Good morning! Welcome to #WeekendCoffeeShare, thank you for joining me on this Saturday morning, hopefully in my garden.

I have been feeling a little more like myself day by day. Reconciling payments, answering emails, and doing invoicing seem to energize me as well as keep me grounded these days.

Come, let’s walk around the garden, we can marvel at all the flowers and colors and strawberries, perhaps even catch a pollinator or two in action. I would introduce you to all these lovely plants and probably even a story or two about them because, trust me, I have stories to tell.

You know that song you hear each year near Christmas? It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Nah, uh, now is the most wonderful time of the year. We are in between spring and summer. Temperature hasn’t reach broiler level yet. Everything is still growing fast as the days lengthen toward Midsummer (longest day of the year) and not to mention everywhere you look is lush, green, and beautiful.

My garden is in transition as well as I harvest the spring crop and slowly replacing them with summer heat-loving vegetables, flowers, and herbs. I’m practicing succession planting this year, meaning I stagger plant so I don’t get a humongous harvest all at once.

I am still amazed at the colors and productivity in the garden this year, particularly the penstemon, berries, and the bachelor’s buttons (if you don’t know what I’m rambling about, click on each picture, the flower’s name will display). The bachelor’s buttons are volunteers from last year’s flowers. I remember them suffering badly in the heat despite having water right at their roots. These volunteers should behave much better than the transplant I put in last year.

I planted the penstemon last spring after starting them from seed last January or February. They hardly grew last year, maybe one or two spires came up at the end of the summer. I had fully expected them to not survive winter but what do you know, they survived and thrived. They had not started to flower when I left for my trip. I guess something happened during the 2 weeks I was gone? I sure hope to catch sight of a hummingbird or two this summer with these beauties.

I started growing strawberries in 2018 as a way to tame my anxiety and depression from unemployment. I started with 3 plants, growing in the horrible clay soil (with no amendments) along the back fence. I haven’t caught the gardening bug just yet. The berries were tiny and I never got any real harvest as they always either dried up or the birds got to them before I did.

After 3 years with no harvest, I decided to get rid of them, start fresh, transform the entire area along the back fence into a flower garden. I tried to grow strawberries in 2021 using containers but it was with no success. They all died on me but that’s before I learned not to bury the strawberry crown.

Last year, after failing to grow 20 bare-root strawberries, I decided to buy transplants – expensive transplants. They worked despite producing only a few berries. One of the transplants produced 8 runners, I unfortunately kill a few of those. When I got this new raised bed last fall, I had to move the strawberries and the 3 blueberry bushes from grow bags into this raised bed, which I’m calling “Acid bed” due to the low PH in the soil as needed to grow blueberries. I was totally not expecting the berries to survive but miraculously, they made it through the harsh winter and became ultra productive.

Best of all, the birds haven’t bothered my strawberries because it’s not on the ground, it’s hanging beside the raised bed wall. Birds only seem to like berries when it’s on the ground, touching soil. Strange creatures. I have been picking berries and savoring them like candies. These are definitely better than any of those boxed strawberries at the store.

If we were having coffee, I would tell you about a garden experiment I told you once in passing back in early March. These are potatoes, started from seed, actually tiny beady seeds from a potato flower. The first picture is from when I planted the potato seedlings back on May 5, 2023 and the other picture was from June 2, 2023. What a difference a month makes, right?

I recall I only gave these a 50% confidence level, mainly judging from the YouTube videos I’ve seen people growing these and a lot of them ended in failure. To be honest, even now, I’m not so sure and I probably won’t know until harvest but I must admit, it is doing pretty well thanks to having access to drip irrigation.

#weekendcoffeeshare is hosted by Natalie of Natalie the Explorer. I appreciate you stopping by. Until next we chat. 🙂