Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Gardening update


I have little green tomatoes now! (Little green Cherokee Purple tomatoes, to be precise; the other varieties are flowering but haven't produced any fruit yet.)

The herbs are coming along; the chervil and cilantro have already flowered; the rosemary and lavender are hanging in there (but they're growing so slowly, I may not have anything to harvest until next year); the basil is just starting to take off. I harvested the first few leaves of basil the other day.

Also, the borage has produced its first blooms.


Borage is fairly uncommon, but it's an edible flower. One of the few truly blue things in the plant world. And awful pretty.

Speaking of blue, I cut these off the bushes in the front yard. I don't know what they are, the previous owner planted them.



I also have a particularly pernicious rabbit. After a rainy spell last week, when it rained for three days straight, I came outside to discover he'd nibbled all my cauliflower down to the roots. He'd also decapitated most of the green bean plants and one whole squash plant. Needless to say, I was livid. When it's not raining, I can spray down repellent, which works--it's just that when it rains, it washes all away and I can't put more down. Let's hope we don't get any more prolonged rainy spells like that. As it is, I'm not sure I'll be able to get any cauliflower this year.

So if anyone has any rabbit tips, let me know. My grandmother volunteered this helpful information: "Just trap them under a box and club them to death. That's what I used to do." I'm pretty sure I don't have it in me to club a rabbit to death.

Unless, of course, I catch it eating my tomatoes.

1 comment:

  1. The flower from the front yard is a hydrangea (and they can be pink, or blue depending on the if there is aluminum in the soil: blue = aluminum, pink = no aluminum. There is another variety that is just white.

    Don't know what to tell you about the rabbit, other than to put up a chicken wire fence around the garden - just make sure he isn't in the garden when you put it up.

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