Every year the garden is one giant experiment, housing lots of little projects guided by a bit of reading about gardening and your run-of-the-mill trial and error. New plants, new gardens, and new kinds of soil and compost. The Elfin Thyme doubled in size, but spread slowly. A dream ground-cover, but not very practical for cooking, and too expensive to pull off as a rug for the yard.
July 2012.
Magic Carpet (it has other names as well) was a colorful success from July through the late fall. It began with red and yellow flowers, followed by orange and neon pink flowers. It has the feel of a succulent and spreads well.
The squash seedlings shot up after a few weeks of hibernating, and followed the trellis of the new back wall garden. If I could just get more squash to survive. The back wall plants produced fruit that shriveled from powdery mildew and may have succumb to squash borers.
Gold Dust was another new ground cover that I picked up from a local nursery. It spread all summer and always brightened up the garden. It's only downfall was how it tangling every passing leaf and twig in its mesh, requiring me to repeatedly pick it clean.
Small Red Onions in last year's corn patch.
And then there are the experiments gone awry. Lots and Lots of them. The worst included these two.
Evidence of the leaf miner that destroyed some of the Swiss Chard starters.
One day I'll figure out how to permanently stop powdery mildew from killing my squash. I can only assume it's from too much humidity, not enough breeze because of our fences, and not buying powdery-mildew resistant seeds.
