occurred to me that many people probably don't know how to buy bedding plants. For example, Home Depot's nursery department was full of beautiful blooms, but they weren't labeled very well and it would have been easy to buy what was prettiest, only to be disappointed upon returning home and finding it was only in bloom for a few weeks when you wanted something colorful all summer. In fact I saw an older couple buying huge pots of flashy foxglove, and I could only hope they knew it was a spring bloomer. The key to this predicament is knowing the difference between annuals and perennials.

Annuals are plants or flowers that will only live for one season. They don't have the resources to over-winter, so you will have to replace them annually. (That's how I keep them straight.) Common examples of summer annuals are petunias, snapdragons, geraniums, stock, and marigolds.

Stock... oh, it smells so good! It doesn't like heat so is in it's prime right now.

Look at this hanging basket of petunias I got as my Mother's Day gift!
It's so heavy we don't know how to hang it without making a hole in the stucco!

Perennials, on the other hand, come back every year. They typically have one bloom period, but this can differ per species as well. Spring blooming perennials such as peonies, iris, and aurinia, only bloom for about a month in the spring.

My aurinia, or Basket of Gold, is still small and almost done blooming.

Others such as lavender, sea thrift, and scabiosa, bloom all summer as long as they are deadheaded properly.

Sea thrift is so compact and cute.

Scabiosa, or pincushion flower, is one of my favorite.

Another key to success is making sure you buy healthy plant material! This seems like a no-brainer, but don't underestimate it's importance! Ideally plants should be just beginning to flower and have lots of buds and lush green leaves. If a plant is already overgrown and full of blooms, it won't have much splendor left for you. If it's too small, however, it may have a weak root system and never reach it's full potential.

The little ones had a great time at the nursery too. There was certainly a lot to discover!

I also bought more of my veggie garden starts on this trip. Now I have basil, peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and a tomato plant in the ground! I need to plant my beans and a few more tomatoes and I will be set! I can't wait for summer.