Crepe Myrtle's

 We put some crepe myrtle's in at the end of 2009.  I remember mulching them the next spring, 2010.  The next spring, 2011, I did the same and they hadn't really done much.  Now some of them had been in pots for a while and I knew they were stressed, but still.  So last summer I watered and watered and watered.  It didn't help that there was a drought.  I also fertilized with Miracle-Gro's Azalea, Camellia, Rhododendron plant food.  I had read that they are more of an acid loving plant (not sure I'm wording that very well).

The above picture was taken last spring (April) and they did end up blooming but they sure hadn't changed much from 2010.

 This picture was taken last week.  Look! they finally grew!  Well, except for the little one to the left.  It does have blossoms you just can't see them.

The t-post's were put in so nobody would run over them :)

Sweet Potatoes

About a month before I planted the pumpkins, I planted some sweet potatoes.  There are only 5 vines in this box!!!  We did a little better with them than the pumpkins.  They were expensive to buy and we ‘might’ have gotten a little better yield if we had waited until the leaves turned.  Of course, we didn’t know when to pick them and the first one we found was HUGE.  It was a lot of work keeping both crops watered over the drought.  As it turned out we probably should have watered the pumpkins less, but we won’t know until we try again next year.  We tried these crops because the price of everything keeps going up and I thought we should try other things.  To be honest though, I HATE gardening in the summer and I even had to force myself to plant some lettuce this week.  It was fun trying new things!!

 

 

Uh oh!!  Turns out we did have to dig to find our treasure

Again, the cattle panel was to help keep chickens out.

Pumpkins

I planted 12 seeds.

We grew 10 plants. 

We harvest 3 pumpkins!!  Two big ones.

This little one grew into the cattle panel that we had covering the box to keep the chickens out.

It will be turned into the pie that John will be baking.

Lemon Petunia's

Remember my hot pink petunias (I only mention the color because they look red in the picture)?  We were at Home Depot a couple of weeks ago and they had petunias out.  I REALLY wanted the red ones, but there was no way to tell if they were trailing petunias or not.  They had about 4-5 of these lemon ones that were obviously trailing, so I thought I would try them.  I was pleasantly surprised at how pretty they were when they started to bloom.  Just thought I'd share.

More potatoes

OK. So I have a dozen other things I've been meaning to post and I post about petunia's and potatoes?! Kind of embarrassing. When I first planted these potatoes I watched a bunch of videos by this man who had planted some in a cut up 55 gal. drum and some 5 gallon buckets. I don't know what kind he planted, but he only yielded about 2 -3 lbs. per bucket. Yes, my scale is reading 3 lbs. 10.7 oz. Kinda neat. This is one plant and we only did the one tonight. I will probably do the others next week sometime.

Petunia's

I've fallen in love with Petunia's. I used to think that they were not very pretty, but this spring I've changed my mind. It started with this 4 x 4 post. I hung the upside down cherry tomato on one side and a basket of Petunias temporarily on the other. My plan was to take the basket apart and get the 4 or 5 plants and put them in my boxes (see below). They do this in Germany and it is so pretty, but I've always liked the hanging Geraniums better. Unfortunately the hanging Geraniums are hard to find and I've not had good luck with them in this heat. So I bought the Petunias and it was cheaper this way. I found that I really liked the basket of flowers hanging there. So when it turned out that there were 5 plants in the basket, I put two in each of my boxes below and one back in the basket. That is right there is only 1 Petunia in the hanging basket. Every time I look at it I think, "I can't believe there is only one plant in that thing!"

The hanging cherry tomato was the plant that had the five tomato horn worms on it.

Side view toward my messy front porch.

My two boxes.

Left side of my back porch.

Right side of my back porch.
In this picture you can also see the potato plants on the left and my garden way back there on the right. Most of the green you see with the potatoes are actually grape vines.

One potato, two potato

I have discovered a side affect to using compost as your source of dirt. The original post I did on potatoes was 2 weeks ago. They were ready to have more dirt put on them again less than a week after I did it. They grew amazingly fast. I couldn't get to it until this morning. They were easily 18 inches tall and from what I read you are supposed to add more dirt when they are about 6 inches tall.

When we moved back Texas (2 years ago on the 17th of March), John went into the pasture and gathered all the manure and hay and dumped it into our yard with a friends front loader. I didn't use much last year. That is all I have used this year. I'm going to have beautiful, lush green plants and NO vegetables!!! But it is really, really nice compost :)

I'm not going to worry about any more dirt. From here on out I'm going to just let them grow and hopefully we will have some potatoes in a couple of months.

Potatoes 2009

This is what they looked like when we first planted them. They did go down a bit, but in the end I decided that it was too much on top. So I didn't do as much this year.

I didn't think to get my camera until we got to this point. I wish I had taken before pictures. Through the whole season I covered it mostly with hay. On the right you can sort of see how we had plants breaking through everywhere. We ended up only having potatoes at the very bottom. The bright red potato is actually a tomato.

I didn't use the black container last year. This is a different black container here behind Mark. There is actually two and they hold blueberries. We moved the blueberries this year because the grapevine has taken over everything. I'm a little worried about the tops of the potato cages, but can't do anything about it at this point.

Potatoes

I have tried to grow potatoes on and off for a few years now. One time I planted them, but I planted too late for this area and got potatoes the size of olives. One time I planted them and it was extremely wet and they turned to mush. Last year I tried a new method where you put them in cages and then cover them alternately with hay and dirt. It wasn't anything amazing, but I did get potatoes. I had problems with them going all over the place though so this year when I went to hill them (yesterday) I used newspaper to try and contain the dirt a little better. I also snipped off anything that was going side ways. If I can find the pictures from last year I will try and post them later today.



I did put them in later than I should have this year put it didn't take them long to start growing at all and it seemed like it took forever last year. The ones in the black container started growing the fastest. We'll see how they turn out.

What have we been up to?

I saw this idea in a Better Homes and Gardens, only they used real pumpkins. It is to hot here in Texas to use real pumpkins, they rot. So I came up with the idea of plastic pumpkins, I thought it looked cute.

This is my entire front porch.

For Justin's communication Merit Badge he had to conduct a Court of Honor. This was held in the middle of September. I really wanted to get his merit badges on his sash (which I've had for several years now). You'll notice Alex does not have his sash, that is because it took FOREVER to do Justins. I swore that I would never do another one - I've calmed down since then :)

Alex got his Life Scout Rank, along with a pile of merit badges. He had 3 campouts and 2 merit badge fairs that he was receiving badges for. And yes, Alex did finally get a hair cut.

Mark got his Scout and his Tenderfoot Rank along with his first merit badge, fingerprinting.