worms in the broom cupboard, maybe...

I went to visit Dirt Poor with Rocks aka my daughter who has been making a garden around their newly built house which is on a steep hill. I will leave her to tell you about it but there were all kinds of neat things happening. We ate several meals which included veggies from the garden including potatoes and I came back with some new ideas, new recipes, some poppy and rubekia seeds and some photo.s of same in bloom which my server won’t let me put up because they are doing maintenance :-(. Oh yes, and a jar of DPWR’s peach and apricot jam, although the fruit didn’t come from the garden.

DPWR has a wormery and uses the wormery juice to fertilize, amongst other things, some luscious mint growing in a water tank from an old toilet – pansies and pelagoniums grow in the toilet bowl. The mint went into Mojitos which my eldest grand-daughter encountered in Cuba. I am now on the look-out for a larger container to grow my mint in. I would like to have a wormery too, but I haven’t though of anywhere in my apartment to put it – well I will just have to think a bit harder, maybe the broom cupboard which to my mind is under-utilised. I produce just about enough vegetable waste to keep the worms going and I would like to have a natural, unmanufactured fertilizer that I can use on house plants too and an alternative to compost which the family keeps in containers where it is really hard to turn over or extract.

Everything in DPWR’s garden looks thriving, including the sunflowers which are not yet in flower but when the flowers do open they will be on a level with the second floor living room balcony. The plants that I gave her from my garden are settled in and looking happy. Always nice to see what other people are doing in their garden.

I guess the weather continued fairly cool while I was away, and needless to say it was raining when I got back and rained very hard this morning. Little has changed in the garden, lilies are still blooming and one of the two daylilies I moved a year ago is between blooms so perhaps I will be able to identify it. The Buddleia, planted this time last year as a sad stalk, has grown into a larger stalk and now has a blossom on the end which is outside the fence. The Golden Rod and Michaelmas Daisies are growing taller and taller but still have not burst into bloom. Last year, as I remember, it started raining in mid-September and rained on as is it’s wont in this part of the world through October and November until it turned to snow. The poor Michaelmas Daisies did their best but produced a few miserable flowers and then gave up in the face of no sun at all.

Tomorrow is supposed to be more or less dry and then more rain – I do hope this is not the start of the rainy season – so I think I will move some plants so that they have a chance to settle before the weather gets cold. The small plants and thyme along the path need weeding, I need to make a list of plants that didn’t bloom this year, work out why and decide whether they are compost or second chancers. I am also thinking about colonising the very dry area between my fence and the road, well a yard or so near the fence, with some excess plants from the garden. They have to be plants that die down during the winter as the snowplow builds a huge mound against, and sometimes over, that fence.

The cherry tomatoes are ripening by the handful now – should I give them some protection to aid the ripening during this cool wet weather? The larger tomatoes are also beginning to ripen and I have 3 small stripy eggplants almost ready to eat, and maybe a baby zucc or two.