Gardens

[Stealth Camper]

Well, that subject should be generic enough to mean just about anything to anyone.....

For me, it means strawberries, blackberries, Amaryllis, peonies, and potatoes. For now.

I planted some Amaryllis seed last year in pots and got 9 beautiful medium sized bulbs for the effort. This year, am planting them in garden to grow the bulbs out to full size. Got 3 random flowers from them, which I did not expect! Bonus!

The rest, except for peony are just growing along slowly, getting watered by the torrential downpours we have been getting every 3-4 days. Flood warnings have been constant for the last couple months. And the Arkansas River which flows thru Tulsa has had water flowing!!! Which is amazing! Usually by early June it would be just about ready to go out and sweep the sand off the river bed....

Peonies - we are going fairly big this year to try to establish a perennial base of flowers. Found a supplier who had a couple crates of 20 roots left over from last fall, so I bought them and ordered another 60 roots for this fall. Mostly a few dollars per root, but there is one that we really like called "Etched Salmon" that is mostly sold out from wholesalers. And the cheapest I have found is $60 a root! With the retail roots running $90-100. Ouch! Will wait on that.

I have about a dozen very nice blackberries growing on one cane that are near ripening! It is a close race with the squirrels, birds, and possum as to who is going to eat them! If I miss out of blackberries, we may get some nice stews over the summer!

[Stealth Camper]

And the bluebird nest reported on in the "where is everyone" section needs updating! There were 3 babies that survived the first batch and now the same pair is working on another batch, starting with 5 new eggs! I have been trying to not bother them too much....

[Stealth Camper]

Bluebird update. I took pics of the 5 eggs on 17 May. Yesterday I looked again and there are at least 4 young birds, fledged out and just about ready to learn flying!


And we have gotten about a dozen blackberries so far....if I ever get a chance to plant them out of these pots, I bet we will get a lot more!

[Stealth Camper]

Well, my update du jour. Ended up with 6 weeks in the hospital. Her leg is healing slowly. Luckily she is not one of the 1 in 5 who dies from this thing! We had spring rains that lasted until the first week of July, then it turned hot and humid. We did get 40 peonies planted in pots for fall planting, with another 60 coming in October! Pressure is on to get the garden beds going!

We found a metal raised bed we like pretty well. Got one last year as test, along with a couple of wooden ones using concrete forms at corners to hold the boards - they are good too, but won't last as long. Bought 4 more to assemble and install - this is to let us keep gardening when we get old! They are Birdie's beds, through Epic Gardening if anyone is interested.

Have started 9 Sassafras cuttings, plus about same of Elderberry cuttings to go with the Elderberries we already have. Gonna try to grown a lot more next spring!

Starting to build fence for all the garden areas - 3 of them. One is small landscape area about 60'x100'. One is perennials and orchard, 60'x240'. And the main one is going to be about 1 acre (220'x220') for all other flowers and 1/4 of it for veggie garden! Okra time!!! These are going to have 10' tall fencing with electric to try to keep the climbers out - trash panda (raccoon), possum, skunk, rabbit, etc. Link shows my inspiration, complete with ground level driver using jackhammer. Now I just gotta pay for it all!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owbRwosYnMQ

That's all I got right now. Later!
Pax,
Stealthy