May in the garden…..it started out hot, got chilly, back to hot, ended chilly. I’ll take it. We had great growth this May due to the early heat wave.
According to The Home Depot, we need to our outdoors great. With heavy chemicals. Such wise advice. <sarcasm is heavy> You know….I’m OK with imperfection!
May means it is….hammock season! And since I don’t cover my gardens/yards with a chemical shit storm….it is kid safe!
It’s early May and Walker is a happy boy, out in his pea patches. A snack before AND after school.
The Spanish Lavender, ‘Butterfly’ Lavender, has done well in the heat this year. It’s a bee magnet. In bloom, it’s covered from sunrise to sunset.
The Key Lime Tree I picked up has done well. Once May came, I tore down the little greenhouse, and moved it outside. With pollination it is doing amazing.
Leaf cutter bees love using Meyer Lemon leaves for their homes. It doesn’t hurt the plant, so oh well. It is outside for the time being as well, getting pollinated. The more that happens, the more lemons and limes we will get next winter!
Yellow Wonder strawberries. I am so glad we grew those from seed last year. The plants have done well this year.
May heat waves bring on June bearing strawberries. A month early. The boys were very excited!
Mid May had the herb garden filling in.
If one happens to dig up enough rocks out of the ground….you have a nearly unlimited supply of building material for pathways. Thanks go to Cascade Glacial Till soil we live on.
In early May I moved all my tomato starts up to bigger pots.
I ended up getting distracted from the back and started finally working on the front. A complaint of mine is how they built the driveway with no way to get to the front of the house, without walking on the lawn. Which ends up destroying the lawn every summer. Oh sure….I could “park in my garage” I am sure…but lets get real here. That isn’t happening.
So I got Ford to help me, and we dug out a 29 foot long by 6 foot wide section of lawn, lined it with yard fabric, edging, and then gravel/sand with pavers to walk on. It works perfectly! (Please ignore the house, we were having the support columns rebuilt and look fantastic now!)
Add in a few pots of flowers…..
So then encouraged by that, I went on to the next section, and removed a narrow band in the front of the lawn. I planted 6 blueberry bushes (that will grow only to about 3 feet high), with lower growing Rosemary plants. Further on, I ripped out the bushes in front of the bed, and planted in more Spanish Lavender ( I had also planted 8 more of that in the bed as well). The stump in the lawn…sigh. We lost the tree (it was riddled with aphids and had moved in a storm this winter) and took it down. But…it’s root structure is so bad we can’t tear it out. Even with our winch on the truck. And if you can see it…there is a huge manhole in our lawn making it even harder. Not sure what we will do yet. Either cut it down below level, fill in dirt and seed it, or turn it into a gnome house……and put a roof on it!
And because everyone gets stuck with a huge ugly manhole for lines in their front yard (seriously, who does this?!?) I decided to cover it with a huge pot of flowers. Works. And yeah, the grass looks a lot better now than in all these photos. But I refuse to use weeding agents. I at least have the patches of dirt growing with grass now 😉
In Mid May I noticed a small bird was getting flushed out of a strawberry pot of mine, so I checked. She was a Junco with eggs.
Juncos hatch quickly (in under 2 weeks time) and in less than another 2 weeks time, they are booted out. The boys loved it and would check on “their babies” every day. We were outside and saw when the mama and daddy birds gave them the boot. Getting to see the birds fly off and be shown how to find bugs is pretty cool – and priceless! Walker though was very upset his babies didn’t come back home 😉
Summer coming to me is Thai Basil in bloom.
The purple peas I had planted started blooming in early May.
By the end of May we were eating them often! They actually are quite prolific, but even though they were sold as dwarf, I found they should have been trellised.
I noticed the first tomatoes in Mid May.
Speaking of tomatoes, I had 37 very large plants waiting for. I did get them in the ground eventually!
Chamomile in bloom.
And last but not least…tiny peaches.
See you at the end of June!
Your boy is so handsome! And growning up fast! Love your blog btw’s. Inspiring myself to get going on the garden. My son just pulled out one of my tomatos…2 year olds man…thank god he’s cute;)
Hah! They did that one as well. They get better as they get older 😉