Garden Tours

Each summer, one of the staff members at the school where I work organizes a staff garden tour.  This year we visited a couple of gardens belonging to retired school employees.  How fun!  Now I know what I will be doing in my retirement  (in 20 years)-- gardening my heart out!

I always come home from garden tours with at least a FEW ideas or plants that I just must add to my garden.  The plant I fell in love with this year was the hosta "Whirlwind." 

Whirlwind is the hosta in the center, with thick, deep green edged leaves that are all whirled around.  So of course I came home and ordered one right away!  The only site I could find selling this (with it in stock) was NH Hostas & Companion Plants.  I've never ordered from them before, so hopefully I won't be disappointed. 

Of course, one can never order just ONE hosta at a time.  No, that just wouldn't do.  So here's what else I added to my cart:

Tea & Crumpets Hosta

Wheee! Hosta

Rockets Red Glare Hosta

I also stopped and picked up some new shrubs, specifically a golden barberry and a neon colors spirea. 

Next week is the Carlton County Master Gardeners garden tours, so I'm sure I'll be back with even more ideas!

Spuds!

May 19 and we just now got the potatoes planted in the garden.  Tilling the garden seemed even a bigger chore this year than ever before, until I remembered that we did increase the size of the garden by 50%, so of course it took awhile longer!

This week is a crazy busy one at work and with kids' baseball and softball practices and games, but I'm hoping to get out on 5/21 to put in the other cold weather crops.

Slow spring

May 5th and I just got around to raking the leaves out of the perennial beds.  How very sad.  Not much is coming up at this point, except the hardy sedum and the tips of the iris.

It's been a long, long time

After taking a almost a year vacation from blogging, I'm ready to get back into it. We have had such an unusual spring, I find that I'm wanting to go back to last year's blog to compare but I have so few notes! So I will do better this year.

We have had beautiful weather today but this has been a crazy spring. Last weekend we got 14 inches of snow (4/19) and this weekend we had 70 degree weather. The snow is almost gone now, but there is still plenty of ice on the lake. We finally saw a sliver of water a few days ago (see picture) and today there is about five feet of open water along the shoreline. Hopefully it won't be long now!

So nothing is really growing yet, unless you count the sedum that are just starting to poke their heads out of the ground. I started some seeds again this spring but not as early as last year. I stared tomatoes ( Early Girl and Roma) and green peppers April 1. About 4/15 I started some flowers (zinnias, petunias, impatiens, and cosmos) and just today I found banana pepper seeds that I saved from last year so I started those as well. I transplanted the Romas today and need to purchase some peat pots so I can transplant the rest of the tomatoes.

I am wondering, though... Is it safe to start lettuce?