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The Back Fence
This is what our back fence looks like now – the shelving next to our
gate, five tomato plants, and the trellis shown above.
| Dee's showing the lemon thyme. |
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| Lady is below the ivy, realizing its time to divide it. |
| Tine finds the first tomatoes. |
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| Can"t wait until they turn purple! Yup! Magical purple tomatoes! |
| Val and Tine admiring tomatoes,... |
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| and the spearmint that's stretching out from under the tomatoes. |
We added
spearmint under each tomato plant. Lots of places online are selling spearmint spray to keep squirrels form eating the tomatoes.
We’ll let you know if it works.
| See what Dee and Tine found?! |
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| Our first clematis faced away from the garden. We found it! |
| The same corner in June 2006! |
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| Showing off our new trellis and plants. The table is to the right of the photo. |
Can
you see us all? Click on the pictures to see a closer look.
| Tine and Dee with the fan flowers |
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| Purple and yellow daisies are on either side of the seashell behind us. |
| The gnome guards all the time. That's his purpose. |
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| Valentine enjoys purple and white snapdragons. Big leafed cabbage behind her. |
| Lady behind the Bay tree. |
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| Next to her is the rosemary. They'll both be big one day! |
| Top half of trellis. |
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| Tine with the strawberry, Lady and Val with the passion vines, and Dee with the grape tomatoes. |
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Teddy Bears' Garden
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Our Garden Path
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The Path We’ve Taken
We're slowly transforming
our 16' X 16' cement backyard into the picture in our heads of what our garden will be. We're showing the path we've
taken, starting when it was just the beginning of a garden, until this year, when we've added decorations and even more plants.
| Planting tomatoes in the Spring of 2004! |
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| Our back fence looks so bare! |
| Our yard in August 2004. |
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| The Garden Gals on our old picnic table. |
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The 2006 Garden
| The big container with the other trellis end. |
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| The Persian Shield is behind Dee and the Hibiscus is in front of her. |
In front
of Tine is David, the Phlox. (We didn’t name him David – that’s the name of the hybrid, but we call him
David, since he came with his beary own name.) Now the gold and maroon flowers in front of us aren’t from the container
we’re in. They’re the wild flowers that grew in that planter next to us last year, and the beary first plant that
grew in our garden, right before we were born. All our lives, we have asked what it is, but, so far, no one has told us. Do
you know what it is?
The empty
container with the caging over it was Sweet Mignonette seeds, but they never sprouted. We’re still hopeful. The little
container in front of us has Greek Oregano seeds, but Greek Oregano is hard to sow, so we’re pretty sure it won’t
ever sprout anything but weeds.
Still, we
love herbs, so we have many herbs in our garden. We still have our four-tier herb garden, although it’s not where we
gather most of the herbs. The Garden Guys donated the old grills to us, so we can grow herbs for their dinners. Naturally,
being stuffies, we want our container garden to be a bit unusual, which can be done easier in containers then in the ground!
We’re so happy with our two gardens-in-a-grill! We dream of an entire garden in unusual containers one day. See our
Young Buds in the Garden section for ideas of containers that we’ve heard others use. We go flea marketing to look for
unique containers and to find items that we can raise the containers up, so Mommy and Daddy don’t have to lean over
all the time in our garden.
But, getting
back to the herbs, we could fit all the culinary herbs in four locations, but we needed one more planter to transplant our
lavender. Because the lavender survived the winter (it isn’t a’posed to in our zone), we cut it back greatly,
before transplanting it into its beary own planter. Here’s what we have in the different locations.
| Our lavenders flowering again. |
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| Tine, Lady, and Val pose. Dee gets sidetracked watching the summer savory. |
| Our Mothers Day pot with parsley in it. |
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| It's heavy enough that the hook doesn't work well, but we like it! |
| Hanging petunias behind us. |
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| Our four-tier herb garden holds several surprises! |
| Herbs from left to right: |
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| Lemon basil, dill, rosemary, oregano, a pink wild flower, and summer savory. |
We told
you it had several surprises! We thought the pink flower was sad looking parsley, until it bloomed. We had no pink flowers
last year, so we have no idea how it grew here. Still, if something wants to grow that much, even if it is in the wrong place,
we’re letting her live here.
Another
surprise is the rosemary! Why is rosemary a surprise in an herb garden? We thought it was a spiked sage, until we moved the
lavender, which hid the original marker! We have two rosemarys now, which is good, since this one smells good, but doesn’t
tastest good. (We like slipping some into the barbequing grill, while the Garden Guys are grilling, to get a smoky rosemary
taste added to the hotdogs, but don’t tell the rosemary’s taste itself.)
And, if
that isn’t enough surprises, we also found a family living in our herb garden! Meet our new herb garden caregivers,
Mommy Turtle, and her babies, Cuff and Link! They like to eat weeds, caterpillars, spider mites, and any other bad bugs, in
exchange for an occasional taste of real herbs, but they promise to always make sure we have plenty of herbs.
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Let’s
give you closer looks now that you’ve read about our surprises.
| Tine found the turtles first. |
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| Can you see them under the rosemary? |
| Our herb garden in our old large grill. |
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| Next to the Prickly Pear cactus is a large Russian Sage, lots of basil, oregano, parsley and a dill. |
| Tine exams the chives. |
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| The lemon balm in the small grill is only smelled by stuffed doggies like Dee. |
We grew
the Lemon Balm, because it’s a’posed to smell and taste lemony. The only ones, who can smell anything, are the
stuffed doggies, because doggies have noses made to smell everything. Maybe they taste lemony, but…just maybe!
That’s
all the plants in our backyard, but, in the front, on the sidewalk next to our house, are three more containers of flowers.
| Tine and Dee visit the containers out front. |
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| Grandma took us out front to water these plants. |
| Dee sits in the Mediterranean Pink! |
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| The pink flowers start blooming in September and end in May. |
| Tine is in front of our first-year Dwarf Lilac! |
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| The flowering Jasmine is supposed to smell nice, but doesn't smell at all?! |
All these plants are perennial – they’ll live for a long time. It’s the first year we
planted long loving plants out front!
| In the pansies, which are completing their cycle. |
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| These pansies came last autumn, and lived through the winter. |
Pansies
only live annually --for a year, but they’re so pretty, who can resist? We’re trying to think what to put out
when these are gone. That’s what gardeners like to do – keep planting to add to the garden.
Our garden
has changed a lot in a couple of years! We love it, but we intend to keep making it better and better, until it just can’t
get better anymore. We hope you can see it in our Web Garden!
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