Puttering Around the Garden

Picked some peas this morning but all in all it is turning out to be a very disappointing harvest. They taste sweet enough it's just that we have had too much rain and they haven't grown as well as they usually do. Plus, they are just tiny.

Trimmed the Aster ‘Snowdrift’ to allow one of the petunia's more room. When I planted these two Asters in 2008 this space was going to be just the right size, according to the description I was given when I ordered it. Little did I know it would get almost twice as large. Nowadays, every plant I buy I allow for an additional 20% growth in width.

My Acorn Squash has sprouted. One out of three seeds isn't too bad considering these seeds were saved from a squash were purchased at a local farmer's market last year.

You may be wondering why I started it in a pot instead of just straight in the ground, well, I have to confess I had no idea how things were going to work out this year as far as what was going to go where and I didn't want to wait any longer in case it got too late. What with the terrible gardening weather we have been having lately it would not have been too late to wait until next week. So I decided to start a bunch of plants in containers and counted on the weather co-operating by they time they got big enough to plant.

Radicchio ‘Variagata di Chioggia’ has sprouted. About a dozen plants have broken ground and boy are they small. I can just barely see them but in no time at all they'll be big enough to eat. This is the second batch this year. The first batch was in a raised bed that was planned for the squash and pumpkins. Again the weather slowed things down.

The Butternut Squash has gotten large enough to go into a bed so I put it at the foot of a ladder trellis I built for this purpose. In all the years I have grown squash this is the first time I've tried it on a trellis. Normally I just let it spread out but I'm testing the 'vertical' theory this year. Hope I didn't get it too close to the pepper plants.

 Same story with the Pumpkin Orange Smoothie. Each pumpkin will only weigh around eight pounds so a vertical trellis should hold them just fine. They are not sitting on little hills but they will do just fine.

Gotta go check on my stem cuttings. This is the first time I ever took cuttings so I'm pretty anxious over how its going to turn out.