I love having fresh flowers in vases scattered throughout the house, but many times it means hacking away all the flowers in my garden and not being able to enjoy them outside.
A good solution to this is a cutting garden. Many common varieties of flowers make excellent candidates for a cutting garden. Check out this list of 45 fantastic cut flowers at Organic Gardening. Simply plant extra of the flowers you wish to cut to avoid having bare spots when you do pick flowers, or separate the plants you have and place them into a separate garden designated as a cutting garden, and get cutting!
Here’s how my garden has been growing. The warm weather has done wonders for my tomatoes and they all have several blossoms! In fact, at last check, one of them had wilty, about to drop flower and a teeny, tiny little green tomato starting to come in.
Beans are doing well, too. In fact I am having trouble deciding whether to pick them now and eat them, or save them to dry and use later in soup or chili.
The raspberries’ blooms have fallen and been replaced with fruit buds, which are just beginning to get a blush of color.
And the blackberries are flowering like crazy; soon we will have an abundance of the dark, sweet berries.
Sadly, my peach trees aren’t doing as well. The trees seem to be fine, but they are dropping fruits. Also on the fruits themselves we are finding more evidence of pest. I think it’s too late in the season to save any of the fruit, so there won’t be the bushels of peaches I was dreaming of. The fruits still on the tree sure look pretty, though.
One of the best ways to guarantee fresh herbs all summer is to grow your own. Herbs are super easy to grow and the flavor and convenience can’t be beat. Most herbs will happily grow in pots or containers, and with a little care, will thrive all summer long - either on your window ledge or in the garden. Place plants in a sunny spot in your home and water regularly, and you’ll have fresh herbs to use all summer - and longer if you care well for them.
You can either purchase seed packets and start the plants from those, following the instructions on the packets, or buy established plants. Plants can be found at your local nursery, as well as Home Depot or Lowes, and in the produce or nursery section of large grocery stores.
As the price of groceries continue to climb, and our interest in organic and natural foods also rises, the hubs and I have decided to implement a new plan: we will instill an edible landscape around our home. No more purchasing flowering trees just because they are pretty (sorry, yellow Magnolia tree - how I admired you so). Instead, we will plant trees that have pretty flowers that also bear fruit (hello, peach and apple trees, and aforementioned cherry trees). Many herbs are also quite nice to look at and interesting in a garden, such as rosemary (which is almost an evergreen shrub-like plant than an herb-looking plant) and parsley. And you can’t go wrong with a row or two of lettuce and some tomato plants.
No, we’re not going to just plant annuals to fill in the bare spots around the gardens. Instead, we’ll tuck in a few bunches of buttercrunch lettuce around the bare spots, and landscape with plants we can also eat from. However - we’re not going to pull what’s already planted; that seems counter-productive to me. What we will do is place edibles as new plants around the house, and maybe eventually replace the non-edibles over time.
One of my very favorite gardening books is the Reader’s Digest Guide to Gardening. I have a second- or third-hand copy that was passed down to me, and with it came sticky notes and scraps of paper marking pertinent spots in the book. Needless to say, I have added to those stickys and scraps and my book is truly a mess. So when I saw that there was a New Illustrated Guide to Gardening came out last year, I couldn’t want to get my hands on a copy.
And it did not disappoint. The color photos are even more vibrant, and thumbnail photos showing specific species of plants, as well as specific photos of pests and disease, are invaluable. This is truly a time when a picture is worth a thousand words. This book is a terrific resource for a beginner gardener like me, or anyone who wants access to basic and helpful gardening information in one very well put together place.
