Habersham Corner: Front Yard in April

Here at last are some pictures!

An arugula forest near the front door. We're letting some of it go to seed, some of it go on our pizza, and some of it go to the chickens. Then I'll replant with another crop of arugula. Arugula is probably my favorite salad green. Lightly peppery, it works as a salad unto itself with just lemon juice, salt, and olive oil, or as an accent in a mixed greens salad. Oh, yum.

The onions and garlic are hanging out for a while longer. I also really, really need to weed that bed. I do kind of like the look of the weeds growing in between the flagstones.

We gave the sugar snap peas and snow peas a shot of blood meal, and they began flowering a little more. I think they're just about done for the season, though. We didn't get a ton of these. That's one part of the garden that has pretty poor soil.

The happy herb spiral. I just used some of the fresh oregano on our pizza tonight.

We're swimming in salad greens right now. There's this plus several more beds!

I think my hulless oats may be a great big failure. I think putting the wood chips on top probably wasn't the best idea, and I probably should have worked the soil more. Oh, well. That's the nice part about growing from seed. A failure only costs $2-3! There are a few oat sprouts in there, but probably not enough to warrant watering it any more...

The flower bed next to the driveway, planted with various perennial seeds. This bed also hasn't had much in the way of amendments, and the sandy soil doesn't have that much to it. It seems to be coming up all right in spite of that, but I can't tell yet how thickly the seeds I put in will actually fill in. I may add a few more to ensure greater coverage (and cutting flowers!).

The summer squash bed with some donated eggplants in the corners of the nearest part of the bed. I need to cover the stems of the squash with toilet paper rolls to hopefully defeat the horrible, terrible, no-good vine borers that decimated our summer squash last year.

The glorious snapdragons that have taken over the asparagus bed, with lots of lettuce in the space that is remaining. I hope the first-year asparagus doesn't mind this much sharing. Someone just told me that asparagus is very hard to grow here, so I guess this bed now falls under the category of Great Big Experiment.

The watermelon is developing many more leaves now, especially since our garden-wide application of blood meal.

The kiwis are starting to send out longer shoots.

The blueberries! We did learn that one can't leave for a vacation and think that your newly-planted one-year-old (AKA extra-puny) blueberries will be okay being watered every two or three days. They won't. All the littlest ones died. I replaced them with rabbiteyes from the local grocery story. I was shocked to find such a good price for such big plants. Supposedly these will grow 8 feet tall, but I think we'll keep them a bit shorter than that for easier picking.

The amaranth is sprouting up very nicely! Another Great Big Experiment.

Cabbage ready for picking. I wish I had planted twenty times as much! I planted this in the late fall and it has slowly plugged along. We only have a few to enjoy... this time!

It was a bad year for loquats. The loquats went from green and hard, to barely yellow, to black. I have to look into whether this is fire blight or not... Very sad not to have loquat sauce on my meatballs this year.

Taking advantage of the kiwi not being on top of the arbor yet, I planted a few tromboncino squash. They're coming up nicely here. Not sure how long it will take for the kiwi to take over the arbor, but hopefully not before these have done their thing.

This picture shows 3 tree circles, 1 tomato circle, 1 watermelon circle, and 2 amaranth circles, as well as the street intersection. All the trees are doing well, except the Meyer lemon which is trailing behind the others just a bit. Its leaves got fairly chewed up by the giant swallowtail caterpillars. Hopefully it will recover without any real damage.