Garden Tour

Chile de Arbol:  Week 2

We have a squirrel problem! The squirrel has eaten almost all of our corn seeds, and has attacked many of the other plants. I put out some rat traps to try to catch it, but they failed. I now have an electronic trap out, so we will keep our fingers crossed. You can see some of the damage done in the pepper picture to the right. With our luck, we will catch this squirrel only to have it replaced by another!

This week we decided to post a video blog giving a tour of the garden. We hope you enjoy it!

Summertime!

Flowering chives

Welcome to summer! Today is May 20, which it the last frost day for Greenwich! We actually "finished" planting the garden last weekend, after we saw there was no threat of frost in the forecast. The only plants we haven't yet planted are bush beans, which can't tolerate temperatures below 40°F, so we will plant them next weekend.

Most of the plants that we put out last weekend are still hardening off and haven't started growing yet. When the seeds are started indoors, the environment is ideal and there is no need for them to grow strong and hardy stems. Once they are placed outdoors, where the day and night temperatures vary drastically and there is wind and rain, they put all their energy into thickening their stems and strengthening their root systems for the first few weeks. Most of the seedlings are still in this stage right now.

Dwarf peach tree

The perennials that were planted last year are thriving. The chives started growing back in March and are magnificent now. The plants are about 24 inches tall, with large purple flowers. Last year, we planted the first of two dwarf peach trees (normal-sized fruit, small tree). It flowered back in March when we had the early spring (I think it almost hit 90°F!), but the frost killed the flower soon thereafter. We thought they didn't have enough time to get pollinated, but apparently they did! There are small, fuzzy peaches all over the tree now (they are kind of hard to see in the picture to the left, but they are there)! We don't expect they will be large enough to eat for a couple more years, but it is still exciting!

Kathy's pepper plant

One of my co-workers grows peppers in her garden that were given as a gift to her father many years ago. Her family has been saving the seeds and re-growing the peppers every year. She dries them and makes a potent seasoning. We weren't sure exactly what they were (tasted kind of like cayenne, but were smaller), until another co-worker discovered on the internet that they are chile de arbol peppers. She brought seedlings to the office last week and distributed them; we will see whose peppers grow the largest! Our plant from last week is shown to the right; kind of lame right now, but its still early!

Strawberries

Hopefully next week we will have more to show. The corn has started popping up, as have the radishes, beets, carrots, and some flowers.  We also planted some perennial flowers that we will show next week after they have recovered from their trauma. Most of the plants are still pretty small now, but within a month or so it will be almost too crowded to walk around the garden! Till next week...

The House

Here's the post you've all been waiting for....from yours truly, Ashley Watson. We bought our 1880 Folk Victorian home in September of 2008, and we knew from the beginning that this house was going to take work... a lot of work....no, really... a LOT of work. We initially focused on the most important things first. Getting a roof that didn't leak, removing the black mold and asbestos, trashing the heinous shag carpeting and wood paneling from upstairs. Along the way we've had some great moments (like discovering the original wood floors were still underneath all of that carpeting), and some not so great moments (like when we discovered that the floor joists in the upstairs bathroom were so rotted that they actually bent under the weight of Aaron walking across them).

Last Summer I was determined to tackle painting the outside of the house. My parents came up from Houston for 3 weeks and we put in 8 hour days, 6 days a week. At the end of the 3 weeks, it was painfully obvious that I was not going to be able to do this all myself (unless I quit my job and became a painter, but unfortunately I am not fast enough, or good enough, to do that). So we bit the bullet and have hired professional painters. Which was not as easy as it seems. A few years back, New York State passed new restrictions about removing lead paint from homes, so finding somebody who was even willing to do our house was an experience in itself.  But alas, we finally found (and hired) Dave Godette and his team from Dave's Painting, and thus far they are well worth the time it took to find them.

Aaron and my goal is to restore this house to the glory of what it once was. We have a picture of the house from 1895 (see right), which is my inspiration for this. The picture obviously can't tell us what color the house was originally, but it does show us that the trim was darker than the body of the house. We scraped down some layers on the house to find the original colors and have matched them as closely as we could. We decided to go with Benjamin Moore paint, both for the high quality paint and because they have an historical colors section with all colors being appropriate to the late 1800's.

Bleeker Beige

Alexandria Beige

Townsend Harbor Brown

Avon Green

The body of the house is going to be Bleeker Beige and the trim Alexandria Beige. The window sashes will be Townsend Harbor Brown. We will also use this color to accent some of the fancy woodwork that we have. The shutters will be an Avon Green. We believe that this will be a fairly accurate replica of what the house looked like when it was first built. Before Dave and his team can get to putting colors on the house, they first have to strip the paint off that we have. Using a paint shaver, and a lot of pure muscle, they have been able to get it down to the wood, and it looks amazing! In the coming weeks, they should be able to start painting the top coats. Future posts will discuss the shutters, windows, and progress of the house along the way. We are so excited to see the end results of painting the house (and even more excited to not be doing it ourselves). Stay tuned for more!

Week 9

Cabbage in the NICU

This was a pretty difficult week, both for the seedlings and for me.  I transplanted the cabbages on Sunday, even though a mild freeze was forecast.  Cabbage is a pretty hardy plant, preferring cool weather, and can take a mild freeze down to around 30°F or so.  But, these are seedlings that haven't been "hardened off" yet, so I was a bit worried.  Well, the low on Sunday night was 28°F, but when we left for work on Monday they still looked okay (maybe kind of wilted).  By the time we got home that evening, they had recovered completely and looked fine.  Unfortunately, the low that night was 25°F!  When we got up Tuesday morning, the cabbages did not look good at all!  One of them had its stem frozen off and was without hope.  The others were wilted severely.  But at that point there wasn't much I could do for them.  After work on Tuesday, I planted a couple seeds where the one cabbage had died, and hoped for the best.  The forecast for the rest of the week was good (rainy and warm), so I just left them alone.  They are still brown (for the most part), but their stems are stiff and have hardened, so we are hopeful!

Barely alive tomatoes

The other seedlings had a hard time as well.  When we got home Tuesday, they appeared to have suddenly given up the ghost, and I was baffled as to the reason.  I did recently change their watering schedule, but I don't know whether that was the reason.  The tomatoes had lost almost all their leaves, the celery appeared to be dead, and the cucumbers and squash were wilted.  But, I stuck to the watering schedule and crossed my fingers.  Only one celery has died (maybe), and the tomatoes still look pretty pathetic, but their stems are stiff and they have a few leaves that aren't wilted.  Hopefully, what doesn't kill them makes them stronger (and there's still the nursery if they do die)!

Promising melons 

On the bright side, the melons have germinated and look to be doing fine (so far).  I planted beets, radishes, and carrots in the garden today (they take a while to come up and are hardy, so its not too early), and planted my second set of lettuce.  We bought three varieties of lettuce (red, green, and buttercrunch), and each one takes about eight weeks from seed planting to maturity, so we plant two per week so that we will be able to harvest every week starting in early July!  Hopefully this week will go better and my problems will be resolved, both in the garden and otherwise.