Well, the iris are out, which means it’s plant whatever the heck else you need to time.
I took Friday off so I could go to my favorite garden center (Broadway Gardens)- the haul from which is above. It was raining, so I foolishly thought it would be fairly empty. Ha! Granted, it was no Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, but there were a fair number of people out in the rain.
One thing I was happy to see was an expanded selection of herbs. They moved them to a different house, and there were things available that I know they’ve never carried before. I managed to snag some lemon balm, which I had only see in one other place, at a price so high I couldn’t bring myself to buy it.
This is the finished back yard garden. New additions this year are: sorrel, green shiso, purple shiso, a Berry something or other heuchera, a new hosta (this one has very long, skinny leaves), two coleus (my now traditional Sedona, and one called Dirty Martini), borage, and lemon balm.
In the front of the house, as a placeholder for the year, I’ve planted cosmos. The one annoying thing – I thought I was getting a mix, and it turned out I bought a flat of whites. Oh well. I love cosmos. I’ll live if I only get one color.
The side garden is so busy I can’t get a good overview picture, but this weekend, I added: two tomatoes (a cherry and medium sized one), a pepper, lemon basil, purple basil, Thai basil, Vietnamese cilantro, regular cilantro, parsley, dill, and more Swiss chard (to fill out my pot, and I’ve planted some in the middle of the pea trellis, which can stay there when those go).
The annoying thing there? I ordered the tomatoes, pepper, and basils from a catalog that has a pretty good reputation. My package ended up sitting in a warehouse all last weekend (after an initial email telling me I’d get it last Friday). So, my original purple basil arrived dead (I replaced it this weekend), and I’m really not sure the pepper is going to make it. It was a small hybrid pepper that I can’t get around here, and the size was the only reason I’d decided to try a pepper again this year. (I decided I had way more jalapenos than I needed just from the CSA, and it’s a total crap shoot getting full sized bells to actually mature up here.) I could probably get my money back, but I knew I was taking a risk, so I’m just not going to go there. This just means I’m back to locally grown starts next year. Live and learn, I guess.