#garden 2023

[ryanscabinlife]

Freshly picked kale omelette for breakfast 19-Jul-2023

[artificial-condition]

Biggest tomato I’ve ever grown!!! And so many more to come 🍅

[brightgnosis]

The Vervain was so hard to photograph; the Taproot that it forms may be over 3 feet deep, but the plant itself is surprisingly tiny- as are its flower spikes. I don't really have a good macro setup that'd make it any easier (and I'm not really sure how to buy lenses that fit my camera right; I did buy a Macro Lens at one point when I first started out, but it wound up being too small despite the product listing saying it'd fit it 😩).

For what it's worth, though, the photo I did manage to get last year during the 2023 growing season isn't the worst ... Just not the best.

Pictured: Common Vervain (Verbena Officinalis)

📸 Photography © Me, Anna Katherina

[tragic-cottonball]

Garden progress

[bibliophilecats]

Gardening this year is great fun

[ladysnowangel]

Orange Zinnias

[wastehound-voof]

Cicada emerged from my garden. :]

My cousin and I would spend many summer hours collecting all the cicada skins we could find. It is a cherished memory we shared. I miss you, cousin. I can’t believe you’ve been gone for 7 years. You were my best friend. This cicada is for you.

[bigkittenbread]

Wild strawberry harvest from the front lawn ♡

[ryanscabinlife]

Drying some marigold, lavender (mostly leaves), and oregano to mix in with the goldenrod I harvested last week for tea. Also, how is it September already? The fuck!?

1-Sep-2023

[artificial-condition]

Some garden pictures 🍅 🌸

[brightgnosis]

I keep hearing from various sources that this Winter's supposed to be a fairly bad one.

I'm ok with losing the Absinthe Wormwood and Mugwort because they're fast growers, if it comes down to it. But the Hyssop was such a slow grower ... I'm wondering if I should just go ahead and dig up the Hyssop, repot it, and bring it in for winter to ensure it keeps- or just leave it and see what comes of it.

Repotting it risks loosing it regardless. But there's still a chance it might keep inground. But I'm still leaning towards repotting it just because it took so dang long for it to even grow the tiny amount that it did and I really don't want to rebuy it next season if I don't really have to because I was able to keep it going, y'know?

Digging almost anything up right before winter, though, is usually such a risky move. Eugh. I'm so conflicted on this one, and I have zero experience with this plant to guide me on it.

ETA: My Husband and I uprooted it and pulled it in tonight, and I'm really glad I did.

I'd checked on everything in the garden before our temps started dropping into the 30's the first time and it was doing ok; about as well as it had been all year- which is to say not great, but at least green. But when we went out today about 90% of it's growth's already died off completely since the temps started doing their switchback* nonsense.

Oklahoma's famous "is it or isn't it" seasonal intermission where it flips back and forth between ~90f and ~30f randomly, and you never know what it's going to be from day to day. Not until it finally decides to get its act together more consistently- which is always a tossup for timing; could be a week of the nonsense, could be 3 months. You literally never know. Just the perks of being in a massive ecological transitional zone.

The plant never got any bigger than my palm throughout the year, despite it supposing to be a semievergreen subshrub that gets quite big- and by this point it should be roughly rivaling my Rosemary in size. But there's only about 4 living stems left on it now, out of the 7 it originally had, and the leaves that are on the remaining ones are shriveled to Antarctica and back. The roots were unhealthy and had significant dieback already, too. Especially compared to some of the healthier plants I dug up alongside it and chucked (because I'm not keeping them).

We'll see if it survives, but it looks kind of grim either way.

ETA 2: For those saying Hyssop "should be hardy to my Zone" ... Yes ... I do know enough to know that it reasonably should be; reasonably speaking, at normal times, in normal seasons, my area shouldn't routinely get cold enough to make it an issue, especially with good Winter protection.

Unfortunately in the last 3 years our Winters have gotten particularly brutal; we've had Ice Storms (a rare phenomenon that only typically occurs about every decade or so, and most frequently in January) occurring twice or more in a season, as early as October. And we're seeing regular temperatures as low as -25f for weeks at a time. We're also getting snow (a phenomenon we don't usually get here that much or for that long, where we mostly just get Sleet- or frozen rain, for those unfamiliar with it- for about a week) more often and in larger quantities than before.

Hyssop is really only cold hardy down to roughly -13f. So even the best Winter protection is not really going to protect Hyssop from those kind of conditions. Especially not in a year when the coming Winter is predicted to be even worse than usual (which includes being even worse than the last 3 pretty bad years that we've already experienced) ... But it's especially not going to protect a palm sized, 1 year old Hyssop plant that's already been struggling all year long to begin with.

Very respectfully and appreciatively: "It should" means absolutely nothing in this circumstance and ultimately doesn't really help me. I'm just going to delete those comments because you're being unhelpful and irrelevant.

[tragic-cottonball]

10/16/23

I swear, rain in the PNW is the best. Blasting like a fire hose, then less than a minute later the sun is out.

[glittergutts]

All 5 of my Marijuana seeds are germinating nicely. Very cute little babies.

[ladysnowangel]

Zucchini and Tomatoes

[wastehound-voof]

Pumpkins planted.