Barefoot Gardening

I think I may actually have more edibles this year than flowers. On my way in the door from work, I snagged a strawberry – boy, was it sweeter than my store-bought ones. And not just because it’s from my own garden! I’ve got 4 blackberry brambles growing as well, some blueberries coming in, 4 pepper plants, and 2 tomato plants! Sadly, I started with 6 pepper plants. One was the last of its variety at the MG sale, and it wasn’t long for this world. The other was dug up and absconded with by some animal, I’m sure. What’s left are 3 sweet varieties and a mole pepper. I will certainly enjoy the fruits of my labor this summer!

Also, a random photo because there was a 4-headed calendula in my windowbox.

Horticulture magazine’s newsletter shared some great looking windowbox recipes today. Mine is in what I like to call purgatory, between winter and summer, and full of random annuals filled in around what’s left from last season. My favorite is the first one, ‘Dark Drama’, but you would have to keep some of those plants trimmed pretty well back to keep from crowding out others. For instance, fuchsia typically gets to be around 3 feet tall and wide, though I can’t find any online references to the variety ‘giant black’.

However, those plants would tie in to the hanging basket I am going to set up, whose recipe came from ‘Hanging Basket #1″ on a brochure from the Portland Nursery for shaded hanging baskets - Sweet potato vine, fucshia, and impatiens.

And for any plants you can’t find locally, Apartment Therapy did a piece this week on the best mail-order sites for plants. I’m partial to Logees, Park Seed, and Gurney’s for the sake of variety. And that’s mainly if I can’t find what I need locally, since adding carbon to the world defeats part of gardening.

In addition, for you seed-savers out there, another blogger I follow did a bit on seed faqs with a handy chart for how long seeds will last.

If nothing else, I can finally close those tabs on my browser, now that I have shared them with the world. I hope they’re as useful to you as I found them.

Luckily, we have a very long growing season in Northern California, so the summer color in my windowbox is still going strong. Sunnyvale is actually split down the middle for two Sunset zones – coastal and inland, and it’s a very pleasant microclimate. Nonetheless, I find myself longing for Pennsylvania fall and colored leaves on the trees. I received the Kinsman newsletter today, and while my experience with their side planting didn’t work out, I fell in love with this windowbox design from them. Is anyone else preparing their garden/patio/porch/balcony for fall?